When Edward Snowden Realized Government Spying Had Gone Too Far | Joe Rogan

I want to bring it back to the initial question. So you're working for the NSA. When do you realize there's a huge issue and when do you feel this responsibility to let the American people know about this issue? Like when do you contact these journalists and what was the thought process regarding this? Like what steps did you go through? Once you realize that this was in violation of the Constitution and that even with the laws of the Patriot Act and the Patriot Act II, things had changed so radically that you knew this was wrong and you had to do something about it or you felt a responsibility to speak out. Okay. So since we gave so much historical preamble, let me just give the Cliff Notes version to get us up to that. So after September 11th, I'm a little bit lost. I'm doing my technical stuff, but it doesn't really feel like it matters anymore. Like I'm making more money. I'm becoming more accomplished. But the world's on fire, right? You remember there was a crazy mood of patriotism in the country because we were all trying to come together to get through it. You remember like people were sticking Dixie cups in the top of every chain link fence on every overpass that was like stand together, you know, never forget. United we stand. Flags on every car. Exactly. And you know, I was a young guy who was not especially political, right? And I come from a military background, federal family, all that stuff. And so that means I'm very vulnerable to this kind of stuff. I see it on the news and Bush and all his sort of cronies are going, look, it's al Qaeda. It's terrorism terrorist organization. They have all these international connections. There's Iraq, you know, dictators, weapons of mass destruction. They're holding the world at ransom. You got Colin Powell at the UN dangling little vials of like fake anthrax. And so I felt an obligation to do my part. And so I volunteered to join the army. You probably can't tell from from looking at me, but I'm not going to be at the top of the MMA circuit anytime soon. So it didn't work out. I joined a special program that was called the 18 X-ray program where they take you in off the street and they actually give you a shot at becoming a special forces soldier. So you train harder and special platoons you go further. And I ended up breaking my legs basically. So they put me out on the charge. Yeah, it was basically what it was. They were shin splints that I was too dumb to get off of. Right. So I kept marching underweight. I'm a pretty light guy to begin with. I had a 24 inch waist when I when I joined the army. Girls are jealous. I would. I think I weighed like 128 pounds. I got I was in great shape, you know, in boot camp because I came up really quick because it was a you know, all I could do was gain. But it was it was just too much on my frame because I wasn't that that active. And so when you keep running on a stress entry, right, and you're running underweight with like rucksacks and things like that, you're running in like boots and then you're doing exercise. And the army is like a whole chapter in the book. You got your battle buddy, right? Because they never allow you to be alone. You always got to have somebody watching you. They thought it was funny to put me the smallest guy in the platoon that the drill sergeant said with the biggest dude in the platoon, who was like an amateur bodybuilder. It was like, you know, 230 or 260, something like that. He was a big fellow. And so, you know, he would when we're off in the woods doing these these marches and things like that, we have to practice buddy carries like the fireman's carrying things like that. He throws me around his neck, you know, I'm like a towel. He's just skipping down like it's nothing. And then I got to put him on me and I'm just like, oh, God, dying. And it was it was it was weirdly fun. I enjoyed it. But it was no good for my body. And so in a land navigation movement, I step off a log because I was on point. And on the other side of the log, because it's the woods in Georgia, I'm at Sand Hill. I see a snake. And so in my memory, you know, it's like time slows down because North Carolina, you know, you think all snakes are poisonous. That's okay. Sorry, there's an issue. We're good. We're good. It's completely fun. No, we're fine. I just there was something that happened on the screen. I wanted to make sure it was okay. Now, that's just so I joined the chat. That's what I was worried about. There's a second image opened up here. Yeah. So anyway, I try to take a much longer step in midair. I land badly. And it's just one leg is like fire. I'm limping. I'm limping. I'm limping. But you know, everybody says don't go to sick call because you go to sick call, you lose your slot, you'll end up general infantry or regular infantry. So I go back. I just tough it out. I get my rack and the next morning when I get out of the rack, which is the top bunk bed, right, I jumped at my legs. They just give out underneath me and I try to get up in it. I just can't get up. And so I go to sick call and I end up going to the hospital and they end up x-raying me and they also x-ray my battle buddy because I got to go there with somebody else. And he has a broken hip where they had to bring him to surgery. In the book, there's a lot more detail about it. It's kind of a dramatic moment. But for me, they just said I had bilateral tibial fractures, right, all the way up my legs. They said I had spider webs. And the next phase of the training was jump school, right, where you got to jump out of a plane. And the doctor, you know, is like, son, if you jump on those legs, they're going to turn into powder. And he's like, I can hold you back. You know, we can put you for like six months. You stay off them. Then you can go back through the whole cycle, right, start basic from scratch. But you'll lose your slot in the special forces pipeline because of the way these things are scheduled and everything like that. And then you'll basically be reassigned to the needs of the Army, or which probably meant I was going back to IT, which was what I joined the Army to kind of escape. Or you can go out on this special kind of discharge that's called an administrative discharge, right, normally got honorable discharge, dishonorable discharge, things like that. This is something for people who have been in for, I think, less than six months, where it's like annulling a marriage. It's as if it never happened. It's as if you never joined. And at the time, I was like, well, you know, that's very kind of him to do that. And I took it, you know, they sent me to sick call or sort of the sick bay, where you're in like the medical platoon and you do nothing for, I think, about a month. And then they let you out once the paperwork all finishes. But in hindsight, I realized that if you take an administrative discharge, it exempts the Army for liability for your injuries. So actually what I thought was a kindness was just, you know, now if I had future problems with my legs, they wouldn't have to cover it or health insurance or any of those things. And it was just a funny thing. But anyway, I get out of the Army. And here, I'm on crutches for a long time and just sort of trying to figure out, all right, well, what's next in life? Because I had gotten a basic security clearance just for going through signing up for the military process, I applied for a security guard position at the University of Maryland because it said you had to get a top secret clearance, which was a higher clearance than I had at the time. And I went, well, that sounds good because I knew if I combine my IT skills, which were now suddenly much more relevant again to my future, with a top secret security clearance because of the way it works, if you have a top security clearance and tech skills, you get paid a ridiculous amount of money for doing very little work. So I was like, all right, well, you know, I can basically make twice what I would be making in the private sector working for government at this level, at this phase, because what we talked about earlier with September 11th and how the intelligence community changed, they no longer cared that I hadn't graduated from college, right? And I had gotten a GED just by going in and taking a test. So for government purposes, it was the same as if I was a high school graduate. So now suddenly it was like these doors are open. Now this University of Maryland facility turned out to be an NSA facility. It was called a CASEL, the Center for the Advanced Study of Language at the University of Maryland College Park. And all I was was literally a security guy walking around with a walkie-talkie, making sure nobody breaks in at night, managing the electronic alarm system and things like that. But once I had my foot in the door there, I could start climbing the ladder step by step. And I applied for, or I went to a job fair actually that was only for people who had security clearances. And I ended up going to the table for one of the technical companies. It was a little tiny subcontractor nobody's ever heard of. And they said, you know, we've got tons of positions for somebody like you. Are you comfortable working nights? And I was like, yeah, you know, I wake up in the middle of the day anyway. That's fine with me. And suddenly I've gone from working for the NSA through a university in a weird way where it's like the NSA holds the clearance, but I'm formally an employee of the state of Maryland at the college. And this is government, man. It's all these weird dodges and boondoggles for how people are employed there. Now suddenly I'm working at CIA headquarters, right? The place where all the movies show you swoop over the marble seal and everything like that. I'm the king of the CASEL, right? I'm there at the middle of the night when no one else is there. The lights are on motion sensors. It's the creepiest thing in the world. There's like flags on the wall that are just like gently billowing in the air conditioning, like ghosts. The hallway lights up as you walk alongside it because it's like a green building and they disappear behind you. And there's no one there. I can go down to the gym at like two o'clock in the morning at the CIA and it's like not see a soul on the other side of the building and then go all the way back. And this kind of thing was my end because they were like, look, it's the night shift. Nothing that bad is going to happen. But it was on a very senior technical team that was basically handling systems administration for everybody in the Washington metropolitan area, right? So every basically CIA server, this is a computer system that like data is stored on. The reporting is stored on. Traffic is moved on. All of this stuff. Suddenly me, this is circa 2005, I think, I'm in charge of. And it's just me and one other guy on the night shift. And if you're interested in the book, there's a lot of detail on this. But I get sort of scouted from this position because they realize I actually know a lot about technology. They were expecting me just to basically make sure the building doesn't burn down. All these systems don't go down overnight and then never come back up. But they go, well, are you willing to go overseas? And to a young man at that age, that's actually like, hey, that sounds kind of exciting. You know, who doesn't want to go work overseas for the CIA? And there's a lot of people listening to the podcast that are like, not me. I'm one of them. Because they're like, wait, the CIA is the bad guys, right? Yeah, exactly. They're like, what, are you going to go overthrow a government somewhere? But you have to understand that I'm still very much a true believer. The government is like the living compressed embodiment of truth and goodness and light, you know, the shining city on the hill. So I want to do my part to spread that to the world. I didn't have skepticism is really what I'm trying to establish here. And so I sign up and I go through this special training school like people here in movies about the farm, which is down at Camp Peery in Virginia. I'm sent to this actually much more secret facility called the Hill, which is in Morrenton, Virginia. And this has been covered a few times in open source media. But I think this is one of the few book length discussions of what happens there in permanent record. But yeah, so I go through training and then I get assigned overseas and I end up in Geneva, Switzerland undercover as a diplomat, right? I think my formal title for the embassy is like something super bland, like diplomatic attaché. And what I am is I'm a forward deployed tech guy. They send you through this school to make you into kind of a MacGyver, right? Yes, you can handle all the computers, but you can also handle the connections for the embassy's power systems, right? The actual electrical connections, you can handle the HVAC systems, right? You can handle locks and alarms and security systems. Basically, anything that's got an on button on it at the embassy that's secure, now you're responsible for. And I traveled from Geneva to other countries in Europe for sort of assignments. And it was like, it was an exciting time. I actually still enjoyed it, but this was where I first working with intelligence started to get doubts. The story has been told many times, so I won't go over it in full detail here. But the CIA does primarily, and it's not the only thing they do, what's called human intelligence. Now there are many different types of intelligence that the intelligence community is responsible for. The primary ones are human intelligence and signals intelligence. You want to think of signals intelligence, right, as tapping lines, hacking computers, all of these sort of things that provide electronic information, anything that's a digital or analog signal that can be intercepted and then turned into information. Human intelligence is all that fun stuff we've heard the CIA doing for decades and decades, which is where they try to turn people. Basically, they say, look, we'll give you money if you sell out your country. It's not even your country, a lot of times it's your organization. These guys could be working for a telecommunications provider, and they want to sell customer records, or they worked at a bank, which was the thing that I saw, and we wanted records on the bank's customers, so we wanted a guy on the inside. But anyway, that's sort of how it works. What I saw was they were way more aggressive for the lowest stakes than was reasonable or responsible. They were totally willing to destroy somebody's life. Just on the off chance, they would get some information that wouldn't even be tremendously valuable. So, ethically, that struck me as a bit off, but I let it pass because what I've learned over my life, short though it's been, is that skepticism is something that needs to build up over time. It's a skill, something that needs to be practiced, or you can think of it as something that you develop through exposure, kind of like radiation poisoning, but in a positive way. It's when you start to realize inconsistencies, or hypocrisies, or lies, and you notice them, and you give somebody the benefit of the doubt, or you trust them, or you think it's alright, but then over time, you see it's not an isolated instance. It's a pattern behavior, and over time, that exposure to inconsistency builds and builds and builds until it's something that you can no longer ignore. Now after the CIA, I went to the NSA in Japan, where I was working there in Tokyo, and then from there, a couple years later, I went to the CIA again. Now I was working as a private employee for Dell, but I was the senior technical official on Dell's sales account to the CIA. These big companies, they have sales accounts to the CIA, and so this means I'm going in, and now it's crazy because I'm still a very young man, but I'm sitting across the table from chiefs of these enormous CIA divisions. I'm sitting across from their chief technology officer for the entire agency, or the chief information officer for the entire CIA. These guys are going, look, here's our problems, here's what we want to do, and it's my job to pitch them a system, and I'm paired up with the sales guy. The whole thing is just go, how much money can we get out of the government? That's the whole goal, and we'll build them. What we were pitching was a private cloud system, and everybody knows about cloud computing now. It's like why your Gmail account is available wherever you go. It's why Facebook has this massive system of records for everyone everywhere. The government wanted to have these kind of capabilities, too. Dell ended up getting beat out by Amazon. Some people aren't familiar with this. Many of them are. But Amazon runs a secret cloud system for the government. I forget what they've rebranded it now, but there's this massive connection between industry and government and the classified space that just goes deeper and deeper and deeper and deeper. At this point, I had misgivings because of what I'd seen in Japan about government, but I was just trying to get by. I was trying to ignore the conflicts. I was trying to ignore the inconsistencies. I think this is a state that a lot of people in these large institutions, not just in our country but around the world, struggle with every day. They got a job. They got a family. They got bills. They're just trying to get by. They know that some of the things they're doing are not good things. They know some of the things they're doing are actively wrong. But they know what happens to people who rock the boat. Eventually, I changed my mind. When I had gone to Hawaii, which was the final position in my career with the intelligence community, I was—because of an accident of history here, I wasn't supposed to be in this position at all. I was supposed to be at a group called the National Threat Operations Center, N-TOC. But because of the way contracting works—and again, this is covered in the book—I ended up being reassigned to this little rinky dink office that nobody's ever heard of in Hawaii called the Office of Information Sharing. I'm replacing this old-timer who's about to retire, a really, really nice guy. But he spent most of his days just reading novels and doing nothing and letting people forget that his office existed because he was the only one in it. There's a manager who's over him, but it's actually over a larger group, and he just looks over him as a favor. Now I come in, and now I'm the sole employee of the Office of Information Sharing. And I'm not close enough to retirement that I'm okay with just doing nothing at all. So I get ambitious, and I come up with this idea for a new system called the Heartbeat. And what the Heartbeat is going to do is connect to basically every information repository in the intelligence community, both at the NSA and across network boundaries, which you normally can't cross, but because I had worked at both the CIA and the NSA, I knew the network well enough, both sides of it, sides that normal workers at the NSA would never have seen because you have to be in one or the other. I could actually connect these together. I could build bridges across this kind of network space and then draw all of these records into a new kind of system that was supposed to look at your digital ID, basically your sort of ID card that says, this is who I am. I work for this agency. I work in this office. These are my assignments. These are my group affiliations. And because of that, the system would be able to eventually aggregate records that were relevant to your job, that were related to you, and then it could provide them. Basically, you could hit this site. It would be an update of what we used to call read boards, which were manually created. Then we go, look, you work in network defense, right? These are all the things that are happening on network defense. You work on, I don't know, economic takeovers in Guatemala. This is what's going on for you there. But in my off time, I helped the team that sat next to me, which was a systems administration team for Windows Networks because I had been a Microsoft certified systems engineer, which means basically I knew how to take care of Windows Networks. This was all those guys did. They always had way too much work, and I had basically no work that I needed to do at all because all I was supposed to do was share information, which was not something that was particularly in demand because most people already knew what they wanted or what they needed. So it was basically my job was to sit there and collect a paycheck unless I wanted to get ambitious. I did some side gigs for these other guys, and one of them was running what were called dirty word searches. Dirty word searches are, let me dial this back because I know we're sort of, this is hard to track. Everything that the NSA does in large part is classified. Everything the CIA does in large part is classified. If I made lunch plans with other people in my office, it was classified. That was the policy, it's dumb. This over classification problem is one of the central flaws in government right now. This is the reason we don't understand what they're doing. This is why they can get away with breaking the law or violating our rights for so long, you know, five years, 10 years, 15, 50 years before we see what they were doing. It's because of this routine classification. Every system, computer system has a limit on what level of classified information is supposed to be stored on it. We've got all these complicated systems for code words and caveats that establish a system of what's called compartmentation. This is the idea when you work at the CIA, when you work at the NSA, you're not supposed to know what's happening in the office next to you because you don't have need to know. Again, that thing from the movies. The reason they have this is they don't want one person to be able to go and know everything, and tell everybody everything. They don't want anybody to know too much, particularly when they're doing lots of bad things because then there's the risk that you realize they're doing so many bad things that it's past the point that we can justify. They might develop sort of an ideological objection to that. Well in the Office of Information Sharing, and actually in basically every part of my career before that, I had access to everything. I had what was called a special caveat on my accesses called PRIVAC, which means privileged access. What this means is you're kind of super user. Most people have all of these controls on the kind of information they can access, but I'm in charge of the system. People who need information, they have to get it from somewhere. Even the director of the CIA, right? He says, I need to know everything about this. He doesn't know where to get it. He's just a manager. Somebody has to be able to actually cross these thresholds and get those things. That guy was me. Dirty word searches were these kind of automated queries that I would set up to go across the whole network and look at all of the different levels of classification and compartmentation and exceptionally controlled information. You can think of it as above top secret in these special compartments, right? Where you're not even supposed to know what these compartments are for. You only know the code word unless you work in them, unless you have access to them, unless you're read into them. One day I got a hit on the dirty word search for a program that I'd never heard of called Stellar Wind. It came back because the little caveat for it, they're called handling caveats, which is like, you can think of like burn after reading or for your eyes only. This one's called STLW, which means Stellar Wind. Unless you know what Stellar Wind is, you don't know how to handle it. All I knew was it wasn't supposed to be on my system. This is a little bit unusual. It turned out this document was placed on the system because one of the employees who had worked on this program years before had come to Hawaii. This person was a lawyer, I believe. They had worked in the inspector general's office and they had compiled a report, part of the inspector general's report, which is when the government is investigating itself into the operations and activities of this program. This was the domestic mass surveillance program that I talked about in the very beginning of our conversation that started under the Bush White House. Stellar Wind was no longer supposed to be really an operation. It had been unveiled in a big scandal in December 2005 in The New York Times by journalist James Risen. I'm not going to name them because I don't want to get it wrong. Another journalist, you can look at the byline if you want to see their involvement. There's a lot of history here too. What they had found was, of course, the Bush White House had constructed a warrantless wiretapping program, if you remember the warrantless wiretapping scandal that was affecting everyone in the United States. The Bush White House was really put in a difficult position by this scandal. They would have lost the election over this scandal because The New York Times actually had this story in October 2004, which was the election year. They were ready to go with it. But at the specific request of the White House talking to the publisher of The New York Times, Salsberger and Bill Keller, then the executive editor of The New York Times, The New York Times said, we won't run the story because the president just said, if you run this story a month before the election, that's a very tight margin if you recall, you'll have blood on your hands. It was so close to 2001, The New York Times just went, you know what, fine. Americans don't need to know that the Constitution is being violated. They don't need to know that the Fourth Amendment doesn't mean what they think it means. If the government says it's all right and it's a secret and you shouldn't know about it, that's fine. Now, December 2005, why did that change? Why did The New York Times suddenly run this story? Well, it's because James Risen, the reporter who found this story, had written a book and he was about to publish this book and The New York Times was about to be in a very uncomfortable position of having to explain why they didn't run this story and how they got scooped by their own journalist. And so they finally did it, but it was too late. Bush had been reelected. And now it was sweeping up the broken glass of our lost rights. So Congress, the Bush White House was very effective in, as I said before, telling a very few select members of Congress that this program existed. And they told them this program existed in ways that they wouldn't object to, but made them culpable for hiding the existence of the program from the American people. And this is why someone like Nancy Pelosi, who you wouldn't exactly think would be buddy buddy with George Bush, was completely okay in defending this kind of program, in fact. And later she said, oh, well, she had objections to the program that she wrote in a letter to the White House, but she never showed us the letter. She went, oh, well, that was classified, right? And this is not to bag on her individually. It's just she's a great example in here, a named example everyone knows of how this process works. The White House will implicate certain very powerful members of Congress in their own criminal activity. And so when the, when then when the White House gets in trouble for it, the Congress has to run cover for the White House. And so what happened was Congress passed an emergency law in 2007 called the Protect America Act, which should have been our first indication. This is a very bad thing because they never name a law something like that unless it's something terrible. And what it did was it retroactively immunized all of the phone companies in the United States that had been breaking the law millions of times a day by handing your records over to the government, which they weren't allowed to do simply on the basis of a letter from the president saying, please do this. And these companies went, look, now that we've been uncovered, now that we've been shown that we're breaking, or now that these journalists have shown that we've broken the law and violated the rights of Americans on a staggering scale that could bankrupt our companies because we can be sued for this. We will no longer cooperate with you unless you pass a law that says people can't sue us for having done this. And so we get the Protect America Act, which they say, you know, as an emergency, this is all public history too. You can look this up on Wikipedia, you know? And so then they go, it's an emergency law. We have to pass this now. We have to keep this program active. Bush is going to end the warrantless wiretapping program and continue it under this new authority where it's going to have some special level of oversight and these kind of things eventually. But for now, we just have to make sure people are safe. Again, they go to fear. They say, if we don't have this program, terrorist attacks will continue. People will die. Blood on your hands, blood on your hands, blood on your hands. Think of the children. Protect America Act passes. The companies get off the hook. The Bush White House gets off the hook. The Congress that was then sharing in criminal culpability for authorizing, or rather letting these things go by without stopping them, then passes in 2008. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act amendments of 2008. This is called the FAA, FISA Amendments Act of 2008. And rather than stopping all of the unlawful and sort of unconstitutional activities that the intelligence agency was doing, they continued it in different ways simply by creating a few legal hoops for them to jump through. Now, this is not to say these things aren't helpful at all. It's not to say they're not useful at all. But it's important to understand when the government's response to any scandal, and this applies to any country, is not to make the activities of the person who is caught breaking the law comply with the law, but instead make the activities of the person who is breaking the law legal. They make the law comply with what the agencies want to do, rather than make the agencies comply with the law. That's a problem, and that's what happened here. Now, the intelligence community's powers actually grew in response to this scandal in 2008, because Congress was on the hook and they just wanted to move on and get this over with. There were objections. There were people who knew this was a bad idea, but it didn't pass on. Now, what the public took away from this, because a part of these laws was a requirement that the Inspector General of all of these different intelligence community elements and the Director of National Intelligence submit a report saying, this is what happened under that warrantless wiretapping program. This is how it complied with the law or how it didn't comply with the law. Basically, look back at how this program was constituted, what it did, what the impacts and effects were, and that was supposed to be the truth and reconciliation council. Now, why am I talking about all this ancient history? Well, I'm sitting here in 2012 with a classified Inspector General's draft report from the NSA that names names that says Dick Cheney, that says David Addington, that says Nancy Pelosi, that says all these people who are involved in the program, the tick tock of how it happens. It says the Director of the NSA, that guy who is evacuating the building at the beginning of our podcast here, that guy was asked by the President of the United States if he would continue this program after being told by the White House and the Department of Justice that these programs were not lawful, that they were not constitutional. And the President said, would you continue this program on my say so alone knowing that it's risky, knowing that it's unlawful? And he said, yes, sir, I will if you think that's what's necessary to keep the country safe. And at that moment, I realize these guys don't care about the law. These guys don't care about the Constitution. These guys don't care about the American people. They care about the continuity of government. They care about the state. Right. And this is something that people have lost. We hear this phrase over and over again, national security, national security, national security. And we're meant to interpret that to mean public safety. But national security is a very different thing from public safety. National security is a thing that in previous generations we referred to as state security. National security was a kind of term that came out of the Bush administration to run cover for the fact that we were elevating a new kind of secret police across the country. And what does it mean when again, in a democracy in the United States, the public is not partner to government? The public does not hold the leash of government anymore, but we are subject to government. Right. We are subordinate to government. And we're not even allowed to know that it happened. Now, in the book, I tell the fact that I had access to the unclassified version of this report back in Japan. And what's interesting is the unclassified version of a report. And we've all seen this today with things like the Mueller report and all of the intelligence reporting that's happened in the last several years. When the government provides a classified report to the public, it's normally the same document. The unclassified version, the classified version of the same thing, just the unclassified version has things blacked out or redacted that they say, oh, you're not allowed to know this sentence or this paragraph or this page or whatever. The document that the public had been given about the warrantless wiretapping program was a completely different document. It was a document tailor made to deceive and mislead the Congress and the public of the United States. And it was effective in doing that. And in 2012, what I realized was this is what real world conspiracies look like. Right. It doesn't have to be smoking men behind closed doors. Right. It's lawyers and politicians. It's ordinary people from the working level to the management level who go, if we don't explain this in a certain way, we're all going to lose our jobs. Or the other way they go, we're going to get something out of this if we all work together. Civilization is the history of conspiracy. Right. What is civilization? But a conspiracy for all of us to do better by working together. Right. But it's this kind of thing that I think too often we forget because it's boring as hell. I want all your listeners, right, to go to the Washington Post because this document that I discovered that really changed me has been published, courtesy of the Washington Post. It's called the Inspector General's report on Stellar Wind. And you can look at the actual document that I saw that was unredacted. Right. I had no blacked out pages online. And what I believe it shows is that some of the most senior officials in the United States, elected and unelected, worked together to actively undermine the rights of the American people to give themselves expanded powers. Now, in their defense, they said they were seeking these powers for a good and just and noble cause. Right. They say they were trying to keep us safe. But that's what they always say. That's what every government says. That's no different than what the Chinese government says or the Russian government says. And the question is, if they are truly keeping us safe, why wouldn't they simply just tell us that? Why wouldn't they have that debate in Congress? Why wouldn't they put that to a vote? Because if they were and they could convince us that they were, they'd win the vote. And particularly, we all know, like the Patriot Act passed, one of the worst pieces of legislation in modern history passed. Why didn't we get a vote? And I think if you read the report, the answer will be clear. So I'm sorry, Joe, I went on for a very long time. No, it was amazing. It's like, don't don't apologize at all. It's just completely fascinating that the continuation of this policy came down to one man and the president having this discussion. That is so well, it's it's much it's much more, much more, but right, right. Literally the president at the heart of it. Yes.