Mormon Stories is a production of the Open Stories Foundation and relies solely upon the support of people like you, its listeners.

To help keep the podcast alive or to become a member of the community, please become a monthly subscriber by visiting MormonStories.org and clicking on the Donate button on the right side of the page under Support.

All contributions to Mormon Stories are completely tax deductible and go towards producing the podcast and building communities and programs of support for Mormons like you.

Thanks for your support.

The kindly light of myth in circling glue, lead thou me on the night is dark and I am far from home.

So with that, then we're going to go ahead and start part two of this podcast, which is where Ryan, you talk to us a bit about the founding of Wikileaks and what went on to make that start.

All right.

So a long, long time ago in a far away place now.

It all really, everybody always asked me, how did you get involved in leaking stuff and why did you, I fell in, ask backwards into this.

And it started back in November of 2015 when I was in a private Facebook group that was mostly made up of very right wing orthodox members that love to talk about how John D'Alene and Kate Kelly are the devils.

And I was this type of a group and there was a couple of us ex Mormons in the group and they knew we were ex Mormon and we were kind of their honorary whipping boys and we would kind of rile them up a little bit with some contrary and posting comments.

And so one of the ex Mormons on the group or I don't even really, I don't even know if it would be fair to call him an ex Mormon because I actually think he was attending church at the time and I'll say his name in a minute, but.

He was definitely a doubter or somebody who didn't agree, he wasn't a lockstep orthodox member.

And he made a post of something about how he's being told that there's a new policy out there.

And I really didn't believe it right I was somewhat skeptical. I'm thinking, you know, maybe that something's getting lost in translation here, something's being misunderstood.

So I copied and pasted the verbiage that he posted and I put it on Reddit and I put it on the Mormon stories Facebook group and I simply said, I'm being told that this policy is out there, can anybody confirm a little did I know I had stumbled across this big brand new policy.

You know, you, you, it blew up in both places and you and I had a little back and forth and private message about who the source was and I told you who it was and I think I sent you a screenshot with his name and I believe you contacted him after that and basically my involvement at that point was over.

You were able to get whatever it is you got you took it to KUTV KUTV published it.

Then it went to the you know, so I'll be up to the New York Times now.

This guy his name is Aaron Brown at the time wanted to stay somewhat anonymous like you didn't want his name all over the place.

So I think he declined an interview when you told him that the local news would interview him or whatever.

And because I didn't really care about maintaining anonymity, you went you went and posted on Reddit and said that I was your source because I was the farthest back that was willing to sort of you know put my name to it.

...