YouSaid · the spoken record

Edward Snowden

lines on the record: 146
first: 2019-11-01
most recent: 2019-11-01
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“And government is always engaged in turf wars, right? They're always engaged in budget battles. And so what actually happened, and we have former FBI employees and things like that on the record who have said this, is that because they didn't imagine it was so serious, they thought it was fine to compete against each other internally in government rather than cooperate. And that's why people died now. Once the buildings came down, once the harm is suffered, the government pulled the Patriot Act off the shelf, which a lot of people don't understand was already written in advance. And it was a law they just never could have passed because there was no public support for this extreme level of intrusion. But now in the wake of crisis with the terrified nation, they got it.”
2019-11-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Edward Snowden · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But it's more than that, I would say. The government does argue, yes, it was intelligence failure. They say we had the pieces we needed to stop the plot. The problem was the FBI, the CIA, the NSA, they weren't playing nice together. They didn't share the pieces. And because of these walls, these limitations that they had on doing their work, people died as a result. And having worked in the government now since then, I was not in the government at the time, but anyone who worked in government can tell you how this works. I actually see it as a very different failure. They exploited a bureaucratic failure, which is actually the FBI, the CIA, the NSA didn't share information with each other because they couldn't. It is false that they could not have. There were procedures in place to do so. They didn't because they all wanted to be the ones responsible for busting the plot. They thought it was a small ball, small time plot.”
2019-11-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Edward Snowden · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In the next year, they actually normalized this kind of surveillance under the FIS Amendments Act of 2008. But just to go back for a minute to that 9-11 moment you said, you said that we didn't know it was coming. We couldn't have stopped it, which is not actually the finding. No, no, of course. No, it was”
2019-11-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Edward Snowden · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And it was only after Bush's very close reelection that we finally got to know about this. Now, in response, the government went, oh, fine, sure, you know, we did this for good reason. You guys are complaining needlessly it was proper and appropriate, but fine. If Congress says we shouldn't be doing this because this White House's popularity is declining, we'll stop it. We'll push Congress to pass a new law, an emergency law called the Protect America Act of 2007, which should have given us a warning it was a bad idea, which retroactively immunized all of the companies that had made the Bush-era warrantless wiretapping program possible from any civil liability, right? Because they had violated the rights of everyone in the United States millions of times a day, and it could have resulted in the largest civil judgments in history. But Congress wrote a special law just to let them skate by.”
2019-11-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Edward Snowden · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, you have to understand that I wasn't at that level at that time for a very long time. When I was at the CIA, I didn't understand mass surveillance was a thing because of a concept called compartmentalism.”
2019-11-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Edward Snowden · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“At a policy level, you're making proposals. You are in a real way starting to become responsible for the system, which is to say you are becoming complicit in the system. And so to question the system is to question yourself. And this makes it very difficult to pull back. It makes it very difficult to develop a form of skepticism.”
2019-11-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Edward Snowden · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That the government would sacrifice a long-term public faith in the institutions of government, right? The White House, the military, the Congress, everything that we need to keep the system running, for a short-term political benefit to justify an unnecessary war going into Iraq for this whole conspiracy of Cheney Heights, to me, it just didn't seem persuasive. The funny thing is that was actually the truth. And now we know that. Many people didn't need the years of evidence that I needed to eventually discover that. But what this is to say is that when you join an institution, when you volunteer to sign up for the government and you go from the army, you go to the CIA, you go from the CIA to the NSA, and you go to deeper and deeper levels, you get higher and higher levels of clearance, you are more and more involved in the system. You start moving from being strictly on the working level to be more...”
2019-11-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Edward Snowden · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And then, again, if you understand, my father was in the military, my grandfather was in the military, basically everyone that I was connected to had some government history. It seemed natural to me that I should do my part. And this is how I found myself in 2004, a few short years later, when everyone else was protesting the Iraq War, volunteering to fight it and signing up for the army. And it's because I was completely unskeptical of the government's claims. Everybody who was criticizing them to me seemed quite a bit unpatriotic because to me it seemed unreasonable that the government would lie about something so consequential, right? The idea”
2019-11-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Edward Snowden · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So I was at a particularly vulnerable political age when 9-11 happened. I was 18 years old and I was on Fort Meade, which I tell in the book, was evacuating on the day the country that needed the most, I was driving past them and seeing people pour out of the building. The CIA evacuated on 9-11. With everything that happened, it was a moment of national trauma. If you recall, if you're old enough to have been there, not everyone in the audience these days is, but many of us were, every underpass that you drove through, every sort of chain link fence you saw had red, white, and blue Dixie cups strung across them that said things like, you know, united we stand, never forget.”
2019-11-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Edward Snowden · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Or company or whatever. Signals intelligence is where because of the advance of technology, sections of the government went, well, why are we dealing with people? People lie, people cheat. There's all this fraud. We can't be sure if they're telling the truth. What if we just spied on them through their devices? What if we spied on them through their communications that are traveling over the air, that are traveling on cables under the ground or under the sea, whether it's the internet, whether it's your email, whether it's a phone call, all of these different signals and all of these different forms could be captured and then you could analyze these for intelligence. That's the distinction between signals intelligence.”
2019-11-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Edward Snowden · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Precisely, and then they rely on this person, often in exchange for money, to tell them facts that they otherwise wouldn't have access to, right? You were just asking people to tell you about interesting things. That's the entirety of the James Bond spy game in real life, right? Nobody's parachuting into denied areas and, you know, planting taps and this kind of thing in that way. That's not how it works in real life. There are covert action programs, but they're very small, very limited. Largely, it's people talking to people and eventually paying them to get them to sell out their country.”
2019-11-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Edward Snowden · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right now But briefly for the audience, and this is covered exhaustively in the book for anyone who has any interest in this, there is the Central Intelligence Agency, the Defense Intelligence Agency, the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency, there's a billion different components to the US intelligence community. And then there's the National Security Agency. But the basic idea is the CIA, traditionally, when you think about this, right, you were thinking human spies. largely a bunch of Americans working undercover as diplomats out of embassies, right? They're make-believe diplomats. And a few people who are working under non-official cover, which means they're not in embassies. They're working as businessmen that are associated with major corporations or small fake companies in certain other countries. And the only thing they do is they go out to dinner with people. This is what happened with Tag Dead.”
2019-11-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Edward Snowden · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Can you distinguish from people the difference between human intelligence so people that don't understand intelligence? It's called Cygnet and Human. And then there's Loveint, but we won't get into that.”
2019-11-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Edward Snowden · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Things is that you So, well, it took a long time for me to actually reach that role in the government. I start on the ground floor and step by step moved up. And I was originally in a systems administration role, whereas maintaining systems that I inherited for the CIA, which was largely human intelligence for many years before I actually moved over to the NSA and started working with signals intelligence, then this kind of data.”
2019-11-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Edward Snowden · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think that was sort of an interesting idea because it really did get me some insight to you that one, something that you had cherished had turned rather dark pretty quickly. And it was a short amount of time that had happened. And then the second part of it and a line that you have in there was that it was permanent. That line you use is deletion has never existed, that it is impossible to be. Both things is that this is a cooked environment. And I want to distinguish in a second between the government and the Facebooks of the world and things like that, but talk a little bit about this disappointment because what you did was you continued to move into a job where that's exactly what you were doing over the government. You were doing exactly the things that you decried.”
2019-11-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Edward Snowden · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, this disappointment, you were trying that surveillance capitalism award used by Shashana Zuboff and many others, but one of the things that you wrote here was now it was the creative web that collapsed as countless beautiful, difficult individualistic websites were shuttered. The promise of convenience led people to exchange their personal sites, which demanded constant and laborious upkeep for a Facebook page or a Gmail account, the appearance of ownership. I think this is a key sentence. The appearance of ownership was easy to mistake for the reality of it. Few of us understood at the time, but none of the things we'd gone to share would belong to us anymore.”
2019-11-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Edward Snowden · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What if they could simply transform the internet from that cooperative and creative space to a competitive and commercial space? If they could simply intermediate as many human activities as they could, if they could make us not build our own sites, but put all of our personal memories, create all of our personal histories, all of our individual connections on their platforms and tell us it's okay. Tell us to trust them. Tell us they're not sharing it and abusing it, which actually when these platforms first were created was true, but they left their terms of service open so they could either be changed at any time. They invited us into a city that was actually a kind of trap. And what happened was we got an internet that was easier to use, easier to access, but ultimately more exploitative.”
2019-11-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Edward Snowden · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But what I saw in that period where I was becoming a young man was all of these companies that had failed started looking for new business models and what they did, which they were creating the groundwork for the surveillance capitalism model we see today, if they didn't have a compelling product, if they didn't want to set up a factory, if they didn't want to ship things across the ocean, what if they could make the product us”
2019-11-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Edward Snowden · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Some of them undoubtedly knew I was a child, despite the fact that I very much didn't want to be seen as one. Other times when I did review my age, I immediately regretted it, but then people took better care of me. The idea here is that the internet, because it was a non-commercial space, it was a cooperative and creative space. Everybody was there to create a new community. Everybody was there to connect. Everybody was there to understand and to learn and to share. Now, as you know, far better than I do because you had an adult's perspective at the time, the internet was rapidly being attempted to be commercialized. This led to the dot-com boom and then the inevitable bust.”
2019-11-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Edward Snowden · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But children are treated unequally necessarily, right? Whether it's by parents, whether it's by government, whether it's by their school system, any system recognizes they are children and so treats them in different manners. And this is meant to protect them. It's meant to provide a better upbringing, you know, more direction, whatever. But children, more than anything else, they want to be treated equally. And computers at the time were truly blind to age. They were blind to origin. So long as you could connect, so long as you were able to access the technology, you had some gateway into this community. You were naturally a part of it. And so I would end up speaking, you know, with like college professors on old BBSs and things like that. And they would spend all of this time educating me on a one-to-one level.”
2019-11-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Edward Snowden · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, this has been one of the things that struck me seeing the public response to the book, not in major platforms and book reviews, but just people writing on forums, people on Twitter. And they constantly connect with this early passage in the book where I'm talking about how I encountered technology in the internet as a child and what it meant to me. And they said, I was almost a sense of nostalgia for them. They remembered it. The internet was a very different place when I was a young man. Now, of course, this is all colored by youthful naivete, right? I was a child experiencing these systems for the first time.”
2019-11-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Edward Snowden · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Six years. I do want to get to regrets and different things like that, but let's talk a little bit about the beginnings of the book. Because one of the things that I was struck by because I was also around during the early days of the internet, you write a lot and very eloquently about the early days. And I was there when it was made into a commercial thing, when it was released to the public. I was using it at the same time. You were. And you talked about it in almost a romantic style. The internet was my sanctuary. The web became my jungle gym, my treehouse, my fortress, my classroom without walls. Talked about the legend of Zelda, Super Mario, the lessons you got from there. Can you talk a little bit about this sort of relationship you had with the internet? Not just because you're a typical nerdy guy, like that kind of thing, but I think a lot of people had these feelings about the early internet, this hopefulness about it.”
2019-11-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Edward Snowden · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“For these different failures in the process. Unfortunately, in this case, they did. And I think actually that is why we see the press being weaponized in so many different directions. Today, we see people attacking the press. We see the press attacking other people because we realize the system itself is failing increasingly over recent decades in comprehensive ways. And so the press is increasingly burdened with, I think, an enormous public responsibility. The question that we have is will they be able to fulfill the role that we need them to or will they end up being captured or failing or being destroyed?”
2019-11-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Edward Snowden · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, this is the beauty of the press in an open society, right? It is this idea that rules get broken, right? Systems fail. What happens when the courts fall down? What happens when the White House falls down? What happens when Congress falls down? When processes fail, not particularly, not specifically, but they fail comprehensively. What then do we rely on when the government is supposed to, at least theoretically, be directed and controlled? Right.”
2019-11-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Edward Snowden · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Published these stories, everyone in the country knew. Pressure immediately fell on Congress to get to the bottom of this. The people on the intelligence committees who allegedly knew this complaint was coming and perhaps could have been the ones who told the press in the first place now had a mandate to lean on the ICIG. They now had a mandate to lean on the White House and get them to cough up more information. But had the system worked As it was designed, or rather as it was working before the press knew about it, there's a very real possibility we never, or we may never have heard about what was actually going on. And now as a result, when we see everything that's happening, I think it's very clearly in the public interest to know the nature of these allegations.”
2019-11-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Edward Snowden · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And then somebody somewhere went to the press and told them about this. They told them the details of the complaint. They told them why it mattered. And this, under the laws that we've just described, was actually a felony. I'm not saying the whistleblower did this. I would say if they did, it doesn't matter. It's not material. And in fact, it's a good thing if they did. Because the only reason we know this today is then once the press”
2019-11-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Edward Snowden · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And they started stonewalling the complaint. The White House got involved and they said, this can't be shared with Congress. And the only reason any of us today know about this whistleblower. The only reason any of us have the transcript of this phone call, or rather the memorandum regarding this phone call, is because someone somewhere, whether it's the intelligence communities Inspector General's Office, whether it's Congress, whatever, they got wind of the fact that this complaint was being suppressed.”
2019-11-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Edward Snowden · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's a fascinating case precisely for all of this preamble that we've gone through. Traditionally, proper channels don't work. And in this case, proper channels were not working. A lot of people go, oh, this person went through proper channels, so they're a whistleblower. Whether they are or not, I say doesn't matter. What is interesting is they were going through official channels. They went to the inspector general of the intelligence community.”
2019-11-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Edward Snowden · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Whether it's Ellsberg, whether it's Drake, whether it's the Ukraine guy today, it does not matter what the provenance of the allegation is. What matters is the truth of it, right? The whole key behind blowing the whistle is to raise the alarm about what is happening. And then it's out of your hands. It's for the system, then it's for journalists then to look at this, to investigate this, to find the truth of it, and then hopefully if it is a matter of public concern to hold those who are responsible for it to the account of the public and perhaps to the law.”
2019-11-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Edward Snowden · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I don't call myself traitor or hero or villain or any of the stuff. I'm just a citizen. I'm just an ordinary person. You want to call me a whistleblower? Great. I'm not going to apply these terms to myself because I don't think it matters. The interesting thing about whistleblowing”
2019-11-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Edward Snowden · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It has to be in a time of war, actively adhering to the enemies of the United States. And there has to be a specific witness and so on and so forth. Traitor treason, all that language needs to go. We use it simply because it's strong language. It's an emotional language. And we think we can use it to win these rhetorical partisan arguments. But in the pursuit of doing so, what we are losing is we're losing the ability to talk to each other because we're instantly leaping to you're adhering to our enemies, right? You're instantly splitting the country and the conversation into an us versus them. And this is why I don't see myself”
2019-11-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Edward Snowden · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And treason is actually the only crime that has actually written into the Constitution of the United States rather than our statutory code. And I'm not accused of treason by the government. Almost no one is formally accused of treason.”
2019-11-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Edward Snowden · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Patriot Right, right, right. This is precisely what you are. What I want to say, when we get to the word traitor, Trader implies a specific crime which is completely different. That is treason.”
2019-11-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Edward Snowden · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They use true patriots if that was interesting. I thought Trader Patriot, trader activist, you know, it's a mixed whistleblower in a way. There's all kinds of ways you could go with this. And I'll tell you, everyone uses a different one for you. So I'd like to know what you do.”
2019-11-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Edward Snowden · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I agree with that, but it's the word trader there. Even as you say, like professors, people who are writing about this use the word trader. Well, they use trader patriotism.”
2019-11-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Edward Snowden · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Just to clarify, because I think that's an important point, right? We've seen a radicalizing of political language as the country has gotten part of this.”
2019-11-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Edward Snowden · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But so far as the law is written, so far as the trials have been held by the government, and again, we've got decades and decades of history here. The only question the jury gets to consider is, was this law broken? Not was it justified. And this is crucial because even in the case of murder, homicide, manslaughter, the jury considers two questions. One, was the law broken? Two, was it justified? The government argues today under the laws of the United States talking to journalists is roughly a crime worse than murder.”
2019-11-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Edward Snowden · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And if you provide this to anyone who is not authorized to receive it, you are guilty of a felony. Now, what this means is there's no distinction between whether you take government secrets and you sell them to a foreign government for personal gain, or you provide them to journalists and enormous personal risk for the public interest. So the government, these are equivalent crimes. One is no better, no worse than the other. And the jury, interestingly, under this law, it's what's called a strict liability crime. This means it does not matter why you did it. You are explicitly forbidden from telling the jury why you did it. The jury is explicitly forbidden from considering the outcomes of your crime, such as it were. Did it actually benefit the nation? Did it benefit the public? Or did it harm this? One would think this is actually relevant for question for the jury.”
2019-11-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Edward Snowden · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right, laws are written such that the espionage act, and this is an old sort of one World War I era law, 1917, 1918, that does not distinguish between taking classified information, secret information rather. They call it national defense information in many cases because the modern classification system didn't really even exist at that point.”
2019-11-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Edward Snowden · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“For the National Security Agency, right? That's their lawyer's office. And he also went to the Congressional Intelligence Committees. And after he had made all of his concerns clear, after he had coordinated with Senate AIDS and everything like that, he eventually was charged under precisely the same crimes I have been charged under. It goes on and on. We saw Chelsea Manning, we saw Daniel Hale, we saw Reality Winner. So there's no way, let me interrupt you. So there's no way that you can't not be a traitor. That's essentially what you can't under the way the laws are written. Right.”
2019-11-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Edward Snowden · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And yes, as you said, this began the chain of scandal that ultimately dethroned a president. Now, he was charged on a precisely the same law as I was. He faced the same sort of dual loyalty accusations that we always see. This repeated itself around the turning of the millennium right in the post-9-11 moment with senior NSA executive named Thomas Drake, who actually went to the inspector general of the Department of Defense. He went to the Office of General Counsel.”
2019-11-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Edward Snowden · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In some cases, the woman who blew the whistle on Enron, for example, has actually had a very rough result for the rest of her life as a consequence of that. But in the national security space, I just want to be clear, it's different. Going all the way back to Daniel Ellsberg in the 1970s, a huge charge on a precise people who don't know this is the person who had the Pentagon papers, which led to Watergate investigations. Right. This was basically the Pentagon was at the direction of the White House secretly prolonging the war and costing many, many American lives and foreign lives in the process entirely for political purposes.”
2019-11-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Edward Snowden · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Criminal. Now, what makes this Ukraine case so unique is there is no history in the United States of proper channels working, right? Of the whistleblowing process actually leading to reform in the national security context. Now, we have seen this work in corporate contexts where whistleblowers go to like the SEC, the Securities and Exchange Commission, about people who are doing insider trading and things like that. And if the company gets convicted, rewards are paid out in the process works quite well.”
2019-11-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Edward Snowden · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“If it's the Congress has concealed some crime, the executive has concealed some crime. The court has abdicated the role. There's no proper channels to handle that. Now, traditionally, the way this has worked is you've got these sort of bureaucratic battles of official leaks or unauthorized official leaks where this or that head of agency talks to a journalist they're friends with and they put this out. And the government kind of indulges in so long as it advances the government's interests. But if it's really something that calls into question the systemic prerogatives of power, the White House's latitude, the Congress's sort of political priorities, then the government would argue there's nothing to protect you, there's no law. You're sort of an activist more so than a citizen. You're a radical, you are quite literally in their view.”
2019-11-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Edward Snowden · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Be unlawful or unconstitutional. This is because the whistleblowing laws are designed around this concept of waste, fraud, and abuse. It's really for someone who is basically abusing their office at a very direct and demonstrable way. Any kind of discrimination. So a single individual acting, right? A single... Right, right, right. Whereas if it's a systemic problem.”
2019-11-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Edward Snowden · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, I covered this in great detail in the book because I think there's a lot of misapplication of terms, particularly the distinction between what is a leaker and what is a whistleblower. The government argues, of course, they are the ones who decide who is and is not a whistleblower. The process of sort of the government accepting your allegations and the government reforming a system as a result of the allegation you bear out. That's what they say is a whistleblower. And they have laws that sort of establish this process. Now, the problem with that is the laws very strictly limit what you can report in the context of what you can report. You can't really take a policy issue to the proper channels, right? And especially if we're talking about any kind of meaningful wrong doing, right? A serious misconduct that arises from a policy decision that could”
2019-11-01 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Edward Snowden · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT