Speaker 1: Welcome back to the deep dive. Today, we are opening
Speaker 1: a file that I think a lot of people assume
Speaker 1: they already know. Backward and forward.
Speaker 2: Oh absolutely, the headlines, right.
Speaker 1: The headlines. But trust me, we are barely scratching the
Speaker 1: surface of the real story if we just stick to those.
Speaker 1: We're looking at permanent record, the memoir by Edward Snowden.
Speaker 1: And before we go any further, I want to be
Speaker 1: really clear. We are putting the politics of the leaks
Speaker 1: themselves to the side for.
Speaker 2: A moment, right, because if you only focus on the
Speaker 2: end of the story, you know, the hotel room in
Speaker 2: Hong Kong, the journalists, the flight to Moscow. Yeah, you
Speaker 2: miss the actual machinery that built the whistleblower. You miss
Speaker 2: the human engineering, so to.
Speaker 1: Speak, exactly. We're looking at the evolution of a mindset.
Speaker 1: We're going to unpack how a kid who grew up
Speaker 1: in the suburbs of DC, obsessively playing Nintendo and hacking
Speaker 1: his bedtime eventually found himself holding the keys to the
Speaker 1: entire US intelligence network. Right, We've got stacks of notes
Speaker 1: from his memoir covering his childhood, the explosion of the Internet,
Speaker 1: the chaos of nine to eleven and his time inside
Speaker 1: the CIA, And what.
Speaker 2: We're really looking for here is the systems thinker. That's
Speaker 2: the through line. Snowden didn't just wake up one day
Speaker 2: and decide to dismantle a global surveillance apparatus. This provides
Speaker 2: a specific look at how a young person raised in
Speaker 2: the shadow of the NSA comes to understand that systems,
Speaker 2: whether they're families, schools, computers, or governments, work based on.
Speaker 1: Rules, and that those rules usually have.
Speaker 2: Bugs, and more importantly, that those rules have bugs.
Speaker 1: So let's unpack this. We have to start at the
Speaker 1: very beginning, and I mean age six. The source material
Speaker 1: describes his very first hack, and I love this because
Speaker 1: it wasn't the computer. No, it was a grandfather clock.
Speaker 2: It's such a classic example of lateral thinking. He's six
Speaker 2: years old, it's his birthday, and he's facing what he
Speaker 2: calls life's first little injustice, bedtime. He has to go
Speaker 2: to bed before he's actually tired.
Speaker 1: I related to this so hard, the tyranny of bedtime. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but most kids know they just cry or beg or
Speaker 1: maybe try to hide under the sofa. Snowden, he realizes
Speaker 1: the decision to send him to bed isn't based on
Speaker 1: his physical state. It's based on a piece of data.
Speaker 2: Exactly the time on the clocks. He identifies the governing metric.
Speaker 1: So he waits for his parents to get distracted, grabs
Speaker 1: a chair, and just physically moves the hands of every
Speaker 1: clock in the house back a few hours.
Speaker 2: And it works.
Speaker 1: And it worked. He's galloping around the living room totally
Speaker 1: mad with power. Yeah. But here is the key takeaway,
Speaker 1: and it's something that seems to define his entire career.
Speaker 1: Later on, he realized that the authorities in this case,
Speaker 1: his parents were operating on a system. They trusted the
Speaker 1: clocks implicitly. They didn't verify the data with their own eyes.
Speaker 2: He hacked the rule, not the person. He writes that
Speaker 2: hacking isn't just about coding. It's about understanding a system
Speaker 2: better than the people who designed it. It's finding that gap,
Speaker 2: you know, the gap between how a system is supposed
Speaker 2: to work and how it actually works.
Speaker 1: His parents assumed the clocks were accurate references for reality.
Speaker 2: And he exploited that assumption.
Speaker 1: There's another great story from his childhood that I think
Speaker 1: really shaped his relationship with technology. The broken Nintendo Entertainment.
Speaker 2: System NES a pivotal piece of hardware for our generation.
Speaker 1: The Classic. So he breaks it or it stops working,
Speaker 1: and he's terrified. His dad is going to be mad.
Speaker 1: His dad is a Coastguard officer, a serious engineer type.
Speaker 1: But instead of getting angry, his dad sits him down
Speaker 1: and they take the thing apart.
Speaker 2: This is a massive moment for him. His father teaches
Speaker 2: him that technology isn't magic. It's just components. It's plastic
Speaker 2: and silicon and copper. If you aren't afraid to open
Speaker 2: the box and look at the circuit board, you can
Speaker 2: understand it.
Speaker 1: And if you can understand it, you can control it.
Speaker 1: And his dad drops this line about technological tyranny. He
Speaker 1: basically tells him, if you don't know how these machines work,
Speaker 1: the machines own you. If you know how to fix them,
Speaker 1: you own them.
Speaker 2: That is a worldview that sticks. It's almost prophetic. Regarding
Speaker 2: his future role speaking the Nintendo Snowden uses this fascinating
Speaker 2: metaphor from Super Mario Bros. To describe his philosophy on life. Oh,
Speaker 2: the invisible wall, Yeah, the invisible wall.
Speaker 1: Right in the original Mario, you can only run right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: you can never go back to the left. If you
Speaker 1: missed a mushroom or a coin, too bad, it's gone.
Speaker 2: He uses that as a metaphor for time and life decisions.
Speaker 2: The screen scrolls forward, the pass disappears behind that invisible wall,
Speaker 2: and you are just compelled into the unknown.
Speaker 1: It's been a foreshadowing. Honestly, once you make a move,
Speaker 1: there is no undo button. You just have to survive
Speaker 1: the level pretty much. So we have this kid who
Speaker 1: loves taking things apart, loves finding loopholes. But we also
Speaker 1: have to look at where he is growing up. He
Speaker 1: calls it the Beltway bubble.
Speaker 2: This is crucial context. He grows up in the Maryland suburbs,
Speaker 2: specifically around Fort Meade, and for those who don't know,
Speaker 2: Fort Meade is essentially the Vatican City of the US
Speaker 2: intelligence community.
Speaker 1: It's where the NSA is headquartered.
Speaker 2: Mm hm. He describes it as a company town.
Speaker 1: But the companies the federal government exactly.
Speaker 2: His parents worked for the government, his neighbors worked for
Speaker 2: the government. He even mentions that the girls he had
Speaker 2: crushes on had fathers in the FBI.
Speaker 1: So secrecy wasn't this dark, mysterious thing. He was just normal.
Speaker 2: It was the air they breathed. It was just what
Speaker 2: dads did.
Speaker 1: And in this environment he discovers the Internet. But and
Speaker 1: this is important, he's talking about the Internet of the nineties,
Speaker 1: the wild West.
Speaker 2: This is a major theme in the book, the contrast
Speaker 2: between the Internet he fell in love with and the
Speaker 2: Internet that exists today. He describes the early Internet as
Speaker 2: a sanctuary. It was anonymous, you could be anyone.
Speaker 1: A cooperative utopia, that's his phrase for it. I loved
Speaker 1: his description of this. He talks about how you could
Speaker 1: reinvent yourself every day. If you said something dumb on
Speaker 1: a message board, or if you were bullied at school,
Speaker 1: you could go home, log on and be a completely
Speaker 1: different person. You weren't tied to your real identity.
Speaker 2: Versus the modern Internet, which he calls surveillance capitalism. Your
Speaker 2: online identity is just it's inextricably linked to your legal identity,
Speaker 2: your bank account, your location.
Speaker 1: We shifted from a creative space to a.
Speaker 2: Commercial one, a commercial, competitive one where everything you do
Speaker 2: is recorded.
Speaker 1: Which brings us to the Los Alamos story. This is
Speaker 1: where baby Snowden turns into a real hacker. He's a
Speaker 1: teenager surfing the web and he ends up on the
Speaker 1: website for the Los Alamos National Laboratory.
Speaker 2: The place where they develop the atomic bomb, right.
Speaker 1: Not exactly a fan site. Light reading for a teenager,
Speaker 1: you know, And he finds a security flaw, a really
Speaker 1: basic one too. He calls it directory walking.
Speaker 2: Basically, the digital door was unlocked.
Speaker 1: Yeah, he could see internal memos, employee data, all sorts
Speaker 1: of stuff you shouldn't have access to.
Speaker 2: You now, paus for a second. In today's world, if
Speaker 2: a kid hacks a nuclear lab, the swat team is
Speaker 2: breaking down the door in five minutes.
Speaker 1: That's exactly what his mom thought. He calls the lab
Speaker 1: to report the bug, and his mom is standing there terrified,
Speaker 1: thinking he's going to prison.
Speaker 2: But that's not what happensins not at all.
Speaker 1: The IT guy gets on the phone, thanks him and says, hey,
Speaker 1: when you turn eighteen, give us a call you want
Speaker 1: a job.
Speaker 2: It was a different time, but it also reinforced this
Speaker 2: idea for him that systems are flawed and if you
Speaker 2: are smart enough to find the flaws and report them.
Speaker 1: You might be rewarded, not punished.
Speaker 2: It validated his white hat instincts.
Speaker 1: But not always. We have to talk about the permanent
Speaker 1: record concept itself. This comes up in high school. He
Speaker 1: hacks his grades, not by breaking into the computer, but
Speaker 1: by hacking the syllabus.
Speaker 2: This is the systems thinker again. He calculates exactly how
Speaker 2: much the homework is worth versus the tests. He realizes
Speaker 2: he can get a zero on every single homework assignment,
Speaker 2: ace the tests, and still pass the class with a.
Speaker 1: C maximum efficiency, minimum effort. I mean, I respect the hustle.
Speaker 2: Honestly, his teachers did not. One teacher warns him, you
Speaker 2: need to start thinking about your permanent record, and that
Speaker 2: phrase it just haunts the whole book. He realizes later
Speaker 2: that the digital age, we all have a permanent record.
Speaker 1: Everything we do online, every credit card.
Speaker 2: Swipe, it's all stored forever. The teacher's threat became the
Speaker 2: reality of the twenty first century.
Speaker 1: So he's this tech savvy kid, kind of drifting, playing
Speaker 1: a lot of video games, maybe lacking a bit of direction,
Speaker 1: and then the world changes.
Speaker 2: September eleventh, one thousand and one, he.
Speaker 1: Describes driving past the NSA headquarters on nine to eleven,
Speaker 1: the chaos, the panic. He mentioned seeing people using those red,
Speaker 1: white and blue Dixie cups to put in chain link
Speaker 1: fences to spell out United we stand and.
Speaker 2: This is a massive turning point for him, he admits,
Speaker 2: and I think this is really honest of him, that
Speaker 2: he got completely swept up in the.
Speaker 1: Fervor I wanted to be a liberator.
Speaker 2: Yeah, he bought the narrative completely. He says, his rational
Speaker 2: judgment was just defeated by his heart. He wanted to
Speaker 2: punish the bad guys, and this motivation is what drives
Speaker 2: him to enlists in the.
Speaker 1: Army, and not just the regular Army. He signs up
Speaker 1: for the eighteen X ray program Special Forces, Special Forces.
Speaker 1: He wants to be the guy kicking down doors.
Speaker 2: It's a start contrast to the computer guy persona we
Speaker 2: usually associate with him. He wants to prove he's not
Speaker 2: just a brain and a jar.
Speaker 1: But the military experience, well, it doesn't go as planned,
Speaker 1: not at all. The story of Daisy cracked me up,
Speaker 1: but it's also painful. He gets paired with this massive
Speaker 1: bodybuilder named Daisy in basic training. Snowden is this scrawny
Speaker 1: tech kid and he has to carry this giant guy
Speaker 1: during drills.
Speaker 2: It sounds funny, but the physical toll was real. He
Speaker 2: ends up breaking both his.
Speaker 1: Legs bilateral tibial fractures.
Speaker 2: He literally ran on them until they cracked.
Speaker 1: And here is the next hack. He's injured. He's in
Speaker 1: the hospital and the doctor offers him a way out,
Speaker 1: an administrative separation.
Speaker 2: This is a fascinating look at how the government bureaucracy works.
Speaker 2: The doctor essentially tells him, look, if we give you
Speaker 2: a medical discharge, the government has to pay for your
Speaker 2: health care forever. If you sign this paper saying you're
Speaker 2: fine and just quitting, you can leave today.
Speaker 1: It's a hack for the government. They exploit the loophole
Speaker 1: to save money.
Speaker 2: And Snowden signs it because he just wants to get
Speaker 2: out of there. He failed at the physical service, so
Speaker 2: he decides to serve with his mind instead.
Speaker 1: This leads us to the most critical systemic shift described
Speaker 1: in the book, The Rise of the Contractor. He calls
Speaker 1: it homo contractors.
Speaker 2: Okay, let's unpack this because I think people hear government
Speaker 2: contractor and they think of mercenaries or construction workers. But
Speaker 2: in the intelligence community it means something very specific.
Speaker 1: Right after nine to eleven, the intelligence budget exploded. The
Speaker 1: government had unlimited money to spend on security, but there
Speaker 1: are federal laws that cap the number of actual government
Speaker 1: employees civil servants that agencies can hire.
Speaker 2: So how do you hire thousands of new spies and
Speaker 2: tech workers. If you have a hiring cap, you use
Speaker 2: the loophole. You hire private companies Dell, Lockheed, Martin, Booz,
Speaker 2: Allen Hamilton, and those companies hire the people. These contractors
Speaker 2: work in the CIA building sit at CIA desks, use
Speaker 2: CIA computers, but their paycheck comes from a private corporation.
Speaker 1: And Snowden points out this creates a bizarre culture. You
Speaker 1: have career civil servants who are there for the mission,
Speaker 1: and then you have this army of young, well paid
Speaker 1: contractors who are basically tech mercenaries.
Speaker 2: And this is how a drop out with no college
Speaker 2: degree gets into the CIA. The standards for contractors were different.
Speaker 2: They needed tech talent desperately, and they didn't care about
Speaker 2: the credentials as much as the skills.
Speaker 1: They just needed bodies and chairs who knew how to
Speaker 1: run servers exact. So he gets his security clearance, which
Speaker 1: he describes as a really nerve wracking experience worrying about
Speaker 1: his teenage chat logs, and he lands a job at
Speaker 1: CIA headquarters, but not as a spy.
Speaker 2: He's as sissedman, a system administrator.
Speaker 1: And here's where it gets really interesting. He introduces us
Speaker 1: to a guy named Frank.
Speaker 2: Frank is the ghost of the old CIA. He works
Speaker 2: the night shift. He doesn't trust digital storage. Every night,
Speaker 2: Frank backs up the raw intelligence onto physical magnetic tapes
Speaker 2: and locks them in a.
Speaker 1: Safe Frank is living in night teen eighty and Snowden
Speaker 1: is living in two thousand and six. But Frank teaches
Speaker 1: him something important. The older generation, the bosses, the people
Speaker 1: running the agency, they didn't understand the new technology.
Speaker 2: This is the sis edmin insight. Because the leadership didn't
Speaker 2: understand the network, they hired these young kids to run it.
Speaker 2: And to run a network, you need root access, you
Speaker 2: need the keys to the kingdom.
Speaker 1: Snowden realizes that as a lowly sessedman, the bottom of
Speaker 1: the totem pole, he has more access to information than
Speaker 1: the senior spies. He can read the internal news, he
Speaker 1: can see the raw intel from field agents. He says
Speaker 1: he could play god.
Speaker 2: He describes it as having a view of the agency's
Speaker 2: global reach that the spies themselves didn't have. They were compartmentalized.
Speaker 2: They only knew their specific mission.
Speaker 1: Sissidmind sees the whole weapon.
Speaker 2: He sees the metadata of the entire organization.
Speaker 1: So he's soaking all this up, working the night shift,
Speaker 1: reading classified reports just out of curiosity, and he decides
Speaker 1: he wants to go overseas. He wants the real spy.
Speaker 2: Life, but the agency plays a bit of a trick
Speaker 2: on him. He wants a dangerous posting. He wants to
Speaker 2: go to a war zone, maybe to prove himself after
Speaker 2: the army failure.
Speaker 1: But instead they sent himid Geneva.
Speaker 2: Geneva, Switzerland, the banking capital, not exactly a war zone.
Speaker 1: It's a plush gig to put him in a diplomatic cover. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but this is where the story takes a literary turn.
Speaker 1: He mentions reading the book Frankenstein before.
Speaker 2: He arrives, which is set in Geneva, right exactly, And
Speaker 2: he draws this parallel that I think defines the whole
Speaker 2: deep dive. He compares the intelligence community to doctor Frankenstein.
Speaker 1: That is a heavy comparison. How does he justify that.
Speaker 2: We'll think about the story. Victor Frankenstein uses science and
Speaker 2: technology to create something powerful, a living being, but he
Speaker 2: does it without thinking about the moral implications. He does
Speaker 2: it because he can. And then the creation breaks free.
Speaker 1: It becomes a monster that he can't control.
Speaker 2: And Snowden sees the surveillance system as the monster. He
Speaker 2: sees a system where the technological capability, the ability to
Speaker 2: collect data, to spy on everyone, to store everything, has
Speaker 2: completely outpaced the ethical and legal restraints. The tech grew
Speaker 2: faster than the rules.
Speaker 1: He talks about his time at the Hill, the training
Speaker 1: center in Virginia. Before he left, he organized a little
Speaker 1: rebellion there because the housing conditions were terrible.
Speaker 2: Which shows his personality again. He's willing to challenge authority
Speaker 2: if the system is broken. He emailed his boss's boss
Speaker 2: to complain about the hotel they were staying.
Speaker 1: In that hacker mindset again, if the system is unfair,
Speaker 1: hack it go around the chain of command.
Speaker 2: But in Geneva, the steaks are so much higher. He's
Speaker 2: not just hacking a hotel bill. He's seeing how the
Speaker 2: CIA operates in the banking world. He sees how they
Speaker 2: recruit sources, how they manipulate people.
Speaker 1: And he's doing it while maintaining the systems that make
Speaker 1: it all possible.
Speaker 2: It's the convergence of everything we've talked about. The kid
Speaker 2: who moved the clocks, the teenager who hacked the nuclear lab,
Speaker 2: the soldier who wanted to fight for freedom.
Speaker 1: Now he's sitting in a bank vault in Switzerland, realizing
Speaker 1: that the freedom he wanted to protect is being eroded
Speaker 1: by the very system he's building.
Speaker 2: And that is the tragedy or the irony of the
Speaker 2: systems thinker Snowden wanted to understand how everything worked. He
Speaker 2: wanted to see the machine. And when he finally got
Speaker 2: to the center of it, when he finally saw the
Speaker 2: whole machine.
Speaker 1: He realized it was built to consume everything. The Internet
Speaker 1: he loved, the anonymous creative sanctuary was being turned into
Speaker 1: a tool for state control.
Speaker 2: And remember the invisible wall.
Speaker 1: For Mario, you can only go forward.
Speaker 2: By the time he's in Geneva, he's starting to realize
Speaker 2: he's hit a wall. He can't unknow what he knows.
Speaker 2: The system is moving in one direction, more control, more secrecy,
Speaker 2: less privacy, and he has to decide if he's going
Speaker 2: to keep moving with the screen or if he's going
Speaker 2: to try to break the console.
Speaker 1: It really reframes the whole whistleblower narrative. It wasn't about politics, really,
Speaker 1: it was about engineering. He looked at the US government
Speaker 1: and said this code is buggy, This system is flawed,
Speaker 1: and the users, the public don't even know it's broken.
Speaker 2: That's the Sisigmund perspective. You don't ask for permission to
Speaker 2: fix a server that's on fire. You just fix it.
Speaker 2: The problem is when the server is the global intelligence apparatus,
Speaker 2: fixing it looks a lot like trees and to the
Speaker 2: people who own the machine.
Speaker 1: So what does this all mean for us? For you,
Speaker 1: the listener, I mean, we aren't ciasis, admit no, but.
Speaker 2: We are users of the system. I think it forces
Speaker 2: us to look at the systems in our own lives.
Speaker 2: We live in a world of terms and conditions. We
Speaker 2: don't read, We use devices we don't understand. We rely
Speaker 2: on black boxes for everything from our finances to our
Speaker 2: social lives. Snowden's story is a warning that if you
Speaker 2: don't understand the system, you have no power over it.
Speaker 1: We are all just players in that Mario level running
Speaker 1: right because the screen tells us.
Speaker 2: To exactly, and the central tension of the book and
Speaker 2: his life remains unresolved for us too. We want safety,
Speaker 2: so we build these massive systems. We want convenience, so
Speaker 2: we give up our data. But at what point does
Speaker 2: the creation the Frankenstein monster take over.
Speaker 1: That is the question. When technological capability output paces accountability,
Speaker 1: who is actually in control, the creators or the creation.
Speaker 2: I think that's the questions Note wants us to ask
Speaker 2: every time we pick up our phones.
Speaker 1: A huge thank you to everyone for listening to this
Speaker 1: deep dive into Permanent Record. It's a dense file, but man,
Speaker 1: is it worth on backing? Absolutely, We'll catch you on
Speaker 1: the next deep dive. Stay curious, stay informed, and maybe
Speaker 1: check your.
Speaker 2: Clocks and read the terms of service.
Speaker 1: See you next time.