0 he washed out after getting injured in a training accident. he tells "the guardian" that he then got a job working as a security guard at a covert nsa facility at the university of maryland. he says he then got a job with the cia working computer security which seems like quite a leap from security guard to cia computer guy. but reportedly his computer skills, his internet skills, in particular, put him on the fast track in the intelligence world. then he says the cia posted him to switzerland under diplomatic cover maintaining computer network security. then he left government work for life in the private sector with high-paying jobs for at least two different intelligence contractors doing the same kind of work he had been doing for the government but now he was working for outside firms and getting paid bank. if you think about it, this guy has had one hell of a career trajectory, right? from high school dropout to army washout to making $200,000 a year doing highly classified intelligence work for elite agencies. all over the course of less than a decade. and all while still just holding the title of technical assistant or something like that. the "washington post" quotes one former cia official saying that the terms the self-described leaker used to describe his positions at the cia, at least, did not necessarily match the internal descriptions of how jobs are described at the agency. when "the guardian" made this video introducing the world to the man who leaked the nsa's documents, he was hiding in a hong kong hotel room. hiding from the largest superpower on earth because he, 29-year-old former technical assistant, had just leaked that superpower's tipious, top secret internet surveillance program. if what happened here is what he says happened here, this rather ordinary fellow apparently had access to devastatingly important, very, very secret information from the government's perspective absolutely could not be leaked without causing great damage to the country. if it was so secret, and so important that it be kept secret, is it weird that he knew about it? and how many other people know about it, too? as far back as 2010 the "washington post" reported a third of all people with top-secret clearances in the country don't work for the government. they work for contractors. in january, the director of national intelligence reported that more than 480,000 contractors have top secret clearance. another 580,000 have confidential or secret clearance. that means more than 1 million contractors now, people working for private companies, have clearance to see highly classified information. after 9/11, the intelligence world changed. not just by getting massively bigger. it also changed in response to the diagnosis that part of the reason 9/11 happened is because dots were not being connected. intelligence was too compartmentalized. not enough people had access to enough information to be able to see the whole picture, see how things related to each other. so the intelligence community was changed so that more people can see more stuff all at once. have those changes made it so your average 20-something guy with a clearance, and there are hundreds of thousands of them, has the post-9/11 changes made it so the average grunt with a clearance has access to way more stuff than your average grunt used to have access to? before 9/11, would you have to be a high-ranking person in order to have access to this kind of stuff that just leaked? does it make a difference so many of the people with clearances now don't work for the government itself, they work for companies? they work for contractors? i mean, you can make your case either way, but the two most consequential leakers of this generation are this guy, who was working for a contractor, booz allen, and this guy, bradley manning who was working for the military. they both leaked. they were both pretty low-level guys. but they both had access to pretty high-level information. what is most notable and similar about these two stories is not who they were working for directly, but the fact that these guys were among hundreds of thousands of americans who have high-level clearances. high-level clearances that provided them as fairly low-level employees to access of highly classified documents. how can somebody who's a 22-year-old private first class or 29-year-old technical assistant access documents about programs that are so secretive their disclosure rocks the government to its core? and if you have that many low-level employees all looking at information about your vast invasive surveillance machine that the government will not talk about in public, how safe do you think that information is? it is almost the natural conclusion that one of them, among the hundreds of thousands, is going to decide to leak in the belief that what they're doing is ultimately for the public good. or at least to satisfy public curiosity. then if you are that low-level employee with that access to very highly classified supposedly super-consequential information, and you decide to let this stuff be publicly known, how do you decide what to do with it? if you're so technically skilled, why not do it yourself? you're a computer guy. you're maybe even a computer geek, and i mean that as a term of endearment. why not post it online yourself? why go through an intermediary? why go to the press? why go to two different media sources? as happened in this case? why pick these reporters in particular? the writer for "the guardian" on these stories is glenn greenwald, a guest on this show multiple times. i've known glenn a long time. longtime national security blogger who's critical of surveillance and of secrecy. he's a civil libertarian absolutist and one of the most eloquent ones we have. mr. greenwald has been outspoken in support of whistle blowing in general. he's been particularly outspoken about bradley manning. the writer from the "washington post" in these articles is barton gellman. he has a reputation for major scoops about national intelligence. that history, and i think this may be important, has led him to be attacked as a reporter. him to be attacked not as a leaker, but as somebody who will publish information that the government maybe does not want published. >> we have a special word for people who provide information to the enemy of their country. >> what word is that? >> what word do we use? traitor. traitor. >> i really resent accusations that we're not patriots or that we are indifferent to the security of the united states if we publish things that the government says are secret. i think what i do is every bit as patriotic as what a soldier does or what an intelligence officer does. >> if you were looking for safe journalistic hands for your story to publish information that the government did not want published, you can see the appeal of talking to that reporter, right? i should mention that from that clip, from "secrecy" from that movie, the man who's calling barton gellman a traitor in that film is the former chief of information security at the nsa. barton gellman, "washington post" reporter who's has to defend himself against nsa chargers that he's a traitor, he won the pulitzer prize in 2008 for reporting on dick cheney's influence over national security policy. he won a pulitzer in 2002 for reporting on 9/11 and the start of the war on terror. that whole nonsense before the iraq war about the aluminum tubes that saddam could only be using for a nuclear program, barton gellman broke the news the white house knew those aluminum tubes were not necessarily nuclear at all, even when they were saying publicly the opposite. the connecticut librarians given national security letters ordering them to turn over information on people using the library, that was a bart gellman scoop. the strategic support branch, secret cia like agency inside the pentagon answering directly to donald rumsfeld was a barton gellman scoop. he broke the news that bin laden had been present at tora bora and the bush administration concluded he escaped from the battle there. in march 2002, six months after 9/11, it was gellman who broke the news that the bush administration was making senior federal officials do bunker duty, making them live and work secretly outside of washington to ensure continuity of government in case of an attack on washington. on 9/11 the news it was vice president cheney, not president bush, who ordered the shoot-down of hijacked civilian planes, that news was broken by barton gellman. and now he's got this new one. joining us now is barton gellman, currently on assignment for the "washington post" and contributing editor at large for "time" magazine and senior fellow at the century foundation. bart, thanks very much for being here. >> thank you. >> let me ask you first in all of the voluminous reporting on your reporting, are there things about your story that are widely being reported wrong or poorly? >> well, the reaction is problematic because you have a lot of people going around saying that this is nothing different than any other kind of warrant, this is a normal subpoena, it goes to a court, they find probable cause. then and only then does the government go into the servers of facebook or google or microsoft and extract information. and that misses something very, very big which is that there are secret opinions in the surveillance court which meets only in secret and issues opinions that are only classified that say that rather than having to specify a phone number or an e-mail, those are defied as a facility under the fisa law. you can now define the facility for which you're permitting a search to be the entire server, an entire network switch over which all library of congress passes every 14 seconds on the fiberoptic cables. that's the facility that you can serve. and it's certified once a year based on evidence and findings that no one else gets to see. so the problem here is there is a mass systemic quality to this surveillance, and we have to trust the u.s. government when it says we're very careful to ensure that we're not targeting americans and we're not using their information appropriately. there's no check. >> in terms of the way the companies that are named in that one particular slide, the way the companies have responded, they have responded with seemingly pretty carefully worded, pretty vehement denials that they knowingly have nothing to do with this. what do you make of the way they have responded and does their description of their own behavior comport with what you understand about the program? >> they have excellent lawyers, and they're very well drafted, these statements, or they are addressed to something not terribly relevant. apple said, for example, at one point, we've never heard of prism. okay. so you don't know the code name. you know that the nice gentleman from the nsa and the fbi came up to your door and asked you to make some arrangements. somebody else on facebook had a very interesting statement. joe sullivan, chief security officer there, i know him. he's a good guy. and he wrote, when the government comes to us to ask for information about an individual, we review it carefully and make sure of probable cause and blah, blah. he didn't say they don't come to us and ask for the whole thing sometimes. he just talked about when they come for an individual. so they were all essentially designed to be evasive. one reason we know that is that the u.s. government has confirmed the outlines of the program in the course of commenting on it or in the course of asking us to withhold certain things from publication. >> could the companies, could any of the companies say no? and is it substantively important that twitter is not on the list of companies that are described as taking part in this program? >> i find it very interesting that twitter is not on the list. now, it's a younger company and so it wasn't as big and important in the early days of this program as it is now. but twitter also has a reputation deservedly for fighting hard for user privacy and in particular in one case when it was a recipient of a national security letter which you're not supposed to -- >> admit to having received. >> and this were certain sealed orders against twitter. twitter fought in court for permission to notify the users so that they could object to the subpoena before the judge ruled. that's highly unusual for a company to do. i don't know that that's why twitter is not in this program, but you can look at it this way. according to the law, the attorney general has the power to compel a company to participate in this program and if the company drags its feet, it can go to the fisa judge, the secret surveillance court and get an order to compel. however, nobody wants to do that. i mean, when you have these sort of giants around, you have a giant clandestine program, you have a very large, powerful but also a highly regulated company, neither one of them really wants don't have a fight. so there's a prolonged negotiation. the companies have a lot of room for maneuver. so there's a five-year gap between the time that microsoft joins and the time that apple, which is the last of them join. apparently dropbox is said to be coming soon on these slides. clearly there are technical issues they've got to solve. but there are ways that the companies can negotiate the access and the conditions. >> do you think that disclosing the contours of this program in the way that you have interferes with the ability of this program to continue or helps anybody who wants to evade this form of surveillance evade it? >> it's a matter of public record already that u.s. government asks u.s. companies to cooperate when it's collecting intelligence about foreign threats and foreign communications. the u.s. government has said that all along. the most highly classified thing in this briefing, as far as the drafter of the briefing was concerned, and he said it three different times, these companies are very important to us, we can't do anything that would harm them. what he meant was, reputational harm, market harm. harm to their public images. and to me, when something is classified for the reason that, companies are doing something which the public would strongly disapprove of, is exactly the wrong reason to classify something. it is a strong reason to think it's something that we ought to bring to light. >> barton gellman for "time" magazine. currently on assignment for the "washington post." and a fellow at the century foundation and a very, very busy man. thank you for helping us understand that. stay in touch with us as this unfolds. >> i will, indeed. you know that guy who called me a traitor, i had him come to my princeton class i taught on secrecy and we had a great time. >> and did he recant? >> he said, maybe traitors aren't all bad. >> very good. and then he killed you. all right. we'll be right back. asional have constipation, diarrhea, gas, bloating? yes! one phillips' colon health probiotic cap each day helps defend against these digestive issues... with three strains of good bacteria. 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