The Cost of Whistleblowing, and Balancing Privacy with National Security
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You're listening to a new episode of The Brave Technologist, and this one features John Kiriakou, who's a former CIA officer, former senior investigator for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and former counterterrorism consultant for ABC News. He was responsible for the capture in Pakistan in 2002 of Abu Zubaydah, believed to be the third-ranking official in al-Qaeda. In 2007, Kiriakou blew the whistle on the CIA's torture program.

saying the CIA tortured prisoners, that torture was official government policy, and that that policy had been approved by the then-President George W. Bush. He became the sixth whistleblower indicted by the Obama administration under the Espionage Act, a law designed to punish spies. He served 23 months in prison as a result of the revelation and has since authored eight books on his experience. In this episode, we discuss why privacy doesn't need to be sacrificed for national security with specific examples how targeted intelligence has succeeded without mass surveillance.

the use of drones in the military, and how the advancement of this technology has gone too far in crossing moral lines, and his experience of blowing a whistle on the CIA's torture program, how he was punished for it, and what he would do differently next time. Now for this week's episode of The Brave Technologist. John, welcome to The Brave Technologist. How are you doing today? Doing well, thanks. Thanks for having me.

Yeah, yeah. Thanks for joining us. Not every day we have a guest on that's got your background. I'm really looking forward to kind of digging into the details a bit. Can you give a little bit on your background, your experience in the CIA, and then we can kind of use that as a jumping off point? Sure. I spent 15 years at the CIA. The first half of my career was in analysis, and the second half was in counterterrorism operations. I became the chief of operations in Pakistan after the 9-11 attacks and then finished off my

career at headquarters as the executive assistant to the CIA's deputy director. Then I went to Deloitte, which was then Deloitte & Touche, as the deputy director of the competitive intelligence practice, spying on Deloitte's competitors. And then from there to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, I was the chief investigator under the chairmanship of John Kerry.

Interesting. That's the other thing I was really excited about having you on about because you kind of were there pre-internet era in the intelligence community. And then you were also there at this like transformation was going on after 9-11 and as big tech started to scale and the web as we know it kind of like started to come into being.

Having that kind of breadth of experience in that viewpoint, what do you kind of see around as the biggest myth around the idea that privacy has to be sacrificed in order for you to have safer national security? That's really one of the most important questions that we have to face. And I can tell you definitively,

that privacy does not have to be sacrificed in the name of national security. There's a famous whistleblower from NSA by the name of Tom Drake. There are several famous whistleblowers from NSA, Bill Binney, Kirk Wiebe, Tom Drake, a couple of others. But Tom Drake tells this chilling story. His very first day at NSA was 9-11. He entered as a senior intelligence service officer. He had been a colonel in the U.S. Air Force and is one of the country's leading thinkers on

on internet privacy. So NSA was getting ready to implement something called Thin Thread, which was a program that would have allowed NSA to intercept the communications of foreign nationals. When 9/11 hit, still on 9/11, the head of NSA, Michael Hayden, who later became the head of CIA, decided to ditch Thin Thread and to implement instead another program, competing program called Stellar Wind.

Stellar Wind just vacuumed up everybody's communications. Now, that's illegal. At least it was in September of 2001. It's also a violation of NSA's charter, which specifically says that NSA may not intercept the communications of American citizens or U.S. persons. That is any foreign national in the United States on a green card. It's illegal. And they did it anyway.

Hayden later said that 9-11 was the greatest gift that the intelligence community had ever received because there was no pushback. You know, it was only, what, four weeks later that we passed the Patriot Act. And here we are now 24 years later, and the Patriot Act is still the law of the land. So Tom Drake objected to this. He said it was illegal. It shouldn't be implemented. So he went to his boss. His boss said, buddy, you're new. You need to keep your mouth shut.

And then he went to the inspector general, the NSA inspector general. The inspector general was not read into the compartment. And so the inspector general didn't know what he was talking about, didn't know what Tom was talking about. Tom then went to the general counsel's office and the general counsel said that this was way over his pay grade and he needed to back off.

Then he went to the inspector general at the Pentagon because NSA, of course, is a DOD agency. They reported him back to NSA and said, you have a rogue officer on your hands. When Tom didn't get any results from the Pentagon, he went, as we're all trained to do, he went to the Congressional Oversight Committee, to the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. Everybody that he reported to, everybody was cleared.

And for his trouble, he got nine felony charges, including seven counts of espionage. Now, he was facing 100 years in prison. His wife left him. She was also an NSA employee. She decided to side with NSA on the issue. Lost his pension, lost his job, lost his clearance, lost his wife, lost his kids, almost lost his freedom.

And then literally the night before the trial began, the case fell apart and the charges were dismissed. But the only job he could get was at the Genius Bar at the Apple Store in Bethesda, Maryland. This is one of the country's leading experts on internet privacy. He ended his career at the Genius Bar and never recovered from it. Of course, we can protect our privacy. Of course...

National security agencies don't need to intercept the communications of Americans, but they do it because they know that they can do it and they can get away with it. And our elected officials aren't willing to stand up for us.

That's such a good example that you brought up too with Tom Drake, because I feel like in the wake of Snowden, when people are looking back on that, one of the examples, you've got all these people out here, former agency people, other folks that are very insistent that we do all of this data collection. And they'll say, you know, they'll categorize Snowden as kind of like breaking the rules. But even when people follow the protocol, right, around reporting up the chains, they get penalized. So you're not giving people a lot of options, right? No. Yeah.

You know, and it was the same situation for me. I had watched the Tom Drake case. I knew what they were doing to Tom Drake. They were going to crucify Tom Drake. And so in my own whistleblowing, I didn't go through the chain of command because my chain of command created the CIA's torture program. I didn't go to the congressional oversight committees because the oversight committees secretly approved of and then appropriated money for the torture program and the secret prison program. The only place I could go was the media.

Yeah, it's wild. And I think, too, and we'll get to the torture whistleblowing, too. I think this kind of frames it really interestingly, too, because because so you kind of have the Tom Drake stuff come out and then Snowden exposes how the government's plugging into all these big tech companies and looking into people's stuff and, you know, all those programs that kind of got disclosed. And this is where it's kind of interesting. And my journey kind of hits in this, too, because, you know, around 2011 through like 2014, 15. Right.

Right after the Snowden revelations, there was kind of this big pivot to business intelligence. Right. I was working in the ad tech space at the time, and all of a sudden, everybody wanted to start having these business intelligence integrations, which is basically just hoovering up everything you were doing. Kind of

de facto standardized what the government was doing, except through corporate commercial channels with users in the public. And now you're in this space now where you've got 10, 20 years of all of this data, both commercial and government collected data. Do you really need all this stuff in order to have good intelligence that protects the country? Absolutely not. You don't need it.

You know, I have to say at Deloitte, they really did it right. My boss was a former CIA analyst who had retired and came out of retirement to put this team together. There were six of us. Four were former CIA. One was former FBI. One was former Secret Service.

There was a separate team of analysts. Now, the analysts had all of the subscriptions, the Wall Street Journal and Hoover's and The Economist and all these data platforms they had access to. And then the rest of us were out there collecting human source intelligence. For example,

We had heard a rumor that Bering Point was calling this global partners meeting in Orlando. So I flew down to Orlando and just hung out in the bar, hung out in the men's room. You know, you just you sit down on the on the toilet and lock the door and you start writing notes. You'd be surprised what people talk about in the men's room or in the bar.

I took a young colleague with me, very attractive young woman. And my God, the stuff that she got out of people, it was stunning to me that people would speak so freely about clearly private, protected, sensitive business information. And then to put a cherry on top of it all, the CEO, the CFO and the COO were meeting in a breakout room. They got up and left at eight o'clock and they just walked away.

And they left papers all over the table. And it was like a complete list of bearing points, clients, all of their revenue down to the last dollar costs, service lines, how discounts were determined. It was the crown jewels of the company.

I called the general counsel's office at Deloitte and I said, listen, they were in there for two hours. They just walked away and they left all this material. What should I do? And he said, don't touch it for two hours. If they're gone for more than two hours, it's considered to be abandoned. So I waited. I chased away a cleaning lady at one point. And then I waited until 10 o'clock at night and I scooped up

All the paperwork. I spent $700 faxing it back from a Kinko's in Orlando. Wow. And we used the information so that Deloitte could make an unsolicited offer to buy BearingPoint, which it did. And now Deloitte is the biggest consulting firm in the world.

Yeah. And so just using, you know, what's around and kind of being in the room. Yeah. Human source intelligence. There is like another example, too. I think you were talking about the Abu Zubaydah tracking him down. Right. And how you were kind of in Pakistan. It has millions and millions of people and zeroing in. And I think you said something like you guys had a targeter that came in with like a piece of butcher paper or something like that.

That was before all this mass internet surveillance and all this stuff that we're being told is necessary, right? How did that process work? Yes. It was before. So Abu Zubaydah, we believed at the time that Abu Zubaydah was the number three in Al-Qaeda.

And we knew that he was somewhere in Pakistan and I had to catch him. And I said, guys, come on. I said, this country is the size of Texas. It has 120 million people in it. What do you mean he's somewhere in Pakistan? You have to go catch him. So for a couple of weeks, I tried a couple of different things. I just could not narrow his location down. I just couldn't do it. So I had a friend who was a targeting analyst. They deal with

thousands, millions of pieces of data. I flew him out and he came out with this butcher block paper and wrote Abu Zubaydah in the center, put a circle around it. And then around Abu Zubaydah, he wrote all of the phone numbers, the email addresses and the physical addresses of everybody that had been in touch with Abu Zubaydah. And then he did it again at a secondary level and then again at a tertiary level.

Took about two weeks, but he drew lines between each one of them, who was talking to whom. He finally came to me. He said, I can't narrow it down to any fewer than 14 possible locations. I said, 14? We've never hit more than two sites before in a night. We can't hit 14. So I asked headquarters for a giant team with weapons and ammunition and battering rams and secure communications and

All kinds of stuff. They flew it all out. One of the sites was a payphone at a shish kebab stand. So we dropped that off the list and then we hit all 13 simultaneously and we got him. Wow. Wow. And without having to collect every single individual, every movement and every browsing activity. Exactly right. And you know, may I add something else? Of course. Another thing that strikes me as particularly dangerous vis-a-vis privacy is

is that we're starting to see this trend now where the FBI, rather than to go to a court and ask for a warrant, instead just goes to an internet provider and just buys the data. Right. They just buy it. So where are our legal protections? There are no legal protections. It's a great point. And it's perfectly legal. Anybody could buy the data because they sell it. Yeah. But the FBI doesn't.

doesn't need a warrant anymore. I remember working in the space. I could go implement something that would track a certain ad or users on ads, right? You would never know where the data stopped and who got their hands on it and how often it was synced and copied and stored. And even if there was a policy where it said, we're going to retain something for a certain amount of time, you can't really hold a lot of weight to it because the other partners are still going to copy that data and do their own thing with it.

And so you end up with this really massive amount of data. I think that's the biggest thing is that it is one of the reasons why I wanted to have you on, too, because I think, one, there's like an entire generation of people now that don't realize that we have a Fourth Amendment. And they just think that privacy is something you kind of have to give up in order to have an Internet or a free web or whatever. But it does matter.

Now these things are definitely getting used against people. And, you know, when you combine the amount of data getting collected, the access, and then the example you just mentioned, too, of them buying the data with this AI space. Like, what are your thoughts on how AI will be used in the intelligence space or how privacy is important around this and things maybe you're concerned about or where your head's at with a lot?

I'm very concerned about AI. And, you know, I actually just a week ago in the UK debated an MI6 officer, British intelligence service officer, and we agreed on this point.

that AI in this early stage is very dangerous in the intelligence space because it can't tell the difference between an American and a non-American or a Brit and a non-Brit. It can't tell who it's targeting or the nationality of the person it's targeting or whether the person ought to be targeted.

Like I said earlier, NSA can't do all your work for you. You need human beings to be able to tell if this is appropriate or if it's not appropriate. So I worry about that. I also worry about the leaps and bounds in technology that we seem to be making all the time. If I were in the CIA today, I would be petrified about crossing a border in alias. Now, this is something that CIA officers used to do literally every single day.

Right. You have passports at six different names from six different countries. And, you know, sometimes you need to go to China or Russia or North Korea or Cuba or something to do an operation. But now everybody's scanning your face at the airport. And then they're like, wait a minute, this isn't John Smith. This is Joe Blow. Why does this guy have two different names and two different nationalities? Next thing you know, you're blown and you're under arrest in a foreign country.

So I don't know how they're dealing with it today in the CIA. I remember hearing about Afghanistan, too, where it almost seemed like kind of a staging ground for like, what can we do with biometrics or even Ukraine, where so much of your everything app and it's all kind of in this thing, which sounds convenient to people. But, you know, in those kinds of environments, it also seems like very dangerous.

Yeah, I agree completely. Very dangerous. It's cool to have new technology. It's cool to be cutting edge. But we don't really know the full effect that these technologies have.

It is kind of an interesting dilemma, like because it does seem, though, that there are parts of these leaps in tech that have been great for the intelligence space and maybe not as harmful. Like, are there areas that are being like super helpful or things like, gosh, I wish I would have had this then when we were doing these operations that are there now? Like, are there any positives that you see out of what's developed over the past 10, 15 years? Oh.

Oh, yeah. You know, what I really wish we had had back then was DNA, DNA sequencing. I'll give you an example. When I was serving in Greece, my job was to target one specific terrorist group called Revolutionary Organization 17 November. They had killed 27 people, including the CIA station chief, two U.S. defense attachés. We couldn't even identify a single one of them.

We knew that it was a small group. It was compartmentalized. But we just couldn't crack through that outer ring. And so they launched a rocket at the German ambassador's residence one night. And when the terrorist fired the rocket, it was a shoulder-fired rocket, he cut his neck. And he bled profusely. And there was a puddle of blood on the sidewalk. Wow.

I went out with the Greek intelligence service to investigate. And I was like, the blood has to come from the guy who fired the rocket, right? It has to. He's the only person that's on the sidewalk. And the Greeks were like, we don't do DNA testing here. We don't have a database. And I was like, well, we have a database, but it's all Americans. So he said, how are you going to collect the blood? Because if you scrape up the blood, which was dry by then,

You're going to get all that concrete that's going to contaminate it. So I went to a home, the Greek version of Home Depot, and I bought a sledgehammer and I smashed the sidewalk up and I took a big chunk.

I put it in a bag, a plastic bag, and then I put it in a diplomatic pouch and I sent it back to the CIA and they ran the DNA test. But they were like, we don't know who this is. It's a Greek. It has to be Greek. Ours are all Americans and they're all like convicted felons. I just wish that we had usable DNA back in 1999 would have made life so much easier. We may have stopped that before they killed another half a dozen people.

Oh, man, that's wild. You made a pretty life changing decision to blow the whistle on the CIA torture program. I don't know, maybe you want to give folks a little bit of context around what was going on there, because there might be people that might have been, I don't know, in diapers back then or something that might not be terribly aware of that. And then also, what motivated you to kind of speak out on that and blow the whistle?

Well, about a month after the 9-11 attacks, the CIA made a strategic policy decision to pursue a torture program, which they euphemistically called enhanced interrogation techniques. They hired two contract psychologists named James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen.

They reverse engineered the Air Force's SEER program and created their own in-house torture program. We were just waiting to catch somebody senior enough to warrant torture. And unfortunately, that was Abu Zubaydah. And so I was asked two months after we caught him if I wanted to be trained in these torture techniques. I said, no, I think they're illegal. And I have an ethical and a moral problem with them. I don't think we should be in the business of torture. And besides...

We executed Japanese soldiers who had waterboarded American POWs, and now we're going to waterboard people, and it's perfectly fine? I said, I have a serious problem with this. I think it's wrong, wrong, wrong, besides being ineffective. And so we began torturing Abu Zubaydah on August the 2nd, 2002. Torture did not result in death.

a single bit of information that forestalled or disrupted an attack or saved an American life. It certainly sated our desire for revenge, but it didn't help to keep Americans safe.

And it was so patently illegal in my mind that I kept waiting for somebody to go public and nobody went public. And I knew that there were other people inside the CIA who were as opposed to it as I was, but nobody said anything. And then finally, in December of 2007, I gave an interview to ABC News and I said that the CIA was torturing its prisoners.

that torture was official U.S. government policy, and that the policy had been personally approved by the president. And so the CIA filed a crimes report against me with the FBI. Under the Bush administration, the Justice Department declined to prosecute me. They said that I had not committed a crime. Interesting. But the Obama administration prosecuted me. They charged me with five felonies, including three counts of espionage, which can be a death penalty charge.

They offered me 45 years in prison. I fought and fought and fought and fought. I finally took a plea to a lesser charge just to make the thing go away. They bankrupted me and I had five kids at home. So I took a plea to a lesser charge. I did 23 months and got out. But I'll tell you, that case gave me a soapbox. They made me famous. I'm a noted human rights activist now. It was worth it.

The cost was high. Yeah. I would do it again. It was worth it. Yeah. It's so interesting, too, that the Bush administration didn't go after you, but the Obama administration did. It's like once you start opening these doors, you never know how they're going to get walked through by who and what they're going to do, right? The Democratic Party is not the Democratic Party of George McGovern or of Franklin Roosevelt. The Democratic Party is a neoconservative party that Ronald Reagan would have loved.

Yeah, it is interesting to you've come out of the other side of that and, you know, are kind of as

example of just like actually, you know, doing what you felt you had to do, right? What was the outcome of all of that? I mean, from what you know, are they still doing this stuff or? No, they stopped. They stopped. And in December of 2014, Congress passed the McCain-Feinstein Amendment, which formally and permanently banned torture. John McCain was very kind to me. John McCain was my strongest supporter on Capitol Hill. It was the December 14th of 2014. I was able to call my wife from prison.

every other day for 15 minutes. And I called her that day and I said, how was your day? She said, oh, it was great. And I said, really great. Why was it so great? And she said, because Congress passed McCain Feinstein today and it proved that everything you said was true. And she said, John McCain had gotten up on the floor of the Senate and said that the American people are

owed me a debt of gratitude because had I not told them what the CIA was doing in their name, they would never have known. So it was worth it. Yeah, yeah, that's great. So often these stories don't end with a positive outcome when people do these things. Yeah, you can say that again. There were so many things happening too that seemed to be

Both like advances in tech allowed for certain things, but also really constitutional issues, too. And I think, you know, there's this the stuff we've been talking about about privacy. And then also at the same time, we start seeing like drones first in the surveillance capacity, but then in a kinetic one. Right. Yeah, that's the future. Take on how these things kind of interoperated and the drone campaigns that happened.

Is that something as somebody who was in the intelligence space you thought? Because it does seem like the kinetic warfare paramilitary type of capabilities were less of a thing. It's almost like the CIA had their own military at a certain point, right? Like they did.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. What's your take on that evolution? Yeah, I don't think anybody really saw it going to where it's gotten. Surveillance drones are of incredible import in operations, both military and intelligence operations. It was always great to have drone coverage so you could get the lay of the land, see if there's ingress and egress, see if you're in danger of being ambushed. Awesome stuff. As soon as things turned kinetic...

It was just, it made it too easy to kill people. There's another whistleblower named Daniel Hale, who I have very deep respect for. And Daniel tells a terrible story. He was a drone operator with the Air Force. He was operating his drone from, I forget where, Florida or Nevada, something like that. His boss is a thousand miles away someplace. And Daniel's operating the drone. He's watching the screen.

And he says, I see the target. And his boss tells him, fire. And he said, wait a minute. There are two little kids standing next to him. And his boss said, I'm looking at the screen too. Those aren't kids. They're goats. And he said, they're not goats, Daniel says. They're kids. I'm sure of it. And his boss says, fire. And he said, I can't fire. They're two little kids. His boss said, if you don't fire, you'll be court-martialed. So he fired.

And he killed a 12-year-old girl and a 9-year-old girl. And he said he went home that night and he said to his roommates, I became a child killer today. Jeez. There's a cost that comes with something like that to the mental health of our drone operators. He's going to have unbearable PTSD for the rest of his life. He's a child killer. And he did it because we're supposed to be the good guys. Well...

That kind of thing happens every day in conflicts around the world. And we're in conflicts all around the world. We're fighting in Somalia and in the Sahel right now, and nobody knows it. It's not reported in the papers. It's wild.

Yeah. Yeah. But where does it end? Well, and there's like these bits of data people get, right? Like I remember hearing about signature strikes. I think it was like some perception that this meant that the president was signing off on it or something. And then someone, I don't know if it was a whistleblower or just more info came to light, where it was really this that if you fit a certain signature of parameters, then you were considered a fair game target. And in fact, in Afghanistan and Iraq...

The signature was any male over the age of 14, period. Yeah. If you were a male over the age of 14, they were going to fire a rocket at you, period. Yeah. It's wild. Without the transparency and people kind of crossing over these lines, it's just the worst case scenarios can happen. Yes.

You've done this. You've done the whistleblowing process before. I'm kind of looking at this. We see people like all of the AI landscape. We talk to folks that share a lot of their concerns and things like that. This next generation of potential whistleblowers, like as someone who's gone through this ordeal that you've gone through with your experience, if somebody in this new generation of tech people that sees something that they don't

feel compelled to blow the whistle on? Like, is there any advice or pointers or, you know, I know everything's a little bit different from case to case. What would you recommend? Oh, yeah. Yeah. That's a great question. And a very important one. There is one bit of advice that is consistent across all national security whistleblowing or not even national security, but all whistleblowing. I want to be crystal clear, hire an attorney before you open your mouth.

And when you do open your mouth, make sure that attorney is sitting next to you. That was a mistake I made where I blew the whistle and then I thought, oh, crap, the government's falling on my head. I better hire an attorney. And then I had to be reactive to everything. This way, you can be proactive and you can craft your whistleblowing in the best possible way and keep yourself safe legally.

Are there like organizations people can reach out to if they want to blow the whistle on things? Absolutely, yes. Absolutely, yes.

The two big ones are the Government Accountability Project, which is at whistleblowers.org, I think it is. And the other one is the National Whistleblower Center, NWC. They're both based in Washington. There are dozens of other smaller ones, and most all of them do great work. There's also one called the Project on Government Oversight, POGO. Those are kind of the three big ones here in Washington.

The National Whistleblower Center is associated with a law firm, quite a famous law firm here in Washington that does only whistleblower cases. And then the Government Accountability Project is a nonprofit, but also has quite a large staff of attorneys that can guide you through the whole process and won't charge you a dime.

Awesome. Yeah, that's super helpful. You can't get your local Saul Goodman, I would imagine, to be your attorney, right? And it seems like kind of preparation's everything with this type of stuff. It's everything. And the last thing you want to see, people getting burned. And I can see it with the way that AI is going to roll out across and just the mandate that's out there. Like a Fortune 1000 ceased to sweep down mandates on getting AI into everything that...

It's almost like there's going to be people that are going to have a conscience about this stuff and making sure that they, one, know that they can do this type of thing. And then two, that they don't set themselves up for pain is like pretty important. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Life will never be the same once you blow the whistle. You can't go back. Once you cross that line, there's no return.

So you have to do it right. Can you expand on that? I will never work in government again. I will never work for a company again. I'm too controversial and poison to the neocons and the neoliberals of the two political parties. So I had to build a life for myself. Tom Drake, like I said, spent the next decade at the at the Apple store. I didn't want to end up at the Apple store.

Daniel Hale works washing dishes in the kitchen of a restaurant. Oh, my gosh. Yeah. I mean, there's no coming back. What are you doing in this life post-whistleblowing? I've got a column at Consortium News and a column at Covert Action Magazine. I host a television series on Unified Television called CIA Declassified. We use declassified documents to tell historical stories about

Substack is a substantial part of my income. I'm right now in the middle between the third and fourth legs of a worldwide speaking tour. I was signed by a speakers bureau in London. So I've done 10 events. I have 90 to go. I just published my eighth book. You know, a little bit of this. I teach a graduate school course in the history of terrorism at the University of Salamanca in Spain. So a little bit here and a little bit there.

And I put together a living. There is a life to be had after. There is. It's just you got to be creative. This is the other interesting thing, too. You've been able to, and there's kind of a tech element to this, too, right? Like when people think about kind of this creator economy and...

Or whether it's Elon saying we're all the media now or whatever. But I mean, like, it does seem like you've had with the tools you've got in hand, you're able to make a life and put yourself out there and help to inform people on whistleblowing. But also just get history out there, too. I would imagine like how much of this has helped you with what you're doing?

Oh my God. I'm 60 years old. I'm not a Luddite, but the technology is changing so quickly. It's kind of hard to keep up. I just had a Zoom call today with six people who I respect and trust in their understanding of technology because I was late to the game with YouTube. I give a lot of interviews. Some of those interviews have millions of views. And one of the shorts is

from one of those interviews has 35 million views. I haven't made $1 from any of those. And I thought, you know what? Why not? Why am I not making any money? So I started a YouTube channel and got my first check last week for $315. So you got to start somewhere.

And yeah, yeah. The future is tech. And, you know, we are all the media. Everybody's got to grab his piece. That's great. Do you ever think the Patriot Act goes away? Do you ever think we go back to where things were on that front before? No. Yeah. Three or four years ago, I would have said yes. When Ed Snowden went public with his revelations in 2013, I remember thinking, thank God somebody finally said something.

In fact, his dad came to prison to visit me. I had made a public statement. I made an open letter to Ed Snowden that I wrote. And it got huge press coverage. But then I wrote a private letter that a CIA friend of mine delivered to him in Moscow. And we became friends. His dad came to the prison to thank me. And I said to his dad, Ed is going to change history. The Patriot Act is going to become obsolete because of him and his truth-telling.

And then here we are 12 years later and the Patriot Act is still the law of the land. Yeah. Yeah. I think we've hit a plateau in Congress with a number of people willing to challenge it. It's just not enough.

Yeah, I know. I sometimes wish it was different, but it does seem like it's going to take something. It's hard to not get too pessimistic about it. It would require people to like really stand up and stand up. Yeah, get out there. And they're not. People are complacent.

You said you got a YouTube channel. We covered a lot here today. I'd love to have you back on sometime too to kind of dig into some more things. Where can people find you? Yep, I've got a YouTube channel. The shows on YouTube are Deep Focus with John Kiriakou and Deep Program. Substack is johnkiriakou.substack.com. I'm on X and Instagram and Facebook and LinkedIn. So anywhere you want to look, you'll probably be able to find me.

Awesome. Well, John, I appreciate you making the time to come on today. It's been a great conversation. Also, I really appreciate that you had the courage to kind of come forward. Thank you very much. And change your life course, but put it out there. It's not something a lot of people would have the courage to do. And I appreciate that you're just so open with doing these interviews. And yeah, like I said, I'd love to have you back to kind of dig into some more topics and stuff like that. I look forward to it. All right. Thanks, John. Thank you. Take care. All right. See you. Bye-bye.

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