Name: Joe Rogan Experience #1368 - Edward Snowden
Uploaded: 2019-10-23T10:00:09.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #1368 - Edward Snowden' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2019-10-23. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #1368 - Edward Snowden' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2019-10-23. Transcript available.

Joe Rogan Experience #1368 - Edward Snowden

and okay that'll just be you're very professional well you know people are like
uh how do you live
and things like that they're like are you taking money from the russians and of
course the answer
is no but uh i i do this for a living like i i speak i'm i don't have a youtube
channel where
it's you know i'm joe rogan but i give speeches at universities and things like
that i do a lot of
interviews and so we're recording now my own setup is it possible that you
could do a youtube channel
would that work if yeah like i i mean if you introduce me so like i get
followers yeah we
could do that dude i'm all in that that could absolutely happen do you want to
do that is that
something you want to do no i mean this is a big question so i i came on um
because i had
just uh written a book uh called permanent record um which is the the story of
my life because that's
what publishers make you do when when you're writing your first book um but it's
more than that because
i didn't just want to talk about me it's actually about the changing of
technology and the changing
of government in this sort of post 9 11 era which in our our generation just
sort of happened uh to be
growing up during uh and i was at the cia and the nsa and all this stuff but
the day that the book came
out uh the government hit me with a lawsuit um and they hit the publisher of
the books uh with a with
a lawsuit um because they don't want to see books like this get written they
especially don't want to
see books like this uh get read um and so the big thing was you know we we didn't
know where this was
going we didn't know what was going to happen um and my publisher of course
wanted me very badly to
let people know this book existed uh in case the government leaned harder and
harder and harder we
didn't know where where that's going um the government is still uh pursuing
that case quite strongly
they're more focused on the the financial censorship side of it basically
taking any money that i made from
it kind of as a warning to the others um and getting a legal judgment against
the publishers saying you
know you can't pay this guy that kind of thing more so than taking the book off
the shelves but that's
not because uh they're okay with the book being on the shelves it's because
thankfully we we've got
the first amendment and so they can't and that's a very rare and and good thing
but anyway in the context
of that um uh they were like well what about joe rogan and you know i i had
heard about
you uh at this point but you know uh the only thing that i had really seen that
i really understood
um had familiarity with was like you talking to bernie sanders which by the way
i very much appreciated
uh hearing that because a lot of people don't give the guy time to talk yeah to
hear him in those
sound bites you don't really get an understanding of who he actually is right
and this is the other
thing like they're like well you know you can go on all these you know major
network shows and i i did a
couple of them i did like uh a morning show i did uh brian williams um but
broadly the media
the the the sort of more corporatized media as we might say um is exactly what
you just described
right they they want you to be able to answer in like 8 15 seconds or less um
and when we're talking
about big massive shifts in society when we're talking about uh power we're
talking about uh technology
and how it controls and influences us uh in the future um you you can't have a
meaningful conversation
within those constraints and so instead these guys all want to say uh repeat
these long discredited
sort of criticisms and you know i'm sure you'll you'll you'll ask the same
thing and that's okay
um they're they're fair questions but it's like we can't have the conversation
if we can't have this
space to think and breathe and have this sort of discussion um so anyway they
they mentioned you
and i was like joe rogan joe rogan joe rogan where do i know this name from uh
before bernie sanders
um and i look back through my my twitter mentions um and the funny thing is
your fans have been uh
harassing me to death for like the last years wonderful people wonderful people
uh but like
go on joe rogan go on joe rogan and i remember like after i had just made a
twitter account uh neil
degrasse tyson actually helped me get on twitter um gave me that little initial
boost and uh
they said joe rogan and so i they like linked you and you know i mouse over
your name because i use a
desktop i'm not mobile for this because security reasons uh and it pops up and
i get your avatar
man and like i have to say your logo is the worst thing in the world for people
who are like trying
to be like politically serious and you know they're worried about the national
security advisor condemning
because like this bald guy with this maniacal grin and like the third eye on
his forehead and i'm like
oh man that's show you know that that doesn't look good but it's actually like
when you watch
you know when when you watch what you're doing it's great stuff man it's great
but that first impression
like i this almost didn't happen but everybody who has talked to you you know
everybody who watches
your show i think they get a very different impression than how you're paying
it and for me
it's a wonderful thing because nobody understands that better than i do right
like the government ran
a smear campaign against me endlessly for six months when i came forward in june
of 2013. i know we got way
off topic here i'll get back to it fine um there's no such thing as off topic
we could do okay talk
about whatever great great okay so for for those people first off who have no
idea who the hell i am
um i'm the guy who was behind uh the revelations of global mass surveillance in
2013.
um i worked for the cia i worked for the nsa as a contractor at the nsa staff
officer at the cia i was
undercover working at embassies um but uh and i talk about the difference
between this in a book and
contractor and government official and how it's all sort of lost its meaning uh
but i saw something
wrong um and i saw basically the government was violating the law um and what i
believe to be the
constitution of the united states and more broadly human rights uh for everyone
in the united states and
around the world there were domestic surveillance programs there were mass
surveillance programs that
worked internationally um basically everything that they could monitor they
were monitoring
and this is actually like people go isn't that obvious isn't that what they're
supposed to do and
this is weird but the answer actually is no under the framework of our
constitution the government is
only supposed to be monitoring people that it has an individualized particularized
a suspicion of wrongdoing for right this is we think about this in the
investigative means right
like all those tv shows where they're like go and get a warrant the reason they
have to do that
like we fought a revolution over this uh you know a couple hundred years back
um is the idea that when
we had you know kings when we had governments of absolute power uh they could
simply go in your home
and go you know is this guy a pot smoker get his diary you know whatever it is
and just like if you find
evidence of a crime you march them off to prison and it's all good you found
evidence they're criminal
or you didn't find evidence well no harm no foul you're just doing what
government does
we were trying to build a better system where it went yes the government has
extraordinary capabilities
but it only uses them where they're they're necessary right uh where they're uh
proportionate to the
threat that is presented by this person you know like we we shouldn't be afraid
of the person who's
got like a baggie of weed uh in their dresser or or something like that that is
not a threat to
national security that is not a threat to public safety um but what happened in
the wake of 9 11
was a whole bunch of uh government officials got together behind closed doors
and this was actually
led interestingly enough by the vice president of the united states cheney uh
everybody remembers that
name or hopefully i can look that name up um dick cheney uh and his personal
attorney uh sort of the the
giuliani of dick cheney um a guy named david addington and this lawyer david
addington wrote a
secret legal interpretation uh that no one else was allowed to see uh it was
kept in the vice president's
safe at the white house um they they weren't giving this even when they told
people and it was just a
couple people in congress nancy pelosi was one of them and a couple of these
other folks um when they
talked uh to the heads of the agency the nsa and the cia and the fbi and all
this stuff they told them
the white house and the office of legal counsel and you know this this uh the
president's attorneys
all of these guys had decided this would be legal to do but we can't tell you
why we can't show you
the legal authorization for you just got to take our word for it um and so they
did this and this
became a mass surveillance program called stellar wind which they said was
supposed to monitor the
phone calls and internet communications emails and things like that of
everybody in the united states
and around the world who they could get access to for links to al-qaeda because
if you remember in the
the wake of uh the september 11th attacks they were singing um we thought there
could be sleeper cells
of al-qaeda that were just you know peppered all throughout the country and
they were going to
spring up at any moment of course like weapons of mass destruction it just didn't
exist it was all a
power grab um but on that basis they started doing this in secret and it was
completely unconstitutional
it was completely illegal even under the very loose requirements of the patriot
act
um but they did it for so long that they got comfortable with it and they
thought this is you
know this is a really powerful capability what if we started using this for
stuff that was
other than terrorism because it wasn't finding any terrorists because there
weren't any terrorists
uh in this context that they were looking for them uh and the ones who uh where
there were
terrorists the program wasn't affected because these were guys in pakistan that
weren't using
you know email and phone calls they were getting on a you know moped with their
cousin who was a courier
who was bringing a letter to his guy you know who runs the the food stand or
whatever
um but uh bit by bit over time this grew and grew and grew and there were scandals
and
if you want to drill down on these later i'll go into them but what happened
was step by step by step our constitutional rights were changed and we weren't
allowed to know it we
were never granted a vote on it and even the many members of congress right 535
in the united states
they were prohibited from knowing this and instead they told only a few select
people in the original
case there were only eight members of congress called the gang of eight who
knew about this
then there were uh the people on the intelligence committees uh both in the
senate and the house who
were told about this but they were only told partially about it they weren't
told the full scope of it
and now that they had been told about it because they had security clearances
and things like that
they weren't allowed to tell anybody else even if they objected to it and we
had one senator uh ron
wyden um and another one i believe tom udall was the name of them who did
object to this and who wanted
something to happen but because they couldn't tell anybody that was happening
they were sort of doing
these weird lassie barks uh to the press where they were like we have grave
concerns about the way
these programs are being carried out uh but nobody knew what they were talking
about and so journalists
were like you know they've got concerns what is that lassie what are you trying
to say tinnies and well
but t