Getty Joe Rogan and Edward Snowden had a lengthy conversation.
Joe Rogan and Edward Snowden spoke for more than two hours in a lengthy podcast, in which they discussed everything from aliens to government mass surveillance. “We the American people had sort of lost our seat at the table of government. We were no longer partner to government. We had simply become subject to government,” Snowden told Rogan.
They also had an unusual discussion about aliens in Rogan’s October 23, 2019 podcast. Specifically, Snowden revealed that he hunted for evidence that the U.S. government was hiding evidence that aliens exist. That was just one moment in a very extensive conversation between Rogan and Snowden, which you can watch later in this article in full.
Snowden told Rogan he looked through CIA and NSA databases for some sign of aliens. “I know, Joe, I know you want there to be aliens,” he said. “I know Neil deGrasse Tyson badly wants there to be aliens, and there probably are, right?”
“But the idea that we are hiding them – if we are hiding them — I had ridiculous access to the networks of the NSA, CIA, military, all these groups — I couldn’t find anything, right,” he said, adding that there was no evidence of chemtrails or aliens. At least not that he found. “I went looking on the network,” he added.
“If it’s hidden, and it could be hidden, it’s hidden really damn well even from people on the inside,” Snowden added.
In the podcast, Snowden discussed his actions leaking secret government documents: “…I’m the guy who was behind the revelations of global mass surveillance in 2013. I worked for the CIA. I worked for the NSA as a contractor.” For the CIA, he was undercover working at embassies. “I saw something wrong. I saw basically the government was violating the law and what I believed to be the Constitution of the United States and more broadly human rights…Basically anything that they could monitor, they were monitoring.”
He said the government is only supposed to monitor people if it has a particularized suspicion but was doing far more. “We fought a revolution over this,” Snowden told Rogan. “It was completely unconstitutional. It was completely illegal,” Snowden said of the government’s mass surveillance techniques.
Presidents George W. Bush, Barack Obama and Donald Trump were all “okay with a constantly growing surveillance state,” Snowden claimed.
Here’s what you need to know:
Snowden Spoke About His Book, Barack Obama, the Russians, the Media & Bernie Sanders in the Podcast
The Snowden conversation with Rogan was pretty extensive. It starts with Snowden telling Rogan that he doesn’t take money from the Russians.
“I do this for a living,” Snowden, wearing a red flannel shirt and a beard, says. He said he does a lot of interviews. Asked whether he could have a YouTube channel, he said maybe if Rogan introduced him so he could get followers. He said he came on the podcast because he has written his first book, which he says is about the change in technology and government in a post September 11, 2001 era. But he said the government sued him and the publisher because “they don’t want to see books like this get written…”
“The government ran a smear campaign against me endlessly,” Snowden said to Rogan. He said he gave documents to journalists under the condition they could only publish stories if they felt it was in the public interest to know about mass surveillance.
Snowden discussed President Barack Obama, saying, “Maybe Barack Obama honestly did want to get to this later, but what we can say today is for all the good that may have been done in that White House, this is an issue where the president went through two full terms and did not fix the problem, but in fact made it worse.”
Snowden laughed a lot during the video, in what was a jovial interview. The video has been viewed more than 2.9 million times.
Edward Snowden.
But he was also serious. “It was completely unconstitutional. It was completely illegal…but they did it for so long that they got comfortable with it….step by step by step our constitutional rights were changed.” Not only was the public not granted a vote on this, they also were not allowed to know about it, which was also true of most in Congress, said Snowden.
“Edward Snowden is an American whistleblower who copied and leaked highly classified information from the National Security Agency in 2013 when he was a Central Intelligence Agency employee and subcontractor. His new book “Permanent Record” is now available,” the blurb on the Joe Rogan YouTube page says.
“The more corporatized media…they want you to be able to answer in 15 seconds or less and when we’re talking about big massive shifts in society, when we’re talking about power, when we’re talking about how technology controls and influences us and the future, you can’t have a meaningful conversation within those restraints,” Snowden said.
Of Bernie Sanders, he said a lot of people “don’t give him time to talk.” Snowden also talked about his family, saying there was a long history of government service. His mother worked for federal courts, his father for the Coast Guard, and his grandfather was an Admiral who worked for the FBI.
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