This is Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedanta.

Have you ever had one of those conversations

where half the people in the room have a very strongly held opinion

and the other half feel just as strongly in the opposite direction?

This happened to me a few years ago.

I was having dinner with friends in Washington, DC.

Everyone was talking about some shocking news that had just come out.

Tens of thousands of top secret documents

from the National Security Agency or NSA had been leaked to journalists.

Since at least 2008, the National Security Agency has been using

secret technology to hack into and far reaching

and it's been going on for years.

The government can compel a phone company to provide this metadata

as it's called for millions of customers.

The man who released all these documents was Edward Snowden,

a computer security consultant at the NSA.

The documents detailed extensive secret US surveillance of people

and governments across the globe.

Edward Snowden believed that what the NSA was doing was wrong

and that the public had a right to know.

I don't want to live in a world where everything that I say,

everything I do, everyone I talk to,

...