45. The Leak That Changed The World: America Exposed (Ep 3)

The Rest Is Classified

Goalhanger

History

4.6 • 732 Ratings

🗓️ 11 May 2025

⏱️ 44 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

With Snowden now in possession of 1,500,000 secret American files, how can he get them in the public eye? Which journalists will he choose to help him? And why does he choose to hole himself up in a hotel room in Hong Kong? Listen as David McCloskey and Gordon Corera discuss just how Snowden and the journalists he was working with plan to publish one of the most consequential stories of the 21st century. ------------------- Order a signed edition of David's latest book, The Seventh Floor, ⁠⁠⁠⁠via this link.⁠⁠⁠⁠ Pre-order a signed edition of Gordon's latest book, The Spy in the Archive, ⁠⁠⁠⁠via this link.⁠⁠⁠⁠ ------------------- Email: [email protected] Twitter: ⁠⁠⁠⁠@triclassified⁠⁠⁠⁠ Assistant Producer: Becki Hills Producer: Callum Hill Senior Producer: Dom Johnson Exec Producer: Tony Pastor Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	I took an emergency medical leave of absence from work, citing epilepsy, and packed
0:12.1	scant luggage and four laptops, secure communications, normal communications at decoy, and an air
0:18.0	gap, a computer that had never gone and would never go online.
0:21.9	I left my smartphone on the kitchen counter alongside a notepad on which I scribbled in pen,
0:26.4	got called away for work, I love you. I signed it with my call letter nickname, Echo.
0:31.4	Then I went to the airport and bought a ticket in cash for the next flight to Tokyo.
0:35.4	In Tokyo, I bought another ticket in cash, and on May 20th,
0:39.3	arrived in Hong Kong, the city where the world first met me.
0:45.2	Okay. Welcome to the rest is classified. I'm David McCloskey. And I'm Gordon Carrera.
0:50.2	And that, unfortunately, dear listeners, was yet another reading from Edward Snowden's memoir,
0:57.0	Permanent Record. And we are now, for those who have been listening to this wonderful series about
1:02.6	Edward Snowden, we are now at a really a critical kind of turning point in this story because
1:10.3	Edward Snowden is taking the plunge and he is going to
1:15.7	finally reach out to journalists to get his information out to the world. And I think it's probably
1:22.9	worth a little bit of how did we get here. Yep. You know, Snowden up to this point, he's been a CIA
1:30.3	officer, technical officer. He's been a contractor for the NSA. He has taken really via bulk
1:37.5	downloads and some kind of fairly ingenious methods of sneaking information out of his NSA office
1:44.1	in Hawaii, this bunker beneath the
1:46.2	pineapple field, he's taken out a trove of about 1.5 million documents, a variety of internal
1:54.5	databases. And he's now at a point where he is figuring out how does he get this information
2:00.2	out to the world.
2:01.1	That's right. He's decided he doesn't want to publish it himself. He wants to go through
	...

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