#288 - Top NSA Official Reveals Darkest Secrets of the Deep State | Tom Drake

Watch the exclusive fan Q&A with Tom on Patreon: https://patreon.com/dannyjones Thomas Drake is a former NSA senior executive who famously exposed the governments illegal domestic surveillance program. While at NSA, he blew the whistle on a multi-billion fraud and secret dragnet electronic surveillance and data mining program conducted by the NSA after 9/11. In April 2010 Tom was charged by the US Department of Justice with a 10 felony count Espionage Act indictment facing 35 years in prison, until the government's case against him collapsed in June 2011. SPONSORS https://shopmando.com - Use code DANNY for $5 off your starter pack. https://stopboxusa.com/danny - Use code DANNY to get BOGO StopBox Pro + 10% off. https://nordvpn.com/dannyjones - EXCLUSIVE NordVPN Deal: Risk-free w/ a money back guarantee. https://whiterabbitenergy.com/?ref=DJP - Use code DJP for 20% off GUEST LINKS https://x.com/Thomas_Drake1 FOLLOW DANNY JONES https://www.instagram.com/dannyjones https://twitter.com/jonesdanny OUTLINE 00:00 - Torture survival training 10:41 - Tom's first intelligence mission 18:36 - Nuclear War 38:31 - Being recruited by CIA 48:46 - Top secret Nuclear War protocols 55:56 - The keyhole program & SR-71 01:02:56 - Strategic deception 01:10:28 - The REAL deep state 01:19:15 - USAID 01:27:26 - Working the Pentagon's terrorism desk 01:35:14 - 1993 WTC bombing 01:44:58 - TWA Flight 800 01:53:06 - Military plane training exercises 01:56:18 - NSA's "jackpot" program 02:02:07 - NSA / Google Partnership 02:09:03 - Secret data hidden at NSA 02:21:26 - Government AI program in 1989 02:31:42 - What happened at NSA after 9/11 02:53:57 - How NSA & FISA betrayed the 4th amendment 02:57:28 - Legal punishments for whistleblowers 03:11:28 - Tom whistleblows to the press 03:20:08 - FBI raids Tom's home 03:37:35 - Tracking Osama Bin Laden 03:49:06 - Indicted for 35 years in prison 04:01:58 - Tom's plea agreement 04:14:03 - Meeting Elon Musk in 2007 04:23:23 - Tom's rare cancer battle 04:37:12 - Is America getting better or worse? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:07Danny Jones?

  I've been waiting to have you on for a long time, man. John Karyaku's been on the show a few times and he's the one who connected us. So shout out to John. Love John. You guys are both in good company being fellow whistleblowers. You worked for the NSA, John worked for the CIA.

• 0:25Danny Jones?

  And for people out there who are listening to you, why don't you just were listening to the show for the first time and maybe may not be aware of who you are. Why don't you just give us like a brief introduction to your background?

• 0:36Speaker 01

  Well, no one knew who I was until I became what I call an asterisk American at the point that the government made me a very public figure, especially the United States, when I blew the whistle on a number of different things going on NSA. So if you want to start there in terms of just I'm in NSA as a senior executive, day one, when I reported to my duty station, reporting to number three person was 9/11. That day was my first day on the job.

• 1:07Danny Jones?

  We'll talk about the whole, the whole, the whole story on how you blew the whistle on the NSA and how all that, all that came to be. But going back before that, like what made you decide you wanted to be in the NSA in the first place?

• 1:21Speaker 01

  Long story. So in my early twenties, I made a choice. It's a volunteer military. So I volunteered. It's no draft. They still have, you know, there's technically, there's still the, you have to register. So I joined the Air Force in 19, late, late 1979. It was right before Christmas.

• 1:42Danny Jones?

  Okay.

• 1:43Speaker 01

  After going through a bunch of screenings and tests and one of the tests you take is a very special test to see if you qualify for a very Special program, which is in the crypto linguistics arena and they actually make up a language.

• 1:59Danny Jones?

  Crypto linguistics.

• 2:00Speaker 01

  Crypto linguistics, that's, yup, and they actually test your propensity or proficiency and being able to pick up a language and the structure of it. It's made up. It's a made up language.

• 2:10Danny Jones?

  Okay.

• 2:10Speaker 01

  Bears no resemblance other than just basic linguistic structure.

• 2:14Danny Jones?

  Okay.

• 2:15Speaker 01

  And then they ask you a whole bunch of questions and I scored high enough to qualify. So that was the first thing. Now you can still choose to not enter into that program. I also chose to go airborne. I wanted to go airborne and I wanted to be, uh, want to be assigned overseas. So I went through basic training at Lackland Air Force Base and then I went on to Monterey. It's the Foreign Language Center, uh, Bresidio Monterey Defense Language Institute. And that's where I learned basic German to a level where you could have at least basic understanding. Focus was oral comprehension. You're spending your time listening. You're not spending your time talking.

• 2:52Danny Jones?

  Mm hmm.

• 2:53Speaker 01

  So it was primarily, but with a military flavor. I went to advanced classified training, highly classified training at Goodfellow Air Base in San Angelo. So now we're in the spring of nineteen eighty. Then a very interesting series of trainings. This is even before I go overseas, which involves survival school. So I was at Fairchild Air Force Base and I went through, uh, in the field, survive, surviving. I mean, this is the SEER program. So, um, it's the whole survive, escape, resist, you're right. It's, it's, it's a whole program in which you learn how to evade, how to survive, how to resist and how to escape. That's, well,

• 3:35Speaker 01

  the, the initials for SEER. So they had a prisoner war camp. It had a highly classified component, which is how do you resist when they're psychologically torturing and interrogating?

• 3:44Danny Jones?

  Really?

• 3:45Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 3:46Danny Jones?

  This is still super classified stuff, right?

• 3:48Speaker 01

  Still super classified. It's probably of all the trainings I received in the military. It's the one that has stuck with me the most after all these years.

• 3:56Danny Jones?

  Really?

• 3:57Speaker 01

  And we can get back to that later because there were certain things about that training that actually helped me resist the government, deal with the government.

• 4:04Danny Jones?

  Oh, wow.

• 4:05Speaker 01

  So I was actually using training that the government paid for during my survival school.

• 4:09Danny Jones?

  Wow.

• 4:10Speaker 01

  At SEER in Fairchild.

• 4:13Speaker 01

  Air Force Base, you know, in Eastern Washington. The actual in the field part of survival and evading. And it was pre- we're talking extremely rigorous. It's still a training environment. So, you know, they had safety monitors, uh, there was boundaries, but we were out in the woods for quite a few days.

• 4:34Danny Jones?

  During this training.

• 4:35Speaker 01

  During this training, learning how to survive. And then you come back, you go through prisoner of war camp. That was quite something. I actually went through everything you heard about later, which became the torture program, which they called enhanced interrogation techniques.

• 4:46Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 4:47Speaker 01

  It was torture because they reverse engineered it. I went through all of that. I know exactly what I mean. I was waterboarded a couple of times in a training environment. Feels like you're drowning alive. I was put into pretty interesting stress positions. Chinese, the one that was the worst was the Chinese water drip.

• 5:04Danny Jones?

  What's the Chinese water drip?

• 5:05Speaker 01

  They strap you down and they just slowly drip uh, water onto your forehead.

• 5:10Danny Jones?

  How long do they do that for?

• 5:11Speaker 01

  For a while until the point where you, you just, you're, you just want to itch itch and you can't because you're, you're strapped down and it just, it just goes, you just really get crazy.

• 5:19Danny Jones?

  This is all the type of shit they do like Guantanamo and all those.

• 5:21Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. But remember the constraints were, and they had safety monitors, right? It's in a training environment, but it's extraordinarily realistic.

• 5:29Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 5:30Speaker 01

  The other one, which a lot of people freaked out in was the box. Something they did later, but that was, is part of their torture. They stick you in a box and then they close it, meaning they actually, it's a specially designed box. And what they do is they bind it down till there's no room to move. You cannot move and you're all crouched.

• 5:47Danny Jones?

  Oh yeah, I've seen this. They did this to Abu Zabeda, I think.

• 5:51Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 5:54Danny Jones?

  I went. And you did the box?

• 5:55Speaker 01

  I did the box. I went to sleep. I went, I did the box.

• 6:00Danny Jones?

  Is it really that small?

• 6:01Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. Yeah. And the box is interesting design because it's not just a fixed of volume. They actually, they can actually.

• 6:11Danny Jones?

  Shrink it?

• 6:12Speaker 01

  Shrink it.

• 6:12Danny Jones?

  Oh, no.

• 6:13Speaker 01

  And you cannot move. They can shrink it down to a point where you cannot move.

• 6:20Danny Jones?

  That's so crazy.

• 6:22Speaker 01

  Threw me in the hole. Yeah.

• 6:25Danny Jones?

  I heard that they have in Guant- specifically at Guantanamo, some of the stuff they were doing, some of the nine eleven prisoners they had, was that they would like put them in a room and play like SpongeBob SquarePants for days on end. And like, or just play like Barney, I love you, you love me for a week straight.

• 6:41Speaker 01

  We had a version of that in this prisoner war camp.

• 6:46Speaker 01

  At very high decibel with the lights blaring. Plus you'd have a bag over your head most of the time where you couldn't even see anything.

• 6:53Danny Jones?

  And what like?

• 6:55Danny Jones?

  The purpose of putting you guys through this stuff is to kind of numb you to it? Is that what?

• 7:02Speaker 01

  Not numb you, to, to learn how to resist.

• 7:06Danny Jones?

  To learn how to resist.

• 7:07Speaker 01

  And not, and not have them break you.

• 7:12Danny Jones?

  And, and you're not allowed to talk about how to resist it?

• 7:14Speaker 01

  I can talk a bit more about the prisoner war part, but not the classified training, the classified training. So, you have like, what do you deal with when they're pounding on you physically and putting you in all kinds of weird positions? Sleep deprivation, bright lights, loud music. And a whole other things I haven't even mentioned yet, a whole range of other, because it goes on for a while.

• 7:35Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 7:36Speaker 01

  I mean, they are, they're really, and in fact, they had a special instructor. I mean, the instructors themselves had to be carefully trained. And because what happens if you start enjoying the pathological?

• 7:49Danny Jones?

  Oh, oh, adjoin the abuse of people?

• 7:52Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. I mean, I'll, I'll can say it right now. They had instructors who started enjoying it and they would have to pull them out of the program.

• 7:58Danny Jones?

  Oh, my God, dude.

• 8:00Speaker 01

  Stanford, we're talking way worse.

• 8:02Danny Jones?

  So dark.

• 8:03Speaker 01

  Extremely dark. Oh, no, even that part of the training sticks, sticks to me this, this day. And speaking of sticking, one song I remember was a Napalm song. It was basically a war protest song from, from the Vietnam era. And they would just play that at super high decibels.

• 8:20Speaker 01

  Plus they, they had all kinds of like psychological, I mean, they would try to break you in terms of you being an American. And they would bring up literal, all the literal facts. About all the, all the issues that, yeah, there's some dark history in America and it's, it's going across, you know, the continent. And pushing all the indigenous peoples out of the way and slavery. They would actually tell you the truth about your in training about your own country. And that was one way because that was indoctrination. They would basically attempt to re indoctrinate you. But they had to basically separate you from your own culture and your own history. And pointing out, of course, all the worst of its evils, I put evils in quote.

• 9:03Speaker 01

  Some of which were pretty dark. There's no question that there are aspects of American history that are dark. We're not a perfect nation.

• 9:10Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 9:11Speaker 01

  But we are America.

• 9:12Danny Jones?

  Yeah. So what was it like getting through that, getting getting on out to the other end of that?

• 9:16Speaker 01

  Pretty challenging.

• 9:19Danny Jones?

  And what after the so after the SEER training?

• 9:22Speaker 01

  I went to water survival, Homestead Air Force Base, which doesn't exist anymore because of Hurricane Andrew. But I was there before that. So this is still 1980, 81 now, we're now in 81.

• 9:32Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 9:33Speaker 01

  Yep. So I went through water survival. That was the funnest one. That that one is still strength, but it wasn't psychological. It was just learning how to survive if you found yourself having to bail out of an airplane. So parachutes, they would take us out out into Biscayne Bay.

• 9:50Danny Jones?

  Oh, yeah.

• 9:50Speaker 01

  Yeah. And it's funny because that was a fun part. It was the very last of the training. Some people go the other way. They don't end up with the with the nice training. They end up with it first and then they go to the real survival school. But this was water survival and it was several days, but we're out in the bay. You know, with all the with all the sharks floating around and they would actually lift you up into a helicopter. Now, for safety, they wouldn't bring you all the way up. But you would have to learn, depending on your ground or air, what it was like to get onto the hoist or what was at the bottom. So there's different, there are different ways they could extract you.

• 10:24Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 10:24Speaker 01

  But you also you also were exposed to the the the prop wash, the rotor wash, which is pretty, pretty huge. Out in the and we're talking a couple of miles plus out in the bay, right? So, yeah, you can, on the horizon, you can see the city, but.

• 10:41Danny Jones?

  So at what point did you finally deploy somewhere to gather surveillance or intelligence? Or what specifically were you doing?

• 10:51Speaker 01

  So I show up at Mildenhall in June of 1981 and then my training begins and I wasn't fully qualified to listen in. This is Intelligence Collection, peacetime over Constance program. It's actually the name of it. There was a number of different missions I flew on, but it was on the RC-135 airframe. But it has different missions depending on how it's modified.

• 11:12Danny Jones?

  Okay.

• 11:13Speaker 01

  They call it rivet joint. That was like the primary name of the platform, but then each mission had its own name as well. Everything has a program name.

• 11:22Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 11:23Speaker 01

  So we did intelligence collection and we're, we used to say, you know, we were the vacuum cleaner of the sky and this is primarily analog. The digital world was just beginning, but it had already started with computers and then we have a computer assisted technology that rapidly came in into the fleet. But it was, you're learning some radio spectrum. We had to learn all kinds of different signals, not just voice, but all kinds of different signal types. You have to understand and recognize multiple languages. I specialized in the languages spoken in that, what was then East Germany, the DDR.

• 12:04Danny Jones?

  Mm hmm.

• 12:05Speaker 01

  So you're listening in, right? You're listening in, picking up signals, you're reporting out. Sometimes there were world events where you'd actually have to send out, you know, certain messages that reached a certain threshold.

• 12:17Danny Jones?

  So.

• 12:17Speaker 01

  Very long missions, by the way. I mean, these, you know, these were.

• 12:20Danny Jones?

  Long flights.

• 12:21Speaker 01

  Minimum was in the nine to 11, some went sometimes 20 plus hours.

• 12:25Danny Jones?

  And I imagine you're flying over countries that don't know that you're flying over them, right? Or that we, that you were flying into airspace that you didn't have permission to fly into? Is that how it works?

• 12:35Speaker 01

  That never, that was never the case. It was always either over allied or friendly countries.

• 12:40Danny Jones?

  Oh, okay.

• 12:40Speaker 01

  Yep. Known air routes, right? It's not like you're invisible. We weren't stealth in that regard.

• 12:45Danny Jones?

  No, okay.

• 12:47Speaker 01

  As we say, we were alone, unarmed, but unafraid.

• 12:50Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 12:51Speaker 01

  Because you have to rely on our ears, literally. Although we had ground support.

• 12:56Danny Jones?

  And so how does that work?

• 12:57Speaker 01

  We primarily flew in international airspace. So international airspace, when you're out over water, it was international airspace.

• 13:03Danny Jones?

  So flying over like ships and stuff?

• 13:05Speaker 01

  Well, just over the ocean, but at very high altitude. You're talking, you know, forty thousand feet plus.

• 13:10Danny Jones?

  Oh, wow. That high?

• 13:11Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. Easily. Oh, yeah. No, I had the experience extraordinary. I mean, I kind of look back on it. We, there were some missions we went even higher than that. And when you looked out the porthole win window, you know, the portholes of the plane and looked up is starting to get a lot darker. And you started, when you looked out to the horizon, you could start to say, yeah, it looks like it's beginning to curve. You're that high. When you approach fifty thousand feet, that's when you start to see the curvature.

• 13:36Danny Jones?

  See the curve, yeah.

• 13:37Speaker 01

  Yeah. Looking down inside of a thunderhead like it was cut out. That was pretty cool. Yeah.

• 13:44Danny Jones?

  So how long did you do this kind of work?

• 13:47Speaker 01

  That was four years. And then I was sent to Davis-Monthan Air Force Base in Tucson, Arizona. And I was a mission crew supervisor flying on EC one thirty H compass call electronic warfare aircraft. So a different application of my training.

• 14:05Speaker 01

  Combat support, direct combat support.

• 14:09Danny Jones?

  Combat support. So, so like flying into combat zones and stuff?

• 14:13Speaker 01

  Could if we had to train for it. So if the balloon goes up or some operation, or you're going to support what they call C suppress enemy air defense, that's was our fundamental. You're protecting fighters, bombers, et cetera, and other and other military assets going into whatever. When the decision had been made at the highest, then what you call the national command authority level, then you were there to support it.

• 14:35Danny Jones?

  What kind of combat zones would you have been in? What year are we talking about?

• 14:38Speaker 01

  I never actually deployed to a combat, like we did training, like we would go to Europe for training. We would go up into Nevada.

• 14:45Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 14:45Speaker 01

  We would, we would support red flag, green flag exercises. We would fly out near Fort Irwin, the national training center and play games. I say play games.

• 14:55Danny Jones?

  War games?

• 14:55Speaker 01

  War games, all kinds of war games. Oh, yeah. And then we actually provided specialized support.

• 15:00Danny Jones?

  Any kind of stuff involving nukes?

• 15:02Speaker 01

  No.

• 15:03Danny Jones?

  Or like, uh?

• 15:03Speaker 01

  No, I did.

• 15:04Danny Jones?

  Nuclear war games, things like that?

• 15:06Speaker 01

  Well, there is, there was always in the background, the PSYOP, the Single Integrated Operating Plan. I mean, that was always there. There's all these scenarios. What would happen if and up to and including a nuclear exchange?

• 15:17Danny Jones?

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• 15:59Speaker 02

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• 16:04Danny Jones?

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• 16:49Danny Jones?

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• 16:58Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. And on the RC 135, we did have a post, I'll say Holocaust, nuclear Holocaust mission, which was what's left.

• 17:06Danny Jones?

  That's interesting. You're the second person I've ever heard use that term SIOP.

• 17:10Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 17:11Danny Jones?

  The S I O P version.

• 17:12Speaker 01

  Well, super, super classified because it was operational, meaning depending on the scenario, the military doesn't do anything without plans. And plans always change.

• 17:23Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 17:23Speaker 01

  But you always had plans and you were always updating. And you were always playing games. You're always doing war game, war planning scenarios.

• 17:30Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 17:31Speaker 01

  We, I would participate.

• 17:34Danny Jones?

  Yeah, the other, the other time I heard the term Psyop was when John Newman was in here explaining how the Joint Chiefs of Staff were had a plan, a, a, a plan to drop nukes on China and Russia when Kennedy was president and they wanted to do it. And there's meetings were called Psyop meetings or something like that where there and then Bobby Kennedy was in the meetings and stuff like that. And they had this full all out nuclear war plan and they wanted to do it before December of 63 before Russia was able to get ICBMs. Cause I guess they didn't have inter, they didn't have intercontinental ballistics before that. So anyways, that's.

• 18:14Speaker 01

  Plans were not just defensive, they were also offensive. I mean, that's partly what makes them so classified. It wasn't just how do you, what would happen if someone they launch, then what do you do? Because you didn't have much time. But then there was first strike, right? So if you, you had to plan for the possibility of a first strike that you would launch.

• 18:37Speaker 01

  There's times where it came really close. Able Archer is one of the exercises where they actually thought that we were engaged in a first strike. Yes, it goes back to 83.

• 18:49Danny Jones?

  What, what was that one? It was called what? Naval Archer?

• 18:52Speaker 01

  Able, able. Remember all exercises of any kind, no matter what it is.

• 18:57Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 18:57Speaker 01

  Will have either operation or it just they'll have the NATO fanatic, you know, like able and then there'll be a series depending on what it is.

• 19:06Danny Jones?

  Okay.

• 19:07Speaker 01

  I was fully immersed in that environment.

• 19:10Danny Jones?

  Oh, look, 1983, military exercise conducted by NATO that took place in November 1983 as part of an annual exercise. It simulated a period of heightened nuclear tension between NATO and the Warsaw Pact, leading to concerns that it could have been mistaken for a real attack by the Soviet Union. Wow.

• 19:29Speaker 01

  And what's interesting, it was actually on the Soviet side realized it was a notional exercise, but it was, it was, it was ultra realistic. It was so realistic that they were actually preparing to defend themselves with, we call, their, their launch of their nuclear weapons.

• 19:47Danny Jones?

  Really?

• 19:48Speaker 01

  And he was in the command and control. He was, he was an alert officer and he said, ah, this is an exercise. Stand down. And if, then it's like what if of history, the what ifs of history.

• 19:58Danny Jones?

  That's so crazy.

• 19:59Speaker 01

  And that's just one example of how close we.

• 20:01Danny Jones?

  The nuclear war thing blows my freaking mind, man. It's just like, you know, from what I understand, the last time that the president of the US was able to get the president of Russia on the phone, just with a phone call, was not quick. It took days, I think. So like, if there was a, just say like a rogue nation, like North Korea, for example, launched a nuke towards us, and we saw it coming, we have that, um, what's that, there's a, um, there's a term where we have to basically use it or lose it, where we have to empty our ICBMs, because if there's one coming at us, it's called first,

• 20:47Danny Jones?

  I forget what it's called. Anyways, where we have to empty our silos, our ICBM silos, because they're super vulnerable and we can't risk a nuke hitting that. So if there's one coming at us, we have to empty those. And assuming we know where this is coming from, for example, say we know it's coming from North Korea. We have to blast those out towards North Korea. But the problem is this all happens within like 20 minutes.

• 21:10Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 21:10Danny Jones?

  And those nukes that we launched towards North Korea will have to fly over the North Pole, over Russia, right? And what are the chances we're going to be able to get Russia on the phone in, in five, 10 minutes to tell them these nukes aren't coming for you? They're going for North Korea or whatever. And that's probably not going to happen. So Russia's, their generals are going to see all these nukes coming out. They're going to empty their silos. And it's like, before you know it, within 10 minutes, there's just, it's just Armageddon.

• 21:37Speaker 01

  That's why they called it MAD, mutually assured destruction. No one really wanted to do it, right? Especially at the great power level, particularly Soviet Union, US, because of what it would, what could happen.

• 21:47Danny Jones?

  Mm-hmm.

• 21:48Speaker 01

  It just, it wasn't just one, you know, nuclear, you know, mushroom popping up. You're talking just.

• 21:56Speaker 01

  Dozens, hundreds. But that was why we had a triad. Because, true, the fixed sites, the like Minuteman, right?

• 22:03Danny Jones?

  Right, right, right.

• 22:04Speaker 01

  Are are very vulnerable.

• 22:05Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 22:06Speaker 01

  Even even, although my father, who was a war two veteran, then was Strategic Air Command, he actually helped develop almost single handedly the the whole plan, the whole failsafe, Chrome Dome plan, where the B fifty two's in particular, because they were the intercontinental bombers that carried multiple nuclear weapons.

• 22:23Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 22:24Speaker 01

  Um, at least they were mobile, but they're basically, once you launched, and then they would they would have their particular uh locations where and it would change depending on world events and all of that.

• 22:36Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 22:36Speaker 01

  But if they got the signal, then they would go in, but they knew there was probably a one way mission.

• 22:42Speaker 01

  So so you had you had the other part of the triad, which were the submarines.

• 22:46Danny Jones?

  Submarines, yeah.

• 22:47Speaker 01

  So submarines were the ones that were super mobile, but essentially hidden.

• 22:52Danny Jones?

  Mm hmm. And they have the MIRVs?

• 22:54Speaker 01

  They they have the. Well, the MIRVs can be placed on any any nuclear, yeah, nuclear.

• 22:59Danny Jones?

  Any kind of missile.

• 23:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, sure can. That was developed later.

• 23:02Danny Jones?

  Typically three warheads.

• 23:03Speaker 01

  Multiple. You could have multiple targets. I mean, that's really multiple independent reentry.

• 23:09Danny Jones?

  Reentry, right, right. So the so the idea is the the booster, after the booster gets knocked off, the rocket goes up into orbit and then the three individual warheads.

• 23:19Speaker 01

  Or more, depending on the type of platform.

• 23:22Danny Jones?

  Reenter the atmosphere and they can literally be programmed.

• 23:25Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 23:25Danny Jones?

  To go multiple different spots.

• 23:27Speaker 01

  And then we start.

• 23:28Danny Jones?

  Which is wild.

• 23:30Speaker 01

  But then you started like the Tomahawk missile, right? Then you started getting into cruise missiles, which could be launched from B two's could be launched in a number of different ways or from ground sites.

• 23:37Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 23:38Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 23:40Danny Jones?

  And the um, the the submarines, they're nuclear powered too. So like in an all out global thermonuclear war, they would be the last ones to survive.

• 23:48Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 23:48Danny Jones?

  Because they'd be underwater, they have nuclear power. I mean, they would just basically be locked in that tube until they ran out of food and water, I I imagine.

• 23:56Speaker 01

  But that could be months, potentially months.

• 24:00Danny Jones?

  Oh, they had that much.

• 24:01Speaker 01

  In a wartime scenario, they could be, they could stay underwater for quite a while.

• 24:05Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 24:05Speaker 01

  Yeah. But all that, all the, like, the parameters of all that's classified.

• 24:09Danny Jones?

  Have you seen, I saw recently, actually, Annie Jacobson published it in her book Nuclear War, her recent book. She published, and Steve, I don't know if you still have this screenshot saved. You might be able to Google it, but she saved, she, she basically published an image of the traffic patterns of all the nuclear submarines throughout the, from Russia and China. And Russia and China both have literally submarine highways that are coming right off the coast of the east coast of Florida and right off the coast of Southern California. It's crazy.

• 24:42Speaker 01

  Some of the routes are known, some of them are loiter, some of them, you can remember, what if, I mean, think about it. You don't have to, you don't have to launch from your homeland.

• 24:52Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 24:53Speaker 01

  You can launch adjacent to the coastlines of a country. And then you're talking maybe a couple of minutes at best.

• 25:03Danny Jones?

  Mm hmm. Couple of minutes, right off the coast of Miami.

• 25:07Speaker 01

  At best. Because once it reaches the surface of the water, then yeah. It doesn't take very long after that. I mean, that's, that's part of the problem. It's, that's the thing with the submarines.

• 25:21Danny Jones?

  And there's so many, there's also, her map showed all the, their targets, like their top targets and their priority of all the targets, which was even more terrifying. Because like, like two of the top 10 targets are right here in Florida, MacDill. And then there's another, like a strategic command down in Sarasota or something.

• 25:38Speaker 01

  Short of all out war on civilians, there's gonna be, there's always, there's been the case, Cold War even now, there are designated targets that now they'll change, they'll update them. But that's why, you know, the, you know, the little, that case, that the briefcase.

• 25:53Danny Jones?

  The football, right?

• 25:54Speaker 01

  Football, that's been carried for decades now. It always follows the president and the backup vice president. Always. There's a special, there's a whole team incredibly specialized.

• 26:04Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 26:05Speaker 01

  There's specialized codes. You don't, you, you want, you don't want an accident, right? So if you decide to make that. I mean, we're talking about an incredible decision that you would be making under dire circumstances. It'd only be under the direst of circumstances you even launch. Whether it's to defend yourself or to go on the offense, but the offense typically is, is, is because, ah, we only get wiped out first, but then what do you, what are you initiating? That's why people don't want, you know, this, the horror of nuclear war, I don't talk, I haven't talked about it much, but you know, it's,

• 26:38Speaker 01

  those weapons are just, and especially now, you see, you'll see, I mean, all you have to look at is the original atomic, which became then hydrogen. And then you look at the, some of the tests when they still were blowing them, you know, either on land or sea or in the air. My father actually was one of the last, he was part of a team. It was actually, um, it was a team Christmas island west of, it was a site.

• 27:03Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 27:04Speaker 01

  Where they would do air bursts. Then of course there was a treaty that banned all that. But they actually do nuclear, they would actually blow up a nuclear, a nuclear weapon in the air.

• 27:13Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 27:14Speaker 01

  At high altitude.

• 27:15Danny Jones?

  Yeah, like EMPs.

• 27:16Speaker 01

  Yep. And he got, he got radiation poisoning and was actually in the hospital for a while, this early sixties.

• 27:22Danny Jones?

  Have you heard of, uh, I think it was Operation Starfish Prime, where they're blowing up nukes in, in outer space?

• 27:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, there's.

• 27:31Danny Jones?

  They actually had a plan to blow one up on the moon.

• 27:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 27:35Danny Jones?

  Like they wanted to hit the nu, the moon with a nuke. Like how, like we're such stupid monkeys. It's crazy.

• 27:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, stupid monkeys kind of reflects, I'll say the dark side of the human condition.

• 27:44Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 27:45Speaker 01

  This propensity, just, uh, because all the tech, one of the things, tech, technology ultimately is used at some point, and has been historically used in war, combat, conflict.

• 27:56Danny Jones?

  Mm hmm.

• 27:56Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 27:57Danny Jones?

  We've detonated them in space, up in upper atmosphere, underwater, under the ground. And a lot of our, our nuclear tests have been just like in Nevada.

• 28:06Speaker 01

  Well, Nevada, there's still places in Nevada that are off limits.

• 28:10Danny Jones?

  The biggest struggle with keeping a firearm within reach in your house is, number one, it's got to be in reach when you need it. And two, you got to keep it safe and away from your children. If you have them. And keeping it in the closet is just too far away. I remember when I was a kid, finding my parents' guns in their closet and I don't want my kids finding mine. All that changed when stop boxing. Sent me this. This thing is 100% mechanical and I love not having to fumble around with a keypad or a combination in the dead of night. And the best part is you don't have to rely on batteries. I keep one under my bed and in my truck and my favorite part is it's safe around the kids. I love how robust, solid and well-made this thing is. And the best part is when I'm traveling, I don't have to screw around with one of those big Pelican cases. This just goes right in my checked

• 28:54Danny Jones?

  bag and there's no issues. This is the best solution that I've found and I'm super happy to have StopBox as a sponsor of the show. StopBox is made in the USA, keeping jobs in America. StopBox is also TSA compliant, so you don't need a separate carry case. They also have a wall-mounted version and one for easy access in cars. And for a limited time only, our listeners get a crazy deal. Not only do you get 10% off your entire order when you use my code, Danny at StopBoxUSA.com, but they are also giving you a buy one, get one free for their StopBox Pro. That's 10% off and a free StopBox Pro when you use the code Danny, D-A-N-N-Y, at StopBoxUSA.com. Discover a better way to balance security and readiness with StopBox.

• 29:40Speaker 01

  Because of radioactivity.

• 29:41Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 29:42Speaker 01

  John Wayne, they're pretty sure, and a number of other actors, a lot of the westerns, they would go right through areas that were, you know, completely irradiated. And they didn't know it. They didn't realize the effects at the time. Even the original,

• 29:56Speaker 01

  in Alamogordo.

• 29:59Danny Jones?

  Really?

• 30:00Speaker 01

  That test, the very first test.

• 30:03Speaker 01

  People that were actually, it turns out, there was living close enough, downwind, guess what happened? And then there's, you know, all these cases later of people getting sick. And cancers.

• 30:14Danny Jones?

  Right. And, and the government.

• 30:16Speaker 01

  Trinity, Trinity, the Trinity.

• 30:17Danny Jones?

  The, uh, the atomic or the, yeah, I think it was, um, the, the atomic.

• 30:24Danny Jones?

  Nuclear Commission or something like that. Um, and the Department of Energy, I think, I don't, I mean, there was, I know there's multiple cases where like, there was contamination in the water and the food and like the cattle and stuff like that.

• 30:36Speaker 01

  It's not clean.

• 30:37Danny Jones?

  Very, and these people, these people just like, and like now that now this is the number one place in the world to go gamble and bet on shit. Go to the casino.

• 30:46Speaker 01

  They, there, it used to be, it was, it used to be, uh, visitors. It was like this, it was like a Disney thing, right? You'd go see, you'd see the cloud go up.

• 30:55Danny Jones?

  Really?

• 30:55Speaker 01

  From a distance. Oh yeah. There was places. Yeah.

• 30:58Danny Jones?

  Oh my gosh.

• 30:59Speaker 01

  I know. You can imagine that. Oh yeah. Let's go. See the little mushroom cloud.

• 31:05Speaker 01

  The little mushroom.

• 31:06Danny Jones?

  Yeah, that's the craziest thing, uh, about the, the Cold War. I mean, even before the Cold War, um, after World War Two, like starting with Operation Paperclip and, and everything that we did secretly and for the military and

• 31:24Danny Jones?

  with the innovate, with like science, with just getting these rocket scientists and these other physicists and all these, you know, brilliant mathematicians like John von Neumann and all these people that literally were using all of their brain power to figure out how to kill more people and how to develop more instruments of war. And I think it was Von Neumann who was the, I think he was the one who calculated like the, he came up with the exact calculation of how high in the atmosphere fat man and little boy needed to be to cause the most civilian deaths.

• 31:59Speaker 01

  Oh yeah. No, it was, it was total war. So we had it and we, we dropped two of them.

• 32:07Speaker 01

  They had plans for more, but it turns out it's turns to only two were necessary to demonstrate what they were going to do with the rest of the country. If they, if the military high command and, uh, Emperor Hirohito decided to keep fighting. See part of it, there's a lot of controversy over should those, I would argue they didn't need to be, but it was also to send a message post World War Two.

• 32:30Speaker 01

  To the Soviet Union.

• 32:31Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 32:32Speaker 01

  That we have this weapon.

• 32:33Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 32:34Speaker 01

  It was clear already at the end of World War Two that the Soviet Union was going to be something other than a friend, unfortunately.

• 32:39Danny Jones?

  Hmm.

• 32:40Speaker 01

  Even though they're allies, people for somebody forget this, allies during World War Two.

• 32:46Danny Jones?

  During World War Two.

• 32:47Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 32:47Danny Jones?

  And as soon as World War Two is over, we

• 32:49Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 32:49Danny Jones?

  have the competition to go get all the fricking.

• 32:51Speaker 01

  But there is my stepfather, passed away, father's passed away now, but he was actually on a troop um, transport.

• 33:01Speaker 01

  Uh, he was a combat engineer. They had plans, ten million, ten, I mean, we're talking a million men and then some invading Japan homeland. And they were anticipating, I mean, tens of actually millions, there was going to be millions. They anticipated upwards of a million casualties.

• 33:20Speaker 01

  If you go back and actually look at what they were planning for up to a million casualties.

• 33:25Danny Jones?

  Wow.

• 33:25Speaker 01

  Could you can imagine, based on the island came in, that's why they started bypassing all the islands, because they just put up, they were extraordinary fighters, right? I mean, there's unbelievable fighters. As good as we were, they just were next level.

• 33:38Danny Jones?

  Really?

• 33:39Speaker 01

  We're talking the Samurai.

• 33:40Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 33:40Speaker 01

  Spirit and

• 33:41Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 33:42Speaker 01

  and the willingness to just die for for the homeland. I mean, they just they and dug in, like really dug in. You can imagine

• 33:49Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 33:50Speaker 01

  how they would have resisted.

• 33:51Danny Jones?

  Hmm.

• 33:52Speaker 01

  If we had invaded mainland Japan.

• 33:55Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 33:55Speaker 01

  The main island.

• 33:56Danny Jones?

  Right. Yeah, man, that history is so, it's so crazy.

• 34:01Speaker 01

  But war itself is hell. My father always said, you know, war is hell, but if you find yourself, you know, there's no such thing as a fair fight. If you have to fight, then you take the gloves off if you need to.

• 34:11Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 34:12Speaker 01

  But I mean, he's, he saw a lot and it definitely affected him. He was a lone survivor. You know, it's part of my history and my legacy. He flew B twenty five missions in Europe for the OSS.

• 34:23Danny Jones?

  Oh, really?

• 34:24Speaker 01

  Forty, forty one, super secret at the time.

• 34:28Danny Jones?

  Like over

• 34:29Speaker 01

  Talk about it.

• 34:29Danny Jones?

  Like overflying.

• 34:30Speaker 01

  Europe. This is, oh, yeah, he's flying out of North Africa and then later Italy as we, as we went up the spine of Italy. Got a plane got hit. It was on a night mission, right? They had special, you know, special goggles and everything else. Uh, he, he operated the, he, at that time, he was a bombardier navigator. Norden bombsight, fascinating instrument. Wasn't quite as accurate as some people said it was, but it at least would give you was, you know, within range. So they're, they're, they're dropping things, you know, to the partisans, right? The partisans that were fighting a guerrilla war against, it's against the Germans. Plane got hit, caught fire. Um, was going down. He was the only

• 35:12Speaker 01

  man. He just happened to be close enough to the, to the hatch door and bailed out, took a swing and a half in the harness, hit the side of a hill, lone survivor. All the rest of the, all the, all his crew, you know, he's got survivor's guilt. He was behind the lines for six months until the British underground picked him up, which means he was always indebted to the, the British for saving his life because the Germans really wanted him. I mean, they wanted their hands on someone doing OSS missions for obvious reasons. Oh yeah. He didn't talk about it.

• 35:41Danny Jones?

  Behind the line for six months.

• 35:44Speaker 01

  He lost, he lost 50 pounds.

• 35:47Danny Jones?

  Holy shit.

• 35:48Speaker 01

  He would never eat yogurt again because the Greek yogurt is super sour. He just always stayed away from yogurt. And we didn't know this. This is a family secret. We didn't know. We knew he had served in World War, in World War II, but it was a family secret. And we always wonder, anytime we had food in front of us, right? You say, eat everything on your plate. We couldn't leave the table until everything was finished. Because you never know. And he would say that never know when your neck, where your next meal is coming from. We didn't, why, why was he saying that?

• 36:20Danny Jones?

  How did you eventually learn the story? He told you later?

• 36:22Speaker 01

  Much, much later. Well, what was happening? He retired. This is much later in life. He's in San Antonio and, um, it was, it was USA Towers. It's now just the Towers. It was actually part of their real estate venture. It was only one that was built, beautiful place, right? And he would play penny any poker, you know, with his, with his fellow residents. And of course, they're going to relive because that's all you got left to talk about. Now is your, you got your memories, right? So they would really, it would share their memories. And they say, Bill, Bill's, Bill, you gotta, you gotta write about this. You gotta talk about this. So he did write, it was a monograph, is published by a military publishing house, press called Down in Greece.

• 37:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, Northern Greece was what, well, it's no longer about Yugoslavia. It was then, it was what became that part of Yugoslavia, but that's where he went down. But he got picked up. He actually got picked up uh, north and, and uh, north of Greece.

• 37:19Danny Jones?

  Oh, okay.

• 37:20Speaker 01

  Yeah. But the partisans they were supporting were in Northern Greece. Of course, the Germans occupied Greece at that time.

• 37:26Danny Jones?

  Right. Um, so going back to your story, you were doing the reconnaissance stuff.

• 37:32Speaker 01

  Eighty-one, eighty-five.

• 37:33Danny Jones?

  Eighty-one, eighty-five.

• 37:34Speaker 01

  Fascinating.

• 37:34Danny Jones?

  Lots of war games, stuff like that. And, and um, how long did that go on for?

• 37:39Speaker 01

  And so the war game stuff in particular, I mean, the war games we did were, were extremely, were extremely detailed. I mean, so a lot of those as well, but most of our mission overseas, when I was on the RC one thirty-five platforms of various types, um, with different types of equipment and, and capabilities. That was all real world reconnaissance. And a lot of, if depending on, we were sending reports out, we would actually uh, have to process our mission, as we called it. And if, but if the information, even real time in the air was significant enough, we had different types of systems that we would use, the type, different types of thresholds by which you would send out reports, up to and including what was called a critic, which if it was depending on the level, right?

• 38:23Speaker 01

  You know, if it rose to that level, it had to be on the president's desk within ten minutes.

• 38:29Danny Jones?

  Wow.

• 38:30Speaker 01

  Because we were a field site. We were part of the other half of NSA that no one talks about, which is the military side. The NSA slash CSS.

• 38:40Danny Jones?

  Oh, interesting.

• 38:41Speaker 01

  Crypto logic service support.

• 38:42Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 38:45Danny Jones?

  So, okay, so you were already part of NSA?

• 38:47Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. I was part of the sixty-nine eighty-eighth Electronic Security Squadron, Electronic Security Command. We, we worked, and we even said ourselves, we, we worked for Big Brother. I mean, our, our reports went back through NSA. But we were the military, the military wing. But remember NSA is a military organization, it's headed up by, well, then a three-star, now a four-star general with a civilian head underneath him as a deputy.

• 39:13Danny Jones?

  Oh, wow, man.

• 39:14Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 39:15Danny Jones?

  How old were you back then?

• 39:18Speaker 01

  Overseas, so when I got there, I was twenty, I had just turned twenty-four after all the training.

• 39:24Danny Jones?

  Right, okay.

• 39:26Speaker 01

  I was there for four years, came back, did electronic warfare for another four years, got out, went to the CIA.

• 39:32Danny Jones?

  Oh, you went to the CIA?

• 39:33Speaker 01

  I did.

• 39:34Danny Jones?

  What made you want to go to the CIA?

• 39:36Speaker 01

  Because of my background and interests and it's like, hey, you know, I knew, I finished up my first masters when I was in Tucson. In international relations and national security policy. And I applied and went through a very extremely rigorous review process, including even more enhanced background investigations and you had to have a poly, it was the first time I was exposed to the, you know, you're hooked up to the polygraph machine.

• 40:08Danny Jones?

  Yep.

• 40:09Speaker 01

  And all kinds of tests, tests after test after test. I was finally offered a position. I left, I had an opportunity to go to operations and go overseas, basically undercover. There's different covers at NSA, there's like, you know, official, non-official, there's what they call NOCs, you probably heard of NOCs.

• 40:28Danny Jones?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 40:28Speaker 01

  Non-official.

• 40:29Danny Jones?

  Heard about that recently.

• 40:30Speaker 01

  They, they want at one point, they want me to be official.

• 40:33Danny Jones?

  A NOC is someone who's like deniable, right?

• 40:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, deniable, but you're on your own. If something happens, they're not kind of like, it's the most risky, it's the riskiest of all.

• 40:41Danny Jones?

  Right, like you're.

• 40:42Speaker 01

  They're not going to come save you. That's exactly, oh yeah. So I chose not to go that route. I had, I had a young family. I'd come back and stay out now, it's like, no, I just, I'm not that young anymore.

• 40:55Speaker 01

  So, but I did go into the, their director of intelligence and so I was working what they call national technical means. Satellite intercept. Collection technology.

• 41:07Danny Jones?

  So.

• 41:07Speaker 01

  And I was at a downlink site, the primary downlink site in which you processed all that.

• 41:11Danny Jones?

  So going back to when you decided you want to go to CIA, is that an easy process? I mean, I imagine it's way, I imagine it's more seamless coming from NSA.

• 41:20Speaker 01

  Oh yeah, of course, yeah, military background. That was partly why they were interested, right?

• 41:25Danny Jones?

  Oh, so, so they reached out first?

• 41:26Speaker 01

  No, no, no, I did, I did. But just to give you just a sense of the initial phase of it.

• 41:31Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 41:32Speaker 01

  They give you an address. Which was a nondescript motel. You knock on a door a certain number of times. There was basically, there was a code. They opened the door and that's how it started. That was the first interview.

• 41:46Danny Jones?

  Wow.

• 41:47Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 41:50Danny Jones?

  And what kind of stuff did they, did they ask you? What kind of?

• 41:53Speaker 01

  Everything.

• 41:53Danny Jones?

  Like John, John alluded to a little bit of the stuff that he, he had talked about.

• 41:56Speaker 01

  Everything and anything, including sexual preferences.

• 42:00Danny Jones?

  Yeah, that's what John was saying.

• 42:01Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 42:04Danny Jones?

  Yeah, they get, they get nitty gritty with that stuff.

• 42:06Speaker 01

  Unbeliev- I mean, it is about as a true, think, think of. And of course, you know, I ended up experiencing this in a different way later. When I was under electronic and physical surveillance. When they decided that I was. You know, such, such a threat to the national security that.

• 42:23Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 42:23Speaker 01

  We're gonna have to, like. Charge him, but during the investigation, I was under all kinds of surveillance.

• 42:30Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 42:31Speaker 01

  But just imagine an electron microscope. Being pointed at your life.

• 42:38Speaker 01

  And anything you have ever done. Any evidence at all. Of your entire, all of it, no matter who you met, where you worked, what you did. And then they get into your head.

• 42:52Danny Jones?

  How do they know all that? I mean, they spent.

• 42:54Speaker 01

  They have special. This is, this is eighty eight. I was going, the background of this game, it was, they, they don't even, they don't even. What's interesting, they don't even start the clearance because they can leverage. Obviously they leveraged my, I had all kinds of background because I, I was at one of the highest levels.

• 43:09Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 43:10Speaker 01

  It was sensitive compartment information. That was the baseline. Never mind SAP, SAR and a lot of compartments.

• 43:16Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 43:16Speaker 01

  Later. Or even more when I got to NSA as a senior executive. I'm, I'm talking just that, so they could leverage that. For them, the, the psychological. Was probably by far, I mean, that was where they really get intrigued and they had special permission. This is similar to what I went through in, in the classified training. So the class of, the classified of, uh. Training, the resistance training, but the highly classified part of it. Is they had special permission to violate your privacy, fourth amendment, they could. It was basically, you're just saying you're consenting to just, we can get anything on you. We don't have to have you sign a paper or we're gonna go here and go there. It's just anything. And they literally had things that somebody I had forgotten about.

• 44:01Speaker 01

  It would come up.

• 44:02Danny Jones?

  And what is the means of finding stuff in?

• 44:05Speaker 01

  Just they use, they use.

• 44:06Danny Jones?

  In the eighties?

• 44:07Speaker 01

  They use.

• 44:08Danny Jones?

  Like there's no cell phones, there's no computers, right?

• 44:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, but they've got all kinds of access to databases, even then. And, and interviews they have with neighbors and friends and where you lived and what your potential, remember, the whole thing is about trust, trust and risk, trust. Yeah, well, yes. There were, you have to forget, there were still computers back then.

• 44:29Danny Jones?

  Right, there were computers, right.

• 44:30Speaker 01

  But they were, they were. And most of them were, you know, mainframes, mainframes, right? But there were still tons of paper-based records, still tons. Much more laborious to go through.

• 44:42Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 44:44Speaker 01

  Incredibly intrusive. So, yeah, they're just

• 44:49Speaker 01

  drilling down into your life. They want to know how trustworthy you were, how, you know, so they, they test you.

• 44:56Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 44:57Speaker 01

  And the tests, the tests were very sophisticated in terms of preferences and how you thought and, and if you were in these circumstances, but extremely, extremely rigorous.

• 45:07Danny Jones?

  To you, what was the most?

• 45:09Speaker 01

  Never mind.

• 45:09Danny Jones?

  Interesting one.

• 45:10Speaker 01

  The ones were actually the face-to-face interviews.

• 45:13Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 45:13Speaker 01

  Those were the most dramatic.

• 45:15Danny Jones?

  Really?

• 45:15Speaker 01

  Well, because in part, it's, there was interviews with Alpapally, there was interviews with Paulies.

• 45:22Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 45:23Danny Jones?

  And which one, like to you, was like, what the hell?

• 45:26Speaker 01

  It was the ones where they're really lifestyle questions. Those are hardcore, lifestyle, girlfriends, friendships, associations,

• 45:38Speaker 01

  who you may have been a part of. I mean, like I said, they, they.

• 45:42Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 45:42Speaker 01

  Just.

• 45:42Danny Jones?

  Try to make you uncomfortable.

• 45:43Speaker 01

  The onion, they just keep peeling your life away, right?

• 45:51Danny Jones?

  So you went

• 45:51Speaker 01

  Ring by ring.

• 45:52Danny Jones?

  So you're you get admitted. They say, okay, Tom, you're in, baby.

• 45:57Speaker 01

  Yeah. So then I

• 45:57Danny Jones?

  You're officially a spook.

• 45:59Speaker 01

  Well, I was in the I was an intelligence analyst and all

• 46:02Danny Jones?

  Okay.

• 46:02Speaker 01

  Imagery analyst.

• 46:03Danny Jones?

  Okay.

• 46:03Speaker 01

  I could have gone that route, but that that's in essence, it's own CIA CIA. At the time, Central Intelligence Agency. But the one you always hear about is the operations. There's a whole nother. There's several different parts of

• 46:15Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 46:16Speaker 01

  CIA.

• 46:16Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 46:17Speaker 01

  The one I was in was the Director of Intelligence. So this is the part that's linked to NRO.

• 46:23Danny Jones?

  Oh.

• 46:24Speaker 01

  Yeah. Plus a SIGINT division and

• 46:25Danny Jones?

  NRO is a funny one.

• 46:28Speaker 01

  That was even more secret than NSA.

• 46:29Danny Jones?

  I know. That's crazy.

• 46:30Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 46:30Danny Jones?

  Because NRO, a lot of people don't know about NRO.

• 46:33Speaker 01

  They don't because it was it was one of the other agencies. The irony, of course, for me, I mean, I jump ahead a little bit NSA itself was never was never part of the National Security Act of 47. It was never legislated by Congress. It was literally created out of thin air by the stroke of Harry S Truman's pen in 1952.

• 46:54Speaker 01

  As a secret military agency to collect and analyze and report on foreign intelligence.

• 47:02Danny Jones?

  Foreign intelligence.

• 47:02Speaker 01

  Foreign, which got you they were given carte blanche.

• 47:06Danny Jones?

  And when was the NRO created again?

• 47:08Speaker 01

  61.

• 47:09Danny Jones?

  61.

• 47:09Speaker 01

  You're talking the Cuban, that period. It's like, oh, my God, it became formalized, right?

• 47:14Danny Jones?

  Right, right, right. And NRO

• 47:15Speaker 01

  But it operated. It operated in secret under sort of the Aegis of CIA. It was its own. It was, but it operated under.

• 47:24Danny Jones?

  It was like under the umbrella.

• 47:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, it still was even when I was there.

• 47:27Danny Jones?

  So it's like CIA of the sky.

• 47:30Speaker 01

  You could you could say that. And in essence, it was a subsidiary. You want to use a corporate term as a subsidiary of CIA. High specializing in national technical means. That's what was always a phrase that was used. National technical means typically meant primarily spaceborne assets.

• 47:47Danny Jones?

  Like satellites.

• 47:48Speaker 01

  Satellites, but there are other types of assets. Yeah.

• 47:52Danny Jones?

  What other types are there?

• 47:53Speaker 01

  Well, there's.

• 47:54Danny Jones?

  Planes and stuff?

• 47:54Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 47:55Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 47:56Speaker 01

  I mean, they had, remember the, the, the original SR 71 was, it was actually a CIA asset.

• 48:02Danny Jones?

  Right, right, right, right.

• 48:03Speaker 01

  U two flights, right?

• 48:05Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 48:06Speaker 01

  Under, right?

• 48:08Danny Jones?

  That was all part of NRO?

• 48:09Speaker 01

  Well.

• 48:10Danny Jones?

  There was CIA.

• 48:11Speaker 01

  CIA.

• 48:11Danny Jones?

  CIA, right, right, right, right.

• 48:12Speaker 01

  You just, I mean, this is where it gets, I mean, you get into the weeds with all the different assets. But NRO primarily was focused on, on, that was national technologies in terms of spaceborne.

• 48:23Danny Jones?

  Right, okay.

• 48:23Speaker 01

  And that's spaceborne across the board.

• 48:27Danny Jones?

  So you were operating.

• 48:28Speaker 01

  Vandenberg, Vandenberg's part of all that in terms of launches, both military and secret.

• 48:33Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 48:34Speaker 01

  But people forget about Vandenberg.

• 48:35Danny Jones?

  I've heard a lot of crazy stories about Vandenberg.

• 48:37Speaker 01

  Vandenberg has, has, has a significant launch capability, but it was always the secret launch capability primarily. It's not like Cape Kennedy.

• 48:45Danny Jones?

  Right. I've, I heard that, so we have, we have that interceptor system to intercept ICBMs, like nuclear, nuclear rockets that are coming for us or warheads that are coming for us. And I know that a bunch, I think we have, we have, I think it's 44 interceptor missiles currently in the US. And I think most of them are in Alaska, but a couple of them are at Vandenberg. I know Vandenberg has some of those interceptor missiles.

• 49:13Speaker 01

  It's, I don't keep up with that.

• 49:15Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 49:15Speaker 01

  And I wasn't, I didn't work in that part of the government.

• 49:19Danny Jones?

  Right, right, right, right. No, I just heard, this is just, um, this is relevant to the whole nuclear,

• 49:23Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 49:23Danny Jones?

  Nuclear war.

• 49:24Speaker 01

  Well, I remember, even when I was at survival school, I mean, just as another sort of a vignette here, an anecdote. Where I stayed, so in between some of the courses I was taking at, at Fairchild Air Force Base, I was in, I was in the barracks. Guess where the barracks that I was in were located? Right outside where they kept all the nuclear weapons and bunkers besides, you know, three, three roads of barbed wire and dogs and

• 49:48Danny Jones?

  Geez.

• 49:49Speaker 01

  Lights and everything else. And then I actually watched what they call the elephant walk.

• 49:54Danny Jones?

  Oh, really?

• 49:55Speaker 01

  My father used to fly B-52s as well. In fact, you know, Buff, we always called them Buffs, big, ugly flying F'ers.

• 50:02Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 50:02Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 50:06Speaker 01

  And they had the elephant walk. They practiced what would happen if the alert is given, launch. And one after the other, two minute intervals going down the runway at Fairchild. Just one after the other. It was just, it was quite amazing. I'd, I had read about it, heard about it, but I'd never seen the elephant walk, what they call the elephant, just like that.

• 50:27Danny Jones?

  This is it, the elephant walk?

• 50:29Speaker 01

  Elephant walk with B-52s.

• 50:30Danny Jones?

  So these are B-52 bombers?

• 50:32Speaker 01

  Those aren't, those aren't B-52s.

• 50:33Danny Jones?

  Okay.

• 50:34Speaker 01

  No, those are more cargo or cargo, that's C-130.

• 50:39Danny Jones?

  C-130, right.

• 50:39Speaker 01

  We're talking the eight engine B-52s, elephant walk. That, that is a version of an elephant walk, but it's, they're just lined up. We're talking about, they're taking off, they come in, take off, two, wait two minutes, take off.

• 50:51Danny Jones?

  So if NRO gets intelligence of a rocket, of a missile coming at us, that's basically what they do.

• 50:58Speaker 01

  Highly classified early alert systems, which I also worked with.

• 51:01Danny Jones?

  SIBRS.

• 51:01Speaker 01

  When I was at the Pentagon leaders, a Navy intelligence officer, another part of my career, that was part of the alert center at the Pentagon. There was a specialized system that would do those kind of alerts.

• 51:11Danny Jones?

  Wow.

• 51:11Speaker 01

  Oh yeah.

• 51:12Danny Jones?

  Get all the planes in the air, get all the nukes.

• 51:14Speaker 01

  It could be that bad, right. We're not just talking like a mission, but they had to practice. You always had to practice. Worst case scenario.

• 51:21Danny Jones?

  Yeah, right, right, right.

• 51:23Speaker 01

  Yeah. But it was amazing, just watch them and they can can't their wheel because you have to take off. What if the wind's blowing sideways the other direction? They could actually turn the but wheels could buy, they could bicycle the wheels.

• 51:35Danny Jones?

  Wow.

• 51:36Speaker 01

  So they could, it was, they're, they're going down the runway, but they'd be depending on the wind.

• 51:41Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 51:41Speaker 01

  You would see them turn.

• 51:42Danny Jones?

  Right, right.

• 51:43Speaker 01

  But the wheels stayed straight.

• 51:44Danny Jones?

  Oh my God, dude.

• 51:46Speaker 01

  But the, yeah, pretty cool. That's why you still have it. It's a massive platform.

• 51:52Danny Jones?

  Yeah. Yeah. The other thing, uh, the, it's in the, um, the plane, the president has to get in, in the middle of nuclear war is interesting too.

• 51:59Speaker 01

  That's a different.

• 52:00Danny Jones?

  I forget the name of that plane. It's called, um. It's called the doomsday plane or something.

• 52:05Speaker 01

  We always call the doomsday plane.

• 52:07Danny Jones?

  Yeah, the doomsday plane and they have, they have like it's, there's a stratcom command center in that plane for like, I think the president, the head of stratcom.

• 52:15Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 52:16Danny Jones?

  And um.

• 52:17Speaker 01

  It's a highly specialized. It's not the normal air force one.

• 52:21Danny Jones?

  Right. It's got, yeah, yeah. It's got like, I think all the windows are blacked out. It's like, it's like super protective for a nuclear blast. It can survive a nuclear blast.

• 52:29Speaker 01

  It can even defend itself. But again, it's, there's all kinds of classified stuff on it. I mean, that's where you assign, things are secrets worth keeping. I'm the first to acknowledge that. There's a lot of secrets that aren't worth keeping because they're using the secrecy system to protect a lot of stuff that this will get into my whistleblowing.

• 52:45Danny Jones?

  Yes, yes.

• 52:46Speaker 01

  And how, why would the government, you know, charge me, right, as they did, but in the military, including our own, there was equipment still to this day or mod versions of it, upgrades that are incredibly sensitive. You would not want that to fall into the wrong hands by any means. We're talking the very leading edge of how do you collect, store, analyze, pick up, transmit. I'll give you one example, though, without going into all the details, just to give you a sense of, we had to be able to operate on our own. We had, we had satellite, well, it was early satellite, you had to remember the, the whole global positioning GPS, right, was just beginning to emerge.

• 53:25Danny Jones?

  That was DARPA.

• 53:26Speaker 01

  Right. So our primary radio, which is still, by the way, you know, like H, ham operators, it's all HF.

• 53:33Danny Jones?

  Oh, okay.

• 53:34Speaker 01

  HF, super long distance. So HF was always our, if, if primary means of communication, that's how you would communicate because you, no matter what was going on, even with atmospherics, even, even in terms of like stratosphere ion, you could still get, get a message out and it could be picked up. So there were specialized ground stations all over the world that even though we had ones that were designated, that could then communicate with you. But we had to know where we were because of shoot down attempts, forced down attempts.

• 54:06Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 54:06Speaker 01

  In years past, because of the sensitive of the missions I flew on, how do you know where you are? And you also had to keep track of where they thought you were. They, I put they in quotes. So we had a special rate of special nav system.

• 54:22Danny Jones?

  Interesting.

• 54:23Speaker 01

  Called the LN20.

• 54:26Speaker 01

  Amazing system. The accuracy, I am not kidding you, is so accurate. Assuming you put in the correct lat longs and we're talking way down to within 25 feet accuracy. 25 feet.

• 54:42Danny Jones?

  This was in what year?

• 54:44Speaker 01

  Uh, late seventies, early eighties.

• 54:47Danny Jones?

  Imagine what the frick they have now.

• 54:49Speaker 01

  Once we knew and assuming there was no failures, there was always, we had no go criteria. You both on the ground, it sometimes would happen, even in the air, going to our, what do you call the sack sensitive area? Or even in, and then there were certain types of reactions, there were threshold at which we would have to abort. Okay. And I was on a couple of those missions, not pleasant. But the, the nav system was such that once you had it properly calibrated, it always knew where it was in reference

• 55:18Speaker 01

  to your base.

• 55:19Danny Jones?

  Wow.

• 55:19Speaker 01

  Your hard stand, literally the hard stand on your, your parking spot at your base.

• 55:25Danny Jones?

  That's amazing.

• 55:25Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 55:27Danny Jones?

  Yeah, it's fascinating. It's just, it's fascinating just to hear stories of like some of the crazy technology that we've been able to develop since the, since the fifties, essentially. And then like, just to be like, okay, now we're learning about this stuff in 2024, 2025. Like, imagine what we're going to be learning about in 2050.

• 55:47Speaker 01

  Here's one. I'll just give you another one. I have, I have any number of these, but I guess even though I know I'm going to be here a while with you. Here's just one. So this, some of the systems I worked with, when I was CIA, involving national technology, satellite technology. Did you know? And this gets back to, and you've, you'll read, there's a lot of stuff out there. Now the keyhole program. I'll just mention that. That was the name. It was super secret. It's still secret, but the fact that there was a keyhole program is not secret.

• 56:16Danny Jones?

  Okay.

• 56:17Speaker 01

  So this is when they went digital. There was all kinds of, of analog. I was part of that because I was part of the transition. You're talking late eighties. So there were still people, analysts I work with who had grown up during the early sixties Cuban Missile Crisis. In fact, one of the older hands, he pulled me, took me under his wing to learn the trade. Cause I was an imagery analyst and I'm just saying imagery.

• 56:40Danny Jones?

  Okay.

• 56:43Speaker 01

  We're talking seventies incredibly, I mean breakthrough in charge couple of devices. Digital camera in the sky.

• 56:55Speaker 01

  Which kept improving over the years.

• 56:59Speaker 01

  When it, when it was for the years and years, no one knew how good it was. They just didn't because it was a state secret.

• 57:05Danny Jones?

  Wow, man.

• 57:07Speaker 01

  And I can't even to this day reveal, it's like, how fast could the SR71 go? We used to fly coordinated with the SR71. We call it that particular program name when it was on that mission was Giant Reach, right? I was on River Joint or I was, it was Burning Wind was the mission.

• 57:22Danny Jones?

  Okay.

• 57:22Speaker 01

  Where I was on the RC135 other variant, which was a specialized variant. I flew on that one as well, uh, called Combat Cent. But we would fly coordinated with, and you see this coming in, man, it's, you know,

• 57:38Speaker 01

  multiple times, you know, the speed of sound, right? Way over 2,000 miles an hour. No one, the top, top speed, yeah, you'll see books out there. There's things that come out, but it was never reveal what its true top speed was. But it could cruise it easily three times and then some, the speed of sound, I mean, easily.

• 58:01Danny Jones?

  That is bananas.

• 58:03Speaker 01

  Yeah. It was difficult for ground stations to, to maintain contact even as a blip because it was moving so fast.

• 58:10Danny Jones?

  Hmm.

• 58:11Speaker 01

  Yeah. That was, but that was advantage.

• 58:13Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 58:13Speaker 01

  Fly super high, 80,000 plus feet.

• 58:18Speaker 01

  And, and if you need to fly really fast, I mean, it was faster than a bullet.

• 58:23Danny Jones?

  Wow.

• 58:23Speaker 01

  Oh yeah. Fascinating airplane. I used to watch it. So I, I used to go, I used to, my, my, I had a little moped. Cause I live right off the, the, the west end of the runway at Milton Hall. And I had a little moped. It was a 49 cc moped. My, my, my air crew members would joke around, so, oh yeah, here comes Tom and his RC49. You know, with my big bag, right? And you go around the back of the runway and the SRs at that time were stationed there. They would rotate, but they were stationed there, had their own special hangar, maintenance and everything else. And a more secluded part of the base. But it was so fascinating watching them get ready to take off from the end of the runway.

• 59:07Danny Jones?

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• 1:00:30Speaker 01

  Because you would see the shock diamonds, you know, as they accelerated at speed down the runway.

• 1:00:36Danny Jones?

  Steve, can you pull up an image of the SR71 so we can see it?

• 1:00:39Speaker 01

  But you're seeing like all the fuel be dripping out of it right at the end of the runway, just dumping. Because it wasn't until it got to speed when the titanium, when it started to heat up, that it would actually seal the, the tanks. Amazing airplane, even to this day. Remember this was drawing, we're not analog era. They were using computers to create this, right?

• 1:01:01Danny Jones?

  That is so crazy.

• 1:01:03Speaker 01

  Kelly Johnson skunk works, right?

• 1:01:04Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:05Speaker 01

  So you can understand, I was exposed, because this is extremely relevant to a, no doubt, another part of our conversation. The very best of American innovation ingenuity. Was creating things like the SR71.

• 1:01:22Danny Jones?

  Wasn't the edge like really sharp?

• 1:01:24Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:01:25Danny Jones?

  Oh, I mean, it looks, yeah, look at it.

• 1:01:26Speaker 01

  Just stunning, even today, even today, you mean, just, it's, I mean, it looked kind of out of this world almost.

• 1:01:32Danny Jones?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:01:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's, it's a stunning airplane. And that's just one of, and not any number of technologies.

• 1:01:40Danny Jones?

  Hmm. And weren't they, weren't they first developing these and testing them out of Area 51?

• 1:01:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, groom Lake.

• 1:01:46Danny Jones?

  Groom Lake, yeah. That's what they do in a lot of the first test flights of these stealth crafts.

• 1:01:51Speaker 01

  Well, this is even like radar. We had, I'll get, I'll get into that. I have, I have, I have, he passed away a few, a few years, some number of years ago, Joseph Lockhart, we'll get to him. December 7th, 1941, I interviewed him.

• 1:02:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's part of my 240 hours of community service.

• 1:02:08Danny Jones?

  Oh, yeah, we talked about that. Oh, I'm, I heard you talking about that.

• 1:02:10Speaker 01

  Joseph Lockhart, he was there on the North Shore of Oahu. With the new fangled radar, which was super secret because it was an edge. Arthur C. Clarke was part of inventing radar.

• 1:02:24Danny Jones?

  Really?

• 1:02:24Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. But remember what he said about technology?

• 1:02:28Danny Jones?

  Yeah, what did he say again?

• 1:02:29Speaker 01

  Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

• 1:02:33Danny Jones?

  Right, right.

• 1:02:35Speaker 01

  So you can imagine even back in the early 60s.

• 1:02:40Speaker 01

  When this started flying, right, even in prototype form. If you happen to see that flying over in the particularly the western part of the US, what would you think it was? It didn't look like anything that flew. Exactly.

• 1:02:56Danny Jones?

  You know, I just had, we, we, we were talking to a gentleman in here yesterday about this story. There, there's a fascinating documentary that I suggest everyone who's interested in this stuff, watch. It's called Mirage Men. And it's about, it's a really sad story about this man who lived in New Mexico, right off, uh, like within probably a couple of miles of a, one of the big air force bases out there. And this guy was obsessed with UFOs and he was in all the UFO communities, move on, going to all these meetings and conferences about UFOs all the time, reading all the books. And, uh, he started to, and this guy was a former, I think, air, former air force guy.

• 1:03:36Danny Jones?

  And he started to see every time, every day at the same time, these crazy aircrafts shoot up off the ground, move around and then come back down and like weird things that he couldn't explain. And he started to collect video and photos and make notes of all this stuff and try to, he was even, even trying to intercept the radio signals and communications that were going on there. And the air force caught wind of it and they sent one of their counter intel guys over to meet up with him. And he let him look through all the photos, listen to all the recordings he had of the radio stuff. And, uh, he knew this guy was a big UFO guy. So he goes, wow, man, I don't know what this is. You know what?

• 1:04:21Danny Jones?

  I think these really are UFOs. I think these really are aliens. And then the NSA moved in across the street from his house and started beaming shit into his house. And this code, like beaming code into his house that he was collecting.

• 1:04:40Danny Jones?

  And the basically with the information they're beaming to him was like, we are an extraterrestrial civilization. Our planet ran out of water and we need to come to earth. We'll be there in two years. And all this stuff literally drove this man insane. Ended up in an insane asylum. And I think he, he ended up, uh, either, I think, I don't know if he committed suicide. But, um, he ended up in a mental institution, like lost his whole life over this stuff. Like they really dedicated a, it's amazing the amount of resources that the air force and the NSA were able to dedicate to this one guy, just because they could use him as a conduit of disinformation to poison the well of this UFO community that they knew was infiltrated with Soviets, right?

• 1:05:24Speaker 01

  Poisoning the well is a technique. To keep prying eyes from noticing things you don't want them to notice.

• 1:05:31Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:05:32Speaker 01

  So.

• 1:05:32Danny Jones?

  Creating this confusing cauldron stew of misinformation, disinformation. There's probably a few little truths in there, right? But you'll never be able to fucking find it.

• 1:05:43Danny Jones?

  It probably sounds more crazier than the disinformation.

• 1:05:45Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:05:46Danny Jones?

  So.

• 1:05:47Speaker 01

  That's a, it's a layering technique.

• 1:05:48Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:49Speaker 01

  So you, you, you always protect, as, as I learned, right? You always protect the core. You always protect what's a really secret that you don't want anybody to know about. And some for legit reasons.

• 1:06:02Danny Jones?

  Yeah, it's amazing, man. And even today, like, like, just in today's day and age, like the level it's gotten to is like out of control, I think.

• 1:06:09Speaker 01

  I have, I have people right now in, in my circle, right? Family, friends, who basically are shutting down from like involving themselves with any news of any kind because the level of, of cacaf, the cacaphony, the, the chaos, the, the disinformation, the what's true, what isn't, ah, I'm going to go crazy, trying to crazy and, and just.

• 1:06:36Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:06:36Speaker 01

  Right? Just trying to figure it all out. I just don't want to figure it out.

• 1:06:40Danny Jones?

  Right. No, yeah, people.

• 1:06:42Speaker 01

  How can I? This is where discernment, we may talk about this later, discernment becomes really critical in these kinds of environments.

• 1:06:49Danny Jones?

  Yeah. Well, it's like. Not only is all of the perception management out of control, but like we have evidence over the last few years that FBI and CIA have been meddling with uh social media companies with the Twitter files, which John Kerry Akku talks about a lot. And um that combined with the fact

• 1:07:13Danny Jones?

  that there are more people than ever independently on the line, just talking about stuff and getting their message out there. So there's like more podcasts out there that like there's a fucking zillion podcasts just in this zip code, probably.

• 1:07:29Speaker 01

  I get all kinds of invites to subscribe to some new Patreon or subscribe to.

• 1:07:33Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:07:34Speaker 01

  Right?

• 1:07:35Danny Jones?

  And.

• 1:07:35Speaker 01

  Substack. I mean, I it's just there and it's like it's like 50 bucks a year, 60 bucks a year. And I don't even have, I don't even remember as much as I don't.

• 1:07:44Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:07:45Speaker 01

  And part of this is flood, the zone gets flooded.

• 1:07:47Danny Jones?

  It's flooded. It's absolutely flooded. And one of the, one of the downfalls, I think of social media is that in order for these people, in order for you to get any sort of recognition for the work you're doing, like you're constantly fighting this, who can be the most sensational? Who can come up with the next end of the world story? You know, the world is is falling apart. We're all gonna die. Aliens are invading like, like, let's try to keep upping that game. And that combined with all the people that are doing it. Then you add in the layer of disinformation to it. It's just like so hard to figure out what's

• 1:08:28Danny Jones?

  real now. It's like the amount of work you have to do to do the research to find out how legitimate a story really is, is absurd. And that like I talk about this all the time, too. I think it's really interesting how you have all these people like I'm one of them, I'm guilty of it, being one of, I I sit here and I talk about great things, right? I haven't been to these places. I haven't seen the shit first person like some of the people like you have done. Right? Like, I'm not going out and filming this stuff and like talking to the people on the ground. I'm just getting information from people that have posted stuff that they heard from someone else.

• 1:09:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:09:06Danny Jones?

  That they heard from someone else, that they heard from somebody who might have been on the ground there.

• 1:09:10Speaker 01

  But you know about the telephone game?

• 1:09:12Danny Jones?

  Yeah. Oh, yeah.

• 1:09:13Speaker 01

  That's the habit. Yeah. It's amazing as a little as a kid, I mean, just how easy it is when you pass on something. How it's so completely distorted by the time it gets to the other end of the classroom.

• 1:09:26Danny Jones?

  Right. Yep.

• 1:09:27Speaker 01

  Yeah. In fact, it often has no bearing on what was whispered into the first ear.

• 1:09:32Danny Jones?

  Yep.

• 1:09:34Speaker 01

  Remember in 1938, Orson Welles War of the Worlds?

• 1:09:37Danny Jones?

  Mm hmm. Of course.

• 1:09:38Speaker 01

  How many people were convinced that the Martians were invading?

• 1:09:43Speaker 01

  And they were calling up neighbors, the newspapers, keeping them up to date because this is his radio. Even though at the beginning of the radio broadcast, he said it was just a story. It was not real.

• 1:09:56Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:09:57Speaker 01

  That's 38.

• 1:09:58Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:09:59Speaker 01

  There was a social, that was a social media of the day.

• 1:10:02Danny Jones?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:10:02Speaker 01

  It was radio.

• 1:10:05Danny Jones?

  Yeah, it's crazy how we're evolving.

• 1:10:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:10:08Danny Jones?

  And it's crazy how much. Like, you, I mean, like, I don't even know, just like the speculate, the speculation of how much organizations like NSA, CIA are wrapped up in all this stuff and benefiting from it. And like, how much more they can get away with just because there's so much chatter, there's so much noise.

• 1:10:28Speaker 01

  Most aren't because I can tell you there's a bureaucracy.

• 1:10:31Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:31Speaker 01

  See, the real deep state, I put that in huge quotes because it's been completely just, it's an overloaded phrase now. Is the bureaucracy. Some like to call it the administrative state, but it's really the bureaucracy, the everyday running, right? They're just, you know, people sitting at desks, doing their jobs, going home with, quote, real families and.

• 1:10:51Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:10:51Speaker 01

  Bills and mortgages and.

• 1:10:53Danny Jones?

  There's two million employees in the US government. I mean, it's like.

• 1:10:55Speaker 01

  The vast majority of those aren't involved in anything close to what is alleged.

• 1:11:01Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:11:03Speaker 01

  But having said that, if, and remember, part of the problem here is I, I worked in a very, very secret world for umpteen years. It does do something to you in terms of sort of, there's that world, then there's the real world. And then there's, there was, there was years, I couldn't say what I did outside of work. The only place I could even talk about it was at work. It does, it does, it does do something to you. But on the other hand, you're also doing things that no one else knows about. I say no one else, that the public at large doesn't know about.

• 1:11:38Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:11:39Speaker 01

  Can only speculate about. When you have secret agencies and secret organizations, it's very easy to ascribe to them certain activities, certain events, and it, and it can make sense. And you even create logic, logic trees from it.

• 1:11:56Danny Jones?

  Right, right, right, right.

• 1:11:57Speaker 01

  But you're also generating a whole bunch of rabbit holes.

• 1:11:59Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:12:01Speaker 01

  And people get lost in the rabbit holes.

• 1:12:03Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:03Speaker 01

  You can imagine, I'll just share this, because I have inner, inside knowledge on this, the kind of phone calls that the main desk, just the, the operator, the main operator, public operator NSA receives, is a team of people. Can you, you can only imagine the bizarre at times calls that come in on that line. It's stunning.

• 1:12:29Danny Jones?

  I can't imagine.

• 1:12:30Speaker 01

  Oh, no, I've had conversations with people that have had the conversations, right?

• 1:12:36Speaker 01

  And it's just they shake their head. There's, they have a whole protocol for how they handle it. There's people that actually, you know, allege all kinds of things.

• 1:12:43Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:12:43Speaker 01

  Or they'll start saying, you know, I've got a chip planted in my head.

• 1:12:49Speaker 01

  And I'm communicating.

• 1:12:50Danny Jones?

  With a.

• 1:12:51Speaker 01

  Or somebody's communicating with me.

• 1:12:52Danny Jones?

  Uh huh.

• 1:12:53Speaker 01

  And it's secret, but you know, I need to share this. In some cases, you know, they're, they definitely want to share it.

• 1:12:59Danny Jones?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:13:00Speaker 01

  But they're gonna call NSA.

• 1:13:02Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:03Speaker 01

  People ascribe, on the other hand, it has enormous power. This is where the spider web comment, remember the uncle, you know, with great power comes great responsibility? Well, also, you can commit all kinds of irresponsibility with the power. And too often, as was my experience, for all the things that are legit, right? What happens when it's turned for other purposes? What happens when they use national security to bend law, get around law, violate your privacy, conduct operations in the shadows?

• 1:13:40Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:13:40Speaker 01

  See, the shadow land, is that, you know, I call the shadow land?

• 1:13:43Danny Jones?

  Yes. And this is another thing that they do is they work with private organizations, private companies to avoid the accountability, right? Like, we talked about this on the phone, but, and I've talked about this on recent podcasts, but like, I just read this fantastic series of articles about, a report about the history of Google and how it was funded and incubated by NSA, CIA, and DARPA. Like, the tools came from DARPA, but there were CIA and NSA folks quite literally visiting Larry Page, or not Larry Page, Sergey Brin at Stanford, him and his professor, through the whole process of developing Google. And they were

• 1:14:25Danny Jones?

  giving him money through some sort of cutout or whatever. And like, that's crazy. That's insane. And then if you, so if you can have these crazy multinational monopoly organizations that control all the information around the world, like, the one is Google, and then YouTube comes second, that, and you say, okay, it was created by them, but it's not really connected. Nobody knows. Nobody knows that that was, that is the case. And it's, it's literally a separate private or a public company, but it's not connected to those agencies.

• 1:14:59Speaker 01

  It's a convenient

• 1:15:00Danny Jones?

  Imagine what they can get away with, and imagine how much they can frigging control.

• 1:15:05Danny Jones?

  It's just so crazy to me, man. I mean, and learning this stuff blows my mind, even though like it shouldn't blow my mind after seeing things like the Twitter files.

• 1:15:12Speaker 01

  This goes back decades, though, way, way before all of the digital age. It goes back, Operation Shamrock, Special Program, NSA, 1950s. Actually, it was in the government even before NSA, the precursor was NSA. So, one of the means, how, how were, how did you send out electronic messages back? In the 50s or even earlier? Remember when the, with the, with the, with the invention of the telegraph? One of the things that came about was telegraph, was Telex. Well, there was a small set of companies, RCA was one of them, that were response, Western Union, okay? They're responsible for Telex. Guess what they were, who they were sharing it with? This became, this all came out in the 70s. People forget, all this came out during those investigations of 70s. Pike Committee, Church,

• 1:15:58Speaker 01

  Bell, Absurd, Rockefeller Commission and others.

• 1:16:00Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:16:02Speaker 01

  Secretly sharing, extraordinary, it was supposed to be protected information, but it quote unquote had intelligence value. So basically, they, they had a special conduit which all, all of those telegrams are being provided

• 1:16:17Speaker 01

  en masse to NSA.

• 1:16:22Speaker 01

  Minaret, spying on Americans. Remember, Foreign Intelligence, wait a minute, this is the best, you're not, you're not, you're not the agency that does, they did, under Minaret for years. All came out in the 70s.

• 1:16:34Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:35Speaker 01

  So it's not like NSA has always operated lawfully. It's part of the problem when you're secret. It's too tempting, it's too convenient. And then you partner with certain companies.

• 1:16:45Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:16:46Speaker 01

  A lot of the partnerships that I'm aware of, the precursor partnerships, this is pre 9/11? Were already in existence, super secret. There was a special, there was a special office, they changed the name to quote unquote protect, to protect the guilty over the years. There's a special office, it deals with corporate partnerships. But it's, imagine, it's incredibly sensitive.

• 1:17:09Danny Jones?

  But it's literally, it's quite literally by, like, in the charter, it's, isn't it illegal for these agencies to be involved in domestic stuff?

• 1:17:17Speaker 01

  Uh, what's, you know, if, if it's the US, you know, if it's for supporting national security in the United States, who's going to argue with that?

• 1:17:24Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:17:25Speaker 01

  Remember a lot, a lot goes under the impermoder of national security.

• 1:17:28Danny Jones?

  Hmm. Yeah. I mean, I imagine it was a lot, a lot easier back in the fifties, sixties.

• 1:17:34Speaker 01

  Way easier.

• 1:17:35Danny Jones?

  And seventies.

• 1:17:35Speaker 01

  And they're much smaller.

• 1:17:36Danny Jones?

  There was, to infiltrate the media.

• 1:17:38Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:17:39Danny Jones?

  Cause there's only, you know, so many media outlets, but now like.

• 1:17:45Speaker 01

  Well, the CIA had a stand, standing program where they would actually have their journalists. And they would seed certain things into the media years, way before nine 11.

• 1:17:56Danny Jones?

  This is like Project Mockingbird.

• 1:17:57Speaker 01

  Mockingbird is the primary one. The Mockingbird was a very.

• 1:18:01Danny Jones?

  Kennedy, right?

• 1:18:02Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, yeah, but there was a lot of other programs similar. They, where you're using fronts. USAID, for example, which was great. I mean, this is.

• 1:18:11Danny Jones?

  They're huge and they're big in the news right now.

• 1:18:13Speaker 01

  Well, because it's too convenient. I mean, if you're overseas, Peace Corps, unfortunately, Peace Corps got used. This is where, for all the right reasons, the Peace Corps, right, did exist. But what if they're being used to quote unquote, collect intelligence? Well, what if you're in that country and they find out that you're really a spy, quote unquote, civilian, but you're really a, you're operating like a spy, even when you're quote unquote, helping the locals? That's a compromise. That's a corruption of the mission.

• 1:18:43Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:44Speaker 01

  But it's too tempting. I, it's just, you get into the whole dynamic of this and the psychology of, I've always said, this is where he gets into sort of my own, because yeah, I was part of that environment. You know, I was part of the well called the normal part of the environment. Not, not, not the sort of the compromise part.

• 1:19:02Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:02Speaker 01

  Until later, where it's just, it becomes, I mean, remember spying is the world's second oldest profession. That's kind of the joke.

• 1:19:11Danny Jones?

  Yep.

• 1:19:14Danny Jones?

  Yep. What do you make of all this recent stuff coming out about with you this controversy with the USAID and

• 1:19:21Speaker 01

  There's a lot of corruption. I just say it that way. Yeah, it doesn't surprise me. And it's, I think, remember the government at large, but particularly the agencies that don't get a whole lot of like direct public attention, even though you may hear about them in the news. National security, like USAID, Pentagon at large. How do you audit them? How do you audit them? Remember, follow the money. But what if you don't, what if you don't want to follow the money?

• 1:19:50Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:19:50Speaker 01

  Meaning you don't want people to follow the money because if you follow the money, you're going to find out where the money went. And when you find out where the money went, you're going to find out that the money went for things that you don't really want the public to know about.

• 1:20:02Danny Jones?

  So, so the story is USAID has been funding stuff all over the world in, in countries like our ally countries, right? Third world countries. And it's under the guise, I mean, the funny thing about it is it's USAID, but the stands for something completely different, right? What is USAID?

• 1:20:20Speaker 01

  Agency for International Development.

• 1:20:21Danny Jones?

  Agency for International Development, right.

• 1:20:24Speaker 01

  No, I knew people, remember, because of my long government career, I knew people. I had neighbor, I had a neighbor that was a senior in, in the USAID agency.

• 1:20:33Danny Jones?

  So like the idea is we're giving huge donations, we're building infrastructure and building stuff in these other countries in exchange

• 1:20:42Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:20:43Danny Jones?

  For us to be able to have a footprint there.

• 1:20:46Speaker 01

  But we did, we did that, as I well know, as I discovered, but I well knew we were doing that with certain, you know, our own corporations. Hey, if you go overseas and have a contract with even an allied government.

• 1:20:56Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:57Speaker 01

  Let's backdoor, let's just use it and you funnel everything back to us.

• 1:21:00Danny Jones?

  So the argument against, the argument for this is like, is it better to not do it and let China and Russia do it?

• 1:21:07Speaker 01

  I've heard that argument. I understand the argument. I understand that. Then just be open about it. See, that's the problem. If that's true.

• 1:21:16Danny Jones?

  It doesn't work if you're open about it.

• 1:21:17Speaker 01

  That's see that, but that's the paradox, isn't it?

• 1:21:20Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:21Speaker 01

  But then it justifies continuing it because, oh, we don't want them to take it over. Now you're in just this vicious cycle.

• 1:21:28Danny Jones?

  Yeah. And that's the conundrum with this whole thing.

• 1:21:30Speaker 01

  Sure is.

• 1:21:31Danny Jones?

  Like, we live in this, we kind of take it for granted that we live in like the, the number one military superpower country in the world.

• 1:21:40Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:21:41Danny Jones?

  And we have, we live in like, like kings, like we, we have everything at our disposal. We could do anything we want with all the technology and, and freedom that most countries don't have. And then, you know, we want to criticize the government for taking, for going so far and in certain areas. But like, like, goddamn, if they, if there's some of the stuff they didn't do, and some people can be blind to this stuff.

• 1:22:09Danny Jones?

  Like, if we didn't do some of this fucked up shit, for lack of a better term, like, we wouldn't be where we are. And we wouldn't have the luxury of being critical of the government. So, yeah, I hear that argument a lot, and it's hard for me to, uh, it's hard for me to navigate sometimes. But, um, so let's get back to your story. You, uh, you went to the CIA, we were, we'll be left off when you went to the CIA.

• 1:22:37Speaker 01

  I was at the CIA, working, um, in the National Photographic Interpretation Center. NPIC.

• 1:22:45Danny Jones?

  Okay.

• 1:22:45Speaker 01

  It changed its name. There is now an agency.

• 1:22:48Danny Jones?

  Which was part of the NRO, right?

• 1:22:50Speaker 01

  Well, it was, it was the analytic side that took what would come down from national technical means.

• 1:22:57Danny Jones?

  Okay.

• 1:22:58Speaker 01

  Including NRO primarily, and analyze it.

• 1:23:01Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:23:02Speaker 01

  And report on it. And it could even end up in the president's daily brief. But there was, I was, you know, later on, I was even part of a, of a joint team at the military in the alert center at the Pentagon, working for the J2, where you'd put together, you know, a morning report.

• 1:23:16Danny Jones?

  Oh, wow.

• 1:23:17Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, which would include, it was all sorts. It would include imagery of all types.

• 1:23:22Danny Jones?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:23:22Speaker 01

  It would include signals intelligence, which was a huge component. Um, because there's, you know, obviously I worked on the Elin disc for a while. All right. So this, this overlaps.

• 1:23:33Danny Jones?

  What is that?

• 1:23:34Speaker 01

  Electronic intelligence. So there's a double different ends.

• 1:23:36Danny Jones?

  Okay.

• 1:23:37Speaker 01

  Sigent incorporates basically communications intelligence, electronic intelligence.

• 1:23:41Danny Jones?

  Okay.

• 1:23:42Speaker 01

  Um, signals intelligence.

• 1:23:43Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:45Speaker 01

  But I, you know, I worked in multiple ends.

• 1:23:48Danny Jones?

  Oh, got it.

• 1:23:49Speaker 01

  So there was a time when I was in the Navy. So this goes now we're not talking 91. So I left the CIA and the reason is I had an opportunity to become a contractor doing similar work. It ended up being something completely different. It was government contractor, getting paid a whole lot more money. I'm in the DC area. Okay. And without even going all the details, it was better at that point. So, you know, with a 40% increase plus in salary. And, and, and a young family.

• 1:24:17Danny Jones?

  Right. Who wouldn't?

• 1:24:19Speaker 01

  Uh, and.

• 1:24:20Danny Jones?

  You get to keep your clearance.

• 1:24:21Speaker 01

  Correct. Did, could do all of that. Yep. But work is in a con, is working as a contractor. Yep. But it was the first time that I actually worked as a contractor. I, of course, I worked with contractors even overseas.

• 1:24:34Danny Jones?

  Okay.

• 1:24:35Speaker 01

  Highly specialized contractors that helps support, um, like E systems.

• 1:24:39Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:24:40Speaker 01

  At a Greenville, uh, Texas. They were one of the contractors that supported the, the RC 135 program.

• 1:24:47Danny Jones?

  Okay.

• 1:24:49Speaker 01

  Or Lockheed Martin when I was, when I was in electronic warfare.

• 1:24:53Danny Jones?

  Oh, wow.

• 1:24:54Speaker 01

  Yeah. So I ended up applying. I wanted, I wanted to continue to serve my country. I'm, I'm a contractor, but there's a way to do that. Without going back into the military full time because it's, it's clear that I had moved on from that. So one way to do that is in the reserves. So I became a, um, it was a direct commission program. I had, I had the master's degree. And I had the background. I had the qualifications and, and when they were looking doctors, lawyers, intelligence specialists. So I applied, was accepted. Um, I, I went through their training program. And then I was assigned to the DIA headquarters unit in the alert center in the national military joint intelligence center at the Pentagon.

• 1:25:36Speaker 01

  Pentagon, reporting directly to the J two, D I A, right, was a day to day agency that.

• 1:25:41Danny Jones?

  People that don't know, what is J two?

• 1:25:43Speaker 01

  The J two is the most senior intelligence officer in, um, in the military, in the, in the Pentagon. And they are the, they provide the, the consolidated intelligence to the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

• 1:25:57Danny Jones?

  Right, okay.

• 1:25:58Speaker 01

  So they work within the Joint Chiefs of Staff Office. You have different Js. I was in the J two part.

• 1:26:03Danny Jones?

  Okay.

• 1:26:05Speaker 01

  But we got, I'm feeding, we're big feeds from all over the world. Fascinating. I was there for, for a number of years. I got to, I got to the rank of lieutenant. So I was, you know, the railroad tracks, um, on, on my naval uniform, my Navy uniform.

• 1:26:19Danny Jones?

  Um, what do you mean when you say feeds from all over?

• 1:26:22Speaker 01

  Feeds, multiple desks, civilian and military. So for example, I, the first desk, I'll just give you an example. We have time to go into every, because it's a huge, it's in, it's in, but it's, it's the, it's kind of like the SIGINT Operations Center, the SOC is they called NSA. This is the, the Pentagon's version of that. But we had multiple agencies there. CIA had its own desk. State Department had its own desk. The CIA had its own desk. Later NSA had a desk. I was first assigned because of my technical background to the ELINT desk. Fascinating, right? It just, it was another aspect of this. Then I, then I was assigned.

• 1:27:02Speaker 01

  And I'm going to, this is critical to the rest of the story, which is really at the heart of what we're going to be talking about because of what led up to it. What happened on nine 11 and then what happened in the aftermath of nine 11?

• 1:27:13Danny Jones?

  Okay.

• 1:27:13Speaker 01

  And then how did I find myself on the front pages of all major newspapers in the country? Some years later.

• 1:27:20Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:27:21Speaker 01

  Okay. Well, how did that all happen? Right? And so I was sitting on the terrorism desk.

• 1:27:30Speaker 01

  Terrorism desk doing incredibly advanced link analysis. Link analysis, meaning we're doing advanced social, I'll just to simplify this, right? Without getting into the weeds, social network analysis. You're going beyond just raw intelligence. What you're doing is because it's terrorism, which is an idea, right? Right?

• 1:27:53Speaker 01

  But where is it embedded? It's embedded in people who decide, you know what? I'm going to commit acts of violence or the equivalent against others. Right? Because I have an ideology, I have a beef, I've got a bone. It could be historical, it could be personal, but it's not basically non-state actors. Although states obviously involve themselves in terrorism and even help sponsor with proxies and everything else. So. I'm in the terrorism desk. Guess what happened in 1993 in in lower Manhattan? People forget about this. They attempted to drop the World Trade Center towers with truck bombs. If they had, they went off. People were killed, people were injured. There was a lot of damage. And if they've been positioned differently, it may have caused way more damage.

• 1:28:37Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:28:38Speaker 01

  I'm sitting, I'm in the alert center. We're following all of this. I literally issued a report. It's a written report. I am sure it's buried. I'm in the alert center. I'm wearing my uniform, my naval uniform. I'm sitting at the desk. I later, shortly after, I went to the Middle East, North Africa desk. That was interesting as well. But on the terrorism desk, which was a unique desk, a unique desk, because it was, it was in essence focused on a particular challenge of how do you deal with non-state actors?

• 1:29:17Speaker 01

  Primarily, or the proxies of state actors.

• 1:29:21Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:29:22Speaker 01

  They don't wear uniforms all the time. They blend and disappear into the population. They have their own unique ways of communicating, both in terms of language and even technology.

• 1:29:36Speaker 01

  So I'm sitting on the desk, I issued a report, I said, because we've been following any number of terrorist groups and individuals, including Al Qaeda.

• 1:29:44Speaker 03

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• 1:30:45Danny Jones?

  And when you're following them, are you working with other agencies to follow them?

• 1:30:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's all source. I have different phones on my desk. I could call up and, oh yeah, or my colleagues right there in the alert center.

• 1:30:56Danny Jones?

  Like the FBI and...

• 1:30:57Speaker 01

  Right there. Right there. That was the beauty of it. It was a fusion center. It was one of the really, it was really the first fusion center. The 9/11 triggered all the fusion centers. But we already had that, at least the military, right, reporting to the J2. But it wasn't just military. You had all the other representing agencies that had anything to do with intelligence, world affairs.

• 1:31:22Danny Jones?

  Sure.

• 1:31:23Speaker 01

  Challenges, challenges, period.

• 1:31:26Speaker 01

  We have, we even had people dealing with weather. I mean, you can, we're talking, it's a holistic.

• 1:31:32Danny Jones?

  Weather?

• 1:31:33Speaker 01

  Is we would call full spectrum. Yes.

• 1:31:37Danny Jones?

  Why were you guys worried about weather?

• 1:31:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, because depending where you were, right? I mean, things happened.

• 1:31:41Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:42Speaker 01

  Right. We, we had the specialized desk that dealt with alerts for nuclear, like certain, or not just nuclear, but certain launches.

• 1:31:50Danny Jones?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:31:50Speaker 01

  You're always tracking launches. You're always tracking.

• 1:31:53Danny Jones?

  Everywhere.

• 1:31:53Speaker 01

  Their signatures, specialized technology to, to analyze in real time or near real time, what those signatures were.

• 1:32:00Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:32:00Speaker 01

  What, where the angle was, what, I mean.

• 1:32:04Danny Jones?

  The Ciber satellites are a huge part of that, right?

• 1:32:06Speaker 01

  All kinds of, how do you determine like strength of signals, emanations, emissions of all kinds, right? Mazin is a whole nother int as well.

• 1:32:16Danny Jones?

  What is Mazin?

• 1:32:17Speaker 01

  Mazin is that, that's basically the, the, the technical, more technical ins.

• 1:32:22Danny Jones?

  Okay.

• 1:32:22Speaker 01

  In terms of things that, basically anything that, that provides a, a signature.

• 1:32:28Danny Jones?

  Got it.

• 1:32:29Speaker 01

  Yeah. Besides normal signals, besides normal electronics. Yeah.

• 1:32:34Danny Jones?

  Like smoke or vapor?

• 1:32:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, they're all, there's all, this is, we're talking.

• 1:32:38Danny Jones?

  Fire.

• 1:32:38Speaker 01

  Full spectrum.

• 1:32:39Danny Jones?

  Full spectrum, everything.

• 1:32:40Speaker 01

  Spectrum. Oh, yeah. Yeah. And there's even specialized even within that, right? It gets really specific. Yeah. I mean, even in the imagery space, we had specialized instruments to measure things.

• 1:32:52Danny Jones?

  Did you ever, did you ever, um,

• 1:32:56Danny Jones?

  work with the Cibers system?

• 1:32:59Speaker 01

  I'm, I'm aware of it.

• 1:33:02Danny Jones?

  Okay. I didn't know if you ever like monitored the Ciber stuff. Okay.

• 1:33:06Speaker 01

  No.

• 1:33:07Danny Jones?

  Yeah. My understanding of it is, um, there's like basically a bunch of them that are traveling around the globe. Like constantly, and, and there's a constant, essentially like with, with all of the different Ciber satellites constantly rotating the globe, the earth. Every single square inch of earth is covered at all times by these Ciber satellites that are recording. That were recording what's going on on the ground, what's going on in airspace and all that stuff.

• 1:33:37Speaker 01

  There was partial versions of that when I was there. Remember, there's been an evolution in technology that has advanced that.

• 1:33:43Danny Jones?

  Find out, Steve, find out when CIBRs became.

• 1:33:46Speaker 01

  See, a lot of the early stuff was prototype or or it was in the in the in the highly classified military space. That was always the like one of the covers or operating under military as a cover for other agencies.

• 1:33:59Danny Jones?

  Okay, so CIBR, when did that come about? Is there a date, Steve?

• 1:34:07Speaker 01

  Um.

• 1:34:08Danny Jones?

  Nineteen ninety four?

• 1:34:09Speaker 02

  It started in the eighties.

• 1:34:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's.

• 1:34:12Danny Jones?

  Oh, that's the advanced warning system and then the boost surveillance and tracking system.

• 1:34:16Speaker 01

  They've had that for a while. That's been evolved. Remember, that for me, my period is the eighties and and through the late nineties.

• 1:34:22Danny Jones?

  Follow on early warning system in the early nineties.

• 1:34:25Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:34:25Danny Jones?

  Oh, by the way, I just remembered what I what I was trying to when we were talking about the nuclear stuff. It's a launch on warning. That's the that's the term they have.

• 1:34:35Speaker 01

  Launch on warning.

• 1:34:36Danny Jones?

  For when they see a ICBM going up that we have to empty our silos.

• 1:34:39Speaker 01

  Well, that's it's a it's a it's a shorthand to say that's what you would launch when you a warning that was, oh, where it's head they're heading. They're incoming.

• 1:34:48Danny Jones?

  Just like use it or lose it with the.

• 1:34:49Speaker 01

  Use it or lose it is no way launch on warning.

• 1:34:52Danny Jones?

  Yeah, right.

• 1:34:53Speaker 02

  Looks like two thousand nine is when they started the earliest.

• 1:34:56Speaker 01

  Okay, that's that's after that. Remember, I'm only aware of prototypes that had nowhere near the coverage. You have to remember, I mean, this extraordinary evolution of technology has enabled all this.

• 1:35:06Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:35:07Speaker 01

  And even the ability to launch on a regular basis.

• 1:35:11Danny Jones?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:35:11Speaker 01

  One of the things that Musk can do is SpaceX. I met him, by the way, when.

• 1:35:16Danny Jones?

  You met Elon?

• 1:35:17Speaker 01

  That's a whole nother story.

• 1:35:18Danny Jones?

  Really? When did you meet him?

• 1:35:19Speaker 01

  Oh, nine, two thousand and seven, before the first successful launch of Falcon.

• 1:35:26Danny Jones?

  Now, two thousand and seven was when you were going through everything, right? When you were you were on your way out.

• 1:35:31Speaker 01

  Not yet.

• 1:35:32Danny Jones?

  Oh, not yet.

• 1:35:32Speaker 01

  No.

• 1:35:33Danny Jones?

  So you were still in NSA.

• 1:35:34Speaker 01

  I was still in NSA. I was teaching at the National Defense University at the time.

• 1:35:38Danny Jones?

  What was the context of this?

• 1:35:40Speaker 01

  We'll get to it. That's a whole nother. If you want to jump around, I can, but.

• 1:35:44Danny Jones?

  Okay, we'll get to it.

• 1:35:45Speaker 01

  I get to it. You might want to make a note. Yes. People always say, you meant Musk? What was he like? I say, yeah.

• 1:35:50Danny Jones?

  You heard it, folks. You better keep watching this because we're going to hear a great story about Elon and the deep state.

• 1:35:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's a story. All right.

• 1:35:57Danny Jones?

  He's fat.

• 1:35:57Speaker 01

  You gotta remember, he was in his, when I met him, he was in his mid 30s.

• 1:36:02Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:36:02Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:36:03Danny Jones?

  Right. 2007. Yeah.

• 1:36:04Speaker 01

  Yeah. Full of mojo and just, yeah, he was, it was, it's a new story. It's, but it's, you know, this fascinating startup. Right. It was.

• 1:36:14Danny Jones?

  Also, so, so you mentioned that the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center.

• 1:36:18Speaker 01

  Oh, yes. That's, this is critical to what literally became the split in the time space continuum for me, the US and the world.

• 1:36:28Danny Jones?

  Okay.

• 1:36:29Speaker 01

  Because without, without this particular event.

• 1:36:34Speaker 01

  But so, so let me go back. See, this is Joseph Lockhart. You'll want me to talk about Joseph Lockhart from, from Pearl Harbor. 1940, December 7, 1941, a day of infamy. That never should have happened either. I can tell you in terms of the damage. Let alone the warning. You know, there was a warning. The warning went out. It got rejected.

• 1:36:53Danny Jones?

  Why did it get rejected?

• 1:36:55Speaker 01

  It wasn't considered important enough. The, the duty officer said, ah, he decided that, nah, it's not worth reporting, not worth sending out the alert.

• 1:37:05Speaker 01

  To move, to move airplanes on the fails pointed nose, you know, basically wingtip to wingtip to move ships out or to alert the crews that actually man the anti-aircraft guns. But that gets, I, I'm in an interview, Joseph Lockhart.

• 1:37:17Danny Jones?

  Yeah, there's a lot of documentaries out there that speculate that that was, uh, that they let that happen as a, um, an excuse to enter the war.

• 1:37:27Speaker 01

  I'll just, I think there's a both hand here. It's not either or. This is all people want. This simplistic.

• 1:37:32Danny Jones?

  People want to be black and white.

• 1:37:33Speaker 01

  It's not black or white. It's not. It's, it's not. But Roosevelt was looking for a way. He was already supporting Britain.

• 1:37:41Danny Jones?

  Many things can be true at once.

• 1:37:42Speaker 01

  Yes. Many things can be true and they can even appear to be contradictory.

• 1:37:46Danny Jones?

  Yep. Yeah.

• 1:37:47Speaker 01

  And yet still, yes. So 1993.

• 1:37:53Speaker 01

  I sent out a message. This is one that's going to haunt me for the rest. This is one of the, this is the first haunt of my life, right? Being within the deep state. Some message saying, these, they may have failed to drop the World Trade Center. I said it this way. I'm paraphrasing myself. They may have failed to drop the World Trade Center sign, but they're coming back. They're coming back.

• 1:38:18Speaker 01

  We must warn all the command authorities about what their intent is. They're coming back. This is not a one-time event. This is not a one-off event.

• 1:38:28Danny Jones?

  And how?

• 1:38:30Speaker 01

  We've been doing the long-term, short-term, midterm analysis.

• 1:38:34Danny Jones?

  So this was the analysis of it?

• 1:38:35Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:38:36Danny Jones?

  We knew they were coming back.

• 1:38:37Speaker 01

  Remember, I'm drawing on my entire, this is the thing. People don't realize what it takes to become fully like is knowledgeable in your space. You're basically, you're, you're, you're not just an area specialist. In this case, I was sitting in the terrorism desk. I had to, I had to know as much as I could know that was possible. And we had, we had all kinds of updated, updated, um, um, topic areas on terrorism, right? What's the latest? And we, you know, you keep iterate, iterate, iterate, publish it, iterate, iterate, iterate, publish it. Because the desk rotates. I mean, I was only there on weekends. I was a weekend warrior because I was in the reserves. One, usually at least once, once a month. So I was there for, you know,

• 1:39:20Speaker 01

  for two full cycles. Sometimes Friday night till Sunday, sometimes from Saturday through Monday morning. And then I would go to work. And at that time I was working at Booze Allen and Hamilton. A whole nother part of my career.

• 1:39:31Danny Jones?

  Oh, wow.

• 1:39:32Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah.

• 1:39:36Speaker 01

  So I sent out this report. Now there was, it's, it's an internal, it's an internal, but it gets all the way to the J2, which is usually a one or two-star general.

• 1:39:45Danny Jones?

  Okay.

• 1:39:46Speaker 01

  He comes down to the alert center and the alert center itself is, it's 24 hours. Normally run usually by a, a, a O6, usually a captain Navy or a Colonel Air Force Army. And it rotates, right? Depending on who's on shift and working. It can be temporary filled by a senior like Lieutenant Colonel at O5. But flag level, because it's a flag level position, it's usually, it's usually in oh six. Generals begin at oh seven and then go up to oh 10. And so I, he comes down, he literally, which is rare, he rarely ever came down, right? But he comes down, he alert center says, yeah, I saw your report. And this is, I'm, this is almost literally what he said out loud.

• 1:40:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, who cares? Who cares about some raghead issuing fatwas in the desert, sitting under a fig tree?

• 1:40:44Speaker 01

  And I paused because it's like, he just dismissed it. I was classically trained in terms of intelligence. It's an art and a science. It's not perfect. It has confidence levels. You know, some cases you have low confidence, sometimes you have high confidence.

• 1:41:01Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:41:02Speaker 01

  We had pretty high confidence that they meant business. There already been a series of terrorist incidents. You can go back to the Reagan, right? Remember Beirut? And we didn't do anything. He just pulled us out.

• 1:41:14Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:41:15Speaker 01

  You can, people have argued about, why did he do that? Someone said it actually emboldened the terrorists. Never mind sort of the larger geopolitical dynamics in terms of history, which in itself gets complicated enough. Okay.

• 1:41:26Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:41:26Speaker 01

  Remember a bunch of French military lost their lives too, in, in the, they're not just US.

• 1:41:33Speaker 01

  So it was clear, the system, I say the system, and this is where you get into people. It wasn't considered, remember, you gotta remember what year it is. This is critical in context. Context is everything here. I remember I was classically trained, indications, warning, duty to warn, but indications. You don't want to wait until you warn. You also want to be in the decision loop, no matter what it is, ahead of time. And what's the whole focus? To keep people out of harm's way, not just US, it could be allies, friendly, period. If you know there's an international airliner, like KL 007, I'm jumping ahead again, okay? But the same year, I mean, I mean, go back 10 years in 1983, which I have inside knowledge on that one.

• 1:42:17Speaker 01

  If you know there's an international airliner flying, flying outside of its, of its route, okay?

• 1:42:25Speaker 01

  And you know that it's now being perceived as an RC 135. That's how the Russians in the west, the, the, the far eastern district, uh, perceived it. They're not going to take it too kindly. They're particularly sensitive to that part of their, of their country. It never should have been shot down. I'm just going to tell you, but that's a what if for me because it did, it got shot down. All those passengers on a 747.

• 1:42:52Danny Jones?

  This was what year?

• 1:42:53Speaker 01

  1983.

• 1:42:55Danny Jones?

  Eighty-three.

• 1:42:56Speaker 01

  KL 007.

• 1:42:59Speaker 01

  Korean Airlines.

• 1:43:00Danny Jones?

  Oh, yes.

• 1:43:01Speaker 01

  I was stationed at Mildenhall, but we got all the reports. I knew people that worked at the Masawa unit. There was then a secret collection unit way up Wakani. I can say it now, way up on the coast. It was, it was the most northern collection, but at the time it was highly sent, super sensitive.

• 1:43:21Danny Jones?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:43:22Speaker 01

  I knew people that worked there.

• 1:43:26Speaker 01

  And they sent out the, I mentioned the critic reporting system, which is supposed to get on the president's desk within 10 minutes.

• 1:43:31Danny Jones?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:43:33Speaker 01

  Issued it, got rejected by NSA. Issued it again, got rejected by NSA. Then it was too late.

• 1:43:39Danny Jones?

  Oh, my God.

• 1:43:39Speaker 01

  They thought it was an exercise back at headquarters. They didn't, they didn't trust the field. That's why you have the alert system. The field site is supposed to provide for that type of coverage.

• 1:43:50Speaker 01

  You didn't just have responsibility to quote unquote spy, collect intelligence on a, a adversary. You also had responsibility to civilian side of the world. This is a civilian airliner. It's not a military airliner at all, but they thought it was an RC 135. Why? Because a Cobra ball mission, another variant of the RC 135, didn't fly in it, but I certainly knew people that did. Happened to be in the area. What were they waiting for? A launch from Kamchatka, because that's typically how the Soviets at the time, they would launch into the Pacific. Got thousands and thousands of miles. It's out in the boonies on this huge peninsula.

• 1:44:29Danny Jones?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:44:30Speaker 01

  But we monitor it with a super specialized equipment.

• 1:44:33Danny Jones?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:44:36Speaker 01

  Without going all the details, they end up going home.

• 1:44:40Speaker 01

  They switched the track. So they call it on the radar because radar back over there wasn't that as advanced. And they kept thinking as they saw this, what they thought was an RC 135, violating their airspace as it flew over the peninsula and into the Sea of Otakos. And they said, well, we better, we better go up and shoot it down. The order was given to shoot it down. And they got shot down. All this was captured. Now Reagan made a big deal out of it because it was incredibly embarrassing because it turns out they shot down a civilian airliner. In the profile, if you're on radar, the profile, even looking at it, even though a 747 is actually quite a bit larger than an RC 135, but it kind of looks the same.

• 1:45:23Danny Jones?

  Can you pull up a picture of an RC 135, Steve?

• 1:45:25Speaker 01

  They both have four engines. It's similar in terms of the angle of the wing. That's one of the, yep, plane. That's the, I believe is a combat sent variant.

• 1:45:34Danny Jones?

  Wow.

• 1:45:34Speaker 01

  There's different variants, of course.

• 1:45:36Danny Jones?

  Okay.

• 1:45:36Speaker 01

  But if you look at that and then compare it to a, um, a 747.

• 1:45:41Danny Jones?

  Very similar.

• 1:45:42Speaker 01

  In profile, from a distance, it's similar. On the radar, a few feet here and there, can't really tell.

• 1:45:53Speaker 01

  They thought it was an RC 135.

• 1:45:57Danny Jones?

  That's a 747. Yeah. What's the story? There was also, um, and this is probably after your, uh, after you were out of NSA, but there was a story similar where an airline got shot down right off of New York, or maybe it didn't get shot down.

• 1:46:12Speaker 01

  OTW 800?

• 1:46:13Danny Jones?

  TW 800, yes.

• 1:46:15Speaker 01

  That is wrapped in a mystery inside of a puzzle that's then smothered with an enigma. I had to paraphrase Churchill.

• 1:46:23Danny Jones?

  I had a, yeah, I had a fellow, a former FBI agent on the, on the show, um, about a year ago, who was there on site, cleaning up, like, like trying to rescue people that were, I mean, there was no rescues, but like, he was there, like in the recovery process of that. And he said it was the worst day of his life, having to see that.

• 1:46:44Danny Jones?

  And the official story is what like the, what was the official story of that?

• 1:46:48Speaker 01

  Electrical, electrical short.

• 1:46:50Danny Jones?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:46:51Speaker 01

  That was the official story.

• 1:46:52Danny Jones?

  I think he said on the podcast, he said it looked like it got shot down.

• 1:46:56Speaker 01

  Many people said, and they, yes. I can't definitively say. But by virtue of how they, how they sealed the whole investigation and a lot of the mystery around what really happened in terms of reporting. It raises some interest of some really hard questions that still remain unanswered to this day. I think there was an accident, but I can see, and some have argued that that variant of the eight hundred, right? I mean, it was a flight, but the variant of that plane could have been susceptible to, and this is gets into static electricity and it could have ignited, but

• 1:47:38Speaker 01

  you know, there are safety mechanisms. Yeah, machines are imperfect. But there is other things around that in terms of what appears to be some kind of launch coming from the vicinity of the ground. That would lead to a possibility that was. This reminds me, it reminds me of what happened with the Airbus, never mind K L double seven, the Airbus, the Iranian Airbus. They took, took off from the airfield and they share it with the military. And there the Vincennes, you go back in the history. This, this is interesting. They thought, they thought the Vincennes, they thought that it was an F fourteen that was coming, coming in

• 1:48:22Speaker 01

  at an angle to attack them. Well, there was, there was a ferry flight that they always flew back and forth. There was an Airbus that flew back and forth across, across the Gulf routinely. And it was on descent, you know, it peaks out, it's a very short flight across, across the Gulf. You know, when you're flying three fifty, four hundred, four hundred fifty miles plus miles an hour. So they they fired off a standard when I was in the Navy, a standard missile, which is basically fire and forget. You can't really recall it per se.

• 1:48:50Danny Jones?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:48:50Speaker 01

  And boom. And to our horror, we shot down a civilian airliner.

• 1:48:54Danny Jones?

  Oh.

• 1:48:54Speaker 01

  Uh, you know.

• 1:48:55Danny Jones?

  God.

• 1:48:56Speaker 01

  Well, it turns out, even though there was an instrument panel that showed it, it was an F fourteen squawking on the airbase, but it got mixed up. They trans and in the heat of the battle and that was, you got to remember the dynamics and that was one of those periods where they were sending out their little boats and needling like a, you know, like an, like a, like a flea, right? Just, you know, in the Vincennes is, you know, Tyco under class, you know, cruiser. So.

• 1:49:24Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:49:25Speaker 01

  But a whole bunch of civilians lost their lives.

• 1:49:27Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:49:28Speaker 01

  I mean, I, so. But it caught, it was an international incident of major proportions.

• 1:49:33Danny Jones?

  Mm hmm. Steve just found a, a great animation of that TWA eight hundred flight. On like the, I guess they, they somehow, based on the trajectory of all the debris, they figured out like what the explosion looked like and how it ripped the plane apart. Go ahead and play it, Steve.

• 1:49:56Danny Jones?

  So the head of the airplane just fricking came off, got decapitated.

• 1:49:59Speaker 01

  Yep. Wow. Actually, that's the first time I've seen this. I've not, I haven't seen, I've never seen the animation.

• 1:50:05Danny Jones?

  That was. I imagine these guys are blacked out already, right? They're unconscious.

• 1:50:09Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. It's just the, the forces involved.

• 1:50:12Danny Jones?

  Right. And then the people that are in the plane.

• 1:50:14Speaker 01

  Well, you're, you're at altitude. That's the other problem. You immediately, I had to, I had to, we went through special chambers, uh, the, to learn what would happen if you lost air or had a a blowout or whatever, or even got hit.

• 1:50:27Danny Jones?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:50:28Speaker 01

  At altitude, uh, you had to go on oxygen almost immediately.

• 1:50:31Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:50:31Speaker 01

  Cause you would lose consciousness.

• 1:50:33Danny Jones?

  Right, right.

• 1:50:33Speaker 01

  There wasn't, there wasn't enough pressure to keep the oxygen, you know, the air in your lungs.

• 1:50:38Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:50:39Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 1:50:42Speaker 01

  You saw what happened to the plane that was coming in about three hundred and fifty, three hundred feet off. This is the, the, the helicopter that ran into.

• 1:50:49Danny Jones?

  Oh, yeah, just recently. The, what was the story with that?

• 1:50:53Speaker 01

  The, uh, the commuter jet.

• 1:50:56Danny Jones?

  Oh, oh, the private jet.

• 1:50:58Speaker 01

  Was it a private jet? Commuter. It, it's eagle, it's eagle. Um, it's a, it's a subsidiary.

• 1:51:04Danny Jones?

  I saw two things. I saw one thing that was like a, in a midair collision. It looked like, another one where a private jet just nosedown into a highway.

• 1:51:11Speaker 01

  That was apparently some kind of meta flight. They were actually on their way to, uh, uh, the central part, the heartland of America, and then going into Mexico. Someone got flown in for special treatment in the Baltimore area, I mean, Philadelphia area.

• 1:51:23Danny Jones?

  Uh, yeah, yeah, exactly.

• 1:51:25Speaker 01

  Yeah. I, I don't, that one is, that one's like, wow, it was like a missile. They were, they were talking, it was incredible. I mean, just, just dropped out of the sky.

• 1:51:31Danny Jones?

  Straight down.

• 1:51:32Speaker 01

  Yeah. Super steep angle. It put an eight foot hole apparently for people on the scene and it was scattered debris everywhere, but that was, yeah.

• 1:51:40Danny Jones?

  God.

• 1:51:41Speaker 01

  But you saw, what I'm saying is how, how quickly, um, that commuter, uh, jet broke up at three, got hit. You can see that helicopter.

• 1:51:53Speaker 01

  Uh, the UH is plow, plowing right in the UH sixty, which is their kind of the workhorse helicopter. Goes back thirty, forty, fifty, forty, fifty years now.

• 1:52:00Danny Jones?

  Can you find a video of it, Steve?

• 1:52:01Speaker 01

  The UH sixty?

• 1:52:02Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:52:03Speaker 01

  Um, I mean, I'm very familiar with that because we used to, some of the mission, you would see them flying around besides the Patches and everything else, but the UH sixty is a workhorse. And flew, it just like, didn't even know it was there. It's, it's pretty clear. There was no evasive maneuvers. Just flew right in, it flew right into it.

• 1:52:19Danny Jones?

  Oh, the videos, the, the video is really kind of hard to see.

• 1:52:22Speaker 01

  Three hundred, well, uh, three hundred feet, because it was basically just before nine o'clock on Wednesday. It just flew right into it.

• 1:52:29Danny Jones?

  That's all it is.

• 1:52:29Speaker 01

  And it just, everybody's dead.

• 1:52:31Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:52:31Speaker 01

  Including helicopter.

• 1:52:32Danny Jones?

  How does that happen, man?

• 1:52:34Speaker 01

  Well, see, that's, that's, there's been a lot of close calls, as it turns out, a lot, because they have all these helicopter routes. You're now, and Reagan has been expanded. Thank you, you, because if you're in Congress, you want to get home as quick as possible. You want me, it's right there, but it's, you know, basically it's in downtown. It's that close.

• 1:52:51Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:52:51Speaker 01

  And it's just a very congested area.

• 1:52:55Danny Jones?

  And this was, this was also, uh, near Philadelphia?

• 1:52:58Speaker 01

  No, this is DC.

• 1:52:59Danny Jones?

  This is DC.

• 1:52:59Speaker 01

  Reagan, this is Reagan and the, or the, he's on final approach.

• 1:53:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:53:05Danny Jones?

  It's just crazy that this is all happening like right on the heels of all that drone controversy.

• 1:53:09Speaker 01

  Oh, the drone, the drone stuff, that's.

• 1:53:11Danny Jones?

  I mean, I think the Trump, Trump just came out and said that it was, they said that it was surveillance, some sort of surveillance thing combined with hobbyists.

• 1:53:20Speaker 01

  Yep. You don't hear about it anymore. You're not hearing about it now. I mean, you don't say it became this thing. It's just reminds me of War of the Worlds. People started seeing all kinds of things. People were showing, hey, there's a whole nother one. And it's got regular blinking lights. It turns out because all kinds of air, you know, there's all kinds of airfields, both public and private and military in that area.

• 1:53:40Danny Jones?

  Right, everywhere.

• 1:53:41Speaker 01

  People just started, people just, well, you're talking New York, the New York area, right? The greater New York, New Jersey, right? That is very congested as well.

• 1:53:49Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:53:49Speaker 01

  People were just on regular flight paths, people in and out of airports, and they're saying they're UFOs.

• 1:53:55Danny Jones?

  They were, they were definitely conventional drones, but like, why?

• 1:53:58Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:53:59Danny Jones?

  Like, why all of a sudden are all these drones out there and only at night?

• 1:54:02Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:54:02Danny Jones?

  And then there was a couple of stories that came out. One that they were looking for like a rogue nuke.

• 1:54:06Speaker 01

  I heard that. I heard that. Plus, there's all kinds of people, there are training exercises. And sometime with the training exercises in the military or, or sort of the secret side of government, they do it under the cover of civilian, right? It just makes it more real. We used to do that.

• 1:54:21Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:54:21Speaker 01

  Look, I'll give you, you want to add another example?

• 1:54:24Danny Jones?

  Yeah, of course.

• 1:54:26Speaker 01

  We used to fly all kinds of training flights with the compass calls a wartime mission. Remember it was combat support. I mean, wartime, but conflict. You just didn't routinely go out and jam stuff. You didn't. We had a special, uh, it was basically an oil bath where if you would, you could send the signal, the jamming, right, the electronic into this, it would never, it never radiate outside. We had a special, it was basically called a cheese cutter. It never radiate outside of the airplane. So, but there was a switch and it was actually because it was a weapon system. It was technically an electronic weapon system. It was controlled by an officer. So I reported in the back of the plane, there was a front, the front end crew. I reported as a mission crew supervisor to a mission crew commander, right? An officer. I was a non-commissioned.

• 1:55:11Speaker 01

  He was commissioned. But he had a switch. In the switch, there was one, it's live or it's. The oil pop, you know, the oil pot, right? So you had to flip the switch to an on position for any radiation that was electronic, you know, a suppressant is a suppressant version of electronic signal. Multiple frequencies depending, you could target it, you could broadband it, you could be very, and you had to flip a switch. Well, we were, we were flying to a certain part of the, the, the Western US. And we, we had special permission because we're gonna, we'll get to this, the whole thing with,

• 1:55:55Speaker 01

  you can't listen in, spy on, collect on Americans.

• 1:55:59Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:55:59Speaker 01

  Without a warrant.

• 1:56:00Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:56:01Speaker 01

  Not that it matters anymore, but that's part of the constitution.

• 1:56:03Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:56:04Speaker 01

  Part of the reason why we were Americans, because we had a revolution for Christ's sake. And we're flying around, right? And of course, that plane flew a lot lower. We're talking about 20,000 feet, 15, 20,000 feet. It could go higher, but that was sort of its normal operating thing. And, and it's a prop plane, turboprop, four engine.

• 1:56:25Speaker 01

  Accidentally flipped on the switch.

• 1:56:30Speaker 01

  And shut down.

• 1:56:33Speaker 01

  Good news, rather remote part of the Western, this Western part of the United States shut down radio stations in the area.

• 1:56:40Danny Jones?

  Oh, my God.

• 1:56:41Speaker 01

  People were calling in saying, ah, I, what happened to the radio station, right? Whoops, whoops, whoops.

• 1:56:51Speaker 01

  Oh, man.

• 1:56:52Speaker 02

  What plane is this?

• 1:56:53Speaker 01

  EC 138.

• 1:56:54Danny Jones?

  EC 138.

• 1:56:55Speaker 01

  Complish call.

• 1:56:56Danny Jones?

  All right, so let's jump back to your story and let's get into the good stuff.

• 1:57:00Speaker 01

  The good stuff?

• 1:57:01Danny Jones?

  Well, I mean, let's, let's, uh, let's start that trajectory at least.

• 1:57:04Speaker 01

  All right.

• 1:57:05Danny Jones?

  So, so I think we left off, um, when you were in NSA and, um, it was 1993, that whole terrorist thing, you were working on the terrorist.

• 1:57:14Speaker 01

  Navy, Navy.

• 1:57:16Danny Jones?

  That was Navy.

• 1:57:16Speaker 01

  On the terrorism desk.

• 1:57:17Danny Jones?

  Terrorism desk. Okay. Cool. And then how did you get from there, um, to NSA?

• 1:57:22Speaker 01

  So I was, I was also a contractor NSA. This is where I was at Booze Allen Hamilton and later with a couple of boutique dot coms in doing management information technology consulting.

• 1:57:32Danny Jones?

  Okay.

• 1:57:32Speaker 01

  So I had become very, very familiar with NSA. And I was actually working on a special program. Called Jackpot, which was an out of the box program separately funded, had five year funding. It was actually part of interesting enough Al Gore's reinventing government initiative. Now, Al Gore did not invent the internet. That's popular meme at the time.

• 1:57:54Danny Jones?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:57:55Speaker 01

  It was basically expand internet, enhance internet. But re under reinventing, a number of agencies were were given special money to take the best of American engineering innovativeness in the IT digital space and bring it in NSA. NSA had become very institutionalized. It had become very reliant on its legacy. I didn't, this gets into, you can remember, it was designed to deal with a very rigid command and control system called the Soviet Union primarily, even though it had a worldwide mission, but that was its primary focus.

• 1:58:34Danny Jones?

  Okay.

• 1:58:36Speaker 01

  Even when I flew in RCs, the bulk of the of the linguists, the crypto linguists were Russian, not all of them. And I had to know enough Russian to understand it. Just another part of my job.

• 1:58:49Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:58:49Speaker 01

  But the primary function, the primary, in terms of the set of people that were on that plane were Russian, were Russian.

• 1:58:57Danny Jones?

  Okay.

• 1:58:58Speaker 01

  Just by virtue of the priority.

• 1:59:02Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:59:03Speaker 01

  So Cold War ends. I'm sitting on desks that are dealing with emerging threats, but it was being basically ignored or dismissed by those in Powell.

• 1:59:21Danny Jones?

  Yeah, you mentioned the general came in and basically said, I don't give a shit about a couple of ragheads.

• 1:59:25Speaker 01

  That's right. Yeah. So, but I was working on a special program called Jackpot. So we're now bringing in the best because they realized, here's the kicker, the key, but it's a kicker. They did study after study after study. Some were pretty significant, including Iran Corporation study. There was others, including stakeholders with the oversight committees. Remember, there was a forum late 70s under Carter because of all the scandals that emerged and all the spying and everything, all operation chaos in the field intelligence program with the military spying on Americans, the Operation Minaret, the Coin Intel Pro, the FBI.

• 2:00:02Speaker 01

  It's like just like just going crazy.

• 2:00:04Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 2:00:05Speaker 01

  Right? And it all culminated under the Nixon administration in terms of, of course, that's when I grew up. I grew up as a young teenager during that period. So I'm working on this program because NSA realized they had a problem. How do you deal with all this data? How do you deal with these new non-state actors? How do they're murky? It's hard to figure them out, let alone follow them. A lot of time they don't use any, any normal means, a normal, regular means of communication that we're used to. So part of my job at the time, and this is where it got very technical, but it was also on the management side. Okay. How do you form organizations?

• 2:00:47Speaker 01

  How do you create organizations to deal with this new digital age? Analog to digital.

• 2:00:53Danny Jones?

  Okay.

• 2:00:54Speaker 01

  The analog didn't disappear, believe me, but now increasingly it's digital. So they just sat there staring at their navel.

• 2:01:04Speaker 01

  Most of the, because they would require change. And in a large organization, and this is, this is what, this is the challenge we're seeing now emerge with Trump 2.0. You're seeing institutionalized, very rigid organizations who have gotten used to the way they do business. And that way that they do business is business as usual. The last thing they want to do, and some of it's justified in part, especially when they're supporting directly like social security payments, right? Medicare, for example, those built on systems, basically COBOL, which I'm very familiar with, COBOL, Common Oriented Business Language, right?

• 2:01:46Speaker 01

  To, um, but very difficult as an organization to change. Never mind corruption, never mind.

• 2:01:54Danny Jones?

  Sure.

• 2:01:54Speaker 01

  Right? So in this space, right? I'm coming in from the outside and I'm basically saying, and even as a contractor, we weren't looked on very kindly. We would go into organizations and actually do a full scope, basically a full scope. We call it, it was, we had ways we did this. Technical examination of the organization in terms of what they were creating, their projects and programs. We also examine the leadership and management structure. And then we, we would create a report.

• 2:02:28Speaker 01

  And we invite all the key principles, including basically the entire organization into like a conference room. Lot of the managers in particular did not, leaders, right, some quite senior, did not appreciate this, right? Because they're being exposed even from within, even though it's a safe environment, they're still being exposed.

• 2:02:47Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:02:47Speaker 01

  Took great exception to it, just to give you an indication of how difficult it is. Even when it's for all the right reasons and when it's actually necessary for the continuance and the sustainment of the mission. Remember the whole thing, my upbringing was mission, mission, mission.

• 2:03:03Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:03:05Speaker 01

  So.

• 2:03:08Speaker 01

  Bringing in outside expertise and it's ironic because this is where NSA is like, well, and it started in the mid eighties, by the way. We're just going to go buy solutions, spend tons of money. We can't do it. We don't want to do it. So we'll go to, we'll go to the corporate America, military industrial complex, or some of the new emerging Silicon Valley companies that we mentioned earlier, like, like Google, for example. I'm actually responsible, I, I take, I'll take credit, but I, with, with some, with some embarrassment, responsible for bringing the first Google appliance in NSA, which then got summarily rejected. We'll get to that one.

• 2:03:49Danny Jones?

  Okay.

• 2:03:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, because of what it found.

• 2:03:51Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:03:51Speaker 01

  These are the boxes that would send out all the little spiders to pick up all the, you know, anything, right? Well, it turns out even, I'll just mention it, I might as well say it now. NSA, even at NSA, even though I had a very high clearance, beyond the high clearance, there were special red zones, special compartmented programs, off limits to very few people. Most people wouldn't even known about them. Some of them for legitimate reasons, why you're protecting very, very, very sensitive sources and methods. Certain operations overseas, certain types of technology you're employing that you don't want anybody to know about outside those that are using it. I knew what that was like when I was involved in SAP and SAR in the military.

• 2:04:32Speaker 01

  Only the people are inside that compartment would, that mission compartment would know and would have access to the information.

• 2:04:40Danny Jones?

  Okay.

• 2:04:41Speaker 01

  Even the commander of our unit would know. He would just know that it would, this is how you protect for legitimate reasons. You don't want to compromise, remember military operations, especially when they're hypersensitive.

• 2:04:53Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:04:54Speaker 01

  Okay. So it found the Google appliance found who went right, right through what they thought was the firewalls bypassed the firewall, went cruising right through. And this is it's in essence, cataloging all these hypersensitive like I'd say hypersensitive programs. Of course, you can imagine the embarrassment if your NSA leadership shut it down to shut it down.

• 2:05:17Danny Jones?

  It was penetrating firewalls?

• 2:05:18Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 2:05:19Danny Jones?

  Of who of what?

• 2:05:20Speaker 01

  Inside NSA.

• 2:05:23Danny Jones?

  Oh.

• 2:05:23Speaker 01

  We, we remember NSA their way that they just kept it's Rube Goldberg. Remember it had its own net, old school, right? But there was a point where they're even arguing whether an individual should even have access to email. That's how bad it was in the early days. So what they did is they built this very, very complex Rube Goldberg just, just kept adding and adding on and it called the NSA net. It's like internet, but it's, it's inside NSA.

• 2:05:52Danny Jones?

  Got it. Okay.

• 2:05:52Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 2:05:53Danny Jones?

  Okay.

• 2:05:53Speaker 01

  It's all network. Everything's network.

• 2:05:55Danny Jones?

  Yep.

• 2:05:56Speaker 01

  So there is, there was a net. This goes way back. This goes back, right? But it was very difficult post nine 11 to figure out what you had. What's important? What's critical? What? How do we keep? I mean, there's just staggering amounts of data.

• 2:06:13Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:06:13Speaker 01

  We're not just talking regular internet. We're talking about the vast, just volumes of information, data, raw info, data coming streaming in from all the collection sites from everywhere. Everywhere.

• 2:06:28Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:06:30Speaker 01

  And that's, that's, that's the vast enterprise.

• 2:06:33Danny Jones?

  And where was it all being stored?

• 2:06:34Speaker 01

  Various places, right? There's a huge data center now in Utah. Now they had to be developed because they're what they're running out of room, quote unquote, physical room to even put the servers up, which had, you know, we're talking at the petabyte level. Okay. All the data. So now there's an entire facility, which can actually grow even more if they needed to. So there is up, there's locations, physical locations without mentioning where they are on, on the, the campus. They call it the NSA larger campus at Fort Meade, where they would have special buildings that are all cooled, you know, air chilled, right?

• 2:07:09Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 2:07:10Speaker 01

  Chillers and everything else vast. Some are underground. Some are in special buildings, right?

• 2:07:18Speaker 01

  Where they would store all the data and where you end this data is being stored in databases.

• 2:07:24Speaker 01

  So this Google appliance was in essence to figure out what we had, right? It was, it's part of the network. But of course, it does its job really, really well. It just goes out, finds it and brings it all back. It was an attempt for the right reasons to help facilitate communication, to help provide sharing of information within NSA. But it found things that they didn't want the rest of NSA to know about, which were these special red zones, compartmented programs, highly sensitive. Because they thought, the techs thought, oh no, our firewalls are strong enough that it'll never penetrate. We're not talking a physical barrier.

• 2:08:06Speaker 01

  We're actually talking firewalls at the software firmware level, which would prevent even other parts of NSA.

• 2:08:13Danny Jones?

  To get through it.

• 2:08:14Speaker 01

  Right, it would just reject it, any attempt.

• 2:08:17Danny Jones?

  And it was a Google appliance?

• 2:08:18Speaker 01

  It was a Google appliance, but they didn't realize the power of the Google appliance. I did, because I was spending, I was spending all kinds of time in Silicon Valley consulting. I had this dual thing. It was an interesting place. I just happened to be there. That's, you say, you know, where's Waldo? Well, I was Waldo and I could, I'd work in a super secret world. Then I'm going out into the burgeoning explosion of internet in terms of commercial. And where am I going most of the time? Silicon Valley. Learning, I mean, just fascinating, absolutely fascinating. Doing consulting, I even had, I was even allowed to engage with separate, basically consulting efforts, projects, when I was there.

• 2:08:55Danny Jones?

  And what kind of consulting were you doing?

• 2:08:56Speaker 01

  Management and technology. But I was also part of my entree. I was doing what we were doing inside NSA, but I was even doing it now both ways. So they were getting the benefit of what I was doing inside NSA. They're, they're, they're willing to share its national security.

• 2:09:14Speaker 01

  Right? Remember I'm I'm

• 2:09:15Danny Jones?

  They can share everything with you.

• 2:09:16Speaker 01

  Well, not everything, but this wasn't surveillance.

• 2:09:19Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:09:19Speaker 01

  We're just talking about, I mean, I'm going to different labs. I went, I actually went to Park Palo Alto Research Center. Fascinating trip. I went to AT&T Bell Labs. It doesn't exist anymore. Up in New Jersey. Fascinating. Phenomenal stuff, right? Leading edge, but all in labs. Way, you know, people don't even realize what's, this is again, this extraordinary thing about America in terms of inventing, hey, because we have this into this mentality, problem, solve it, problem, solve it, problem, solve it. Why wouldn't you?

• 2:09:49Danny Jones?

  Exactly.

• 2:09:50Speaker 01

  Necessity, the famous phrase, necessity is the mother of invention.

• 2:09:54Danny Jones?

  Yes.

• 2:09:54Speaker 01

  Why not? Why would you, why would you stop that from happening? Why would you prevent that from happening?

• 2:10:02Speaker 01

  So.

• 2:10:05Speaker 01

  I'm at NSA. I begin, because I'm bringing back, right? New thoughts, new, and then there's people NSA that I'm, because I had an enterprise, I had enterprise responsibility. I'm going through the ends, the, I even went overseas in a couple of cases. So I'm going to the ends of NSA to find the very best projects, the very best program is to help those improve themselves at the same time. And that's why we were doing these special reviews.

• 2:10:33Danny Jones?

  Okay.

• 2:10:34Speaker 01

  In the course of doing all that, just to compress all this, to get to 2001.

• 2:10:40Speaker 01

  I was finding people phenomenal, call it sigint skunk work, skunk works, like Lockheed Martin skunk works that built the U2 in the SR 70, 71. Okay?

• 2:10:55Speaker 01

  Phenomenal, because NSA would realize in the 90s in particular, they faced a huge challenge with the digital age. They couldn't just, because that's the only thing they knew. Oh, we'll just bring everything back, store it and figure it out later. Bring everything back, store it.

• 2:11:13Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 2:11:15Speaker 01

  How do you suck the ocean dry? Can you just, wait a minute, leave the ocean where it is? Just keep track, and this is how I was taught, even on the RC 135. Essential elements of information, metadata, the critical information, the things that you need to know about. The stuff that's routine, you just keep track of that. It's only when it turns to something other than routine that you care.

• 2:11:40Danny Jones?

  Mm hmm.

• 2:11:41Speaker 01

  That's kind of the signal to noise ratio. When it rises above a certain level, you then say you notice it, but you can't notice everything.

• 2:11:48Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:11:49Speaker 01

  I can't, I can't always look at every straw in the haystack, can I? I need to know, though, if one of the, if one of the straws, right, turns. How do I know that? Well, I have to know when it turns. Or it catches on fire. Okay. I gotta know about that.

• 2:12:08Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:12:09Speaker 01

  That's part of indications of warning as well, ultimately, in terms of how you provide that to support, which is stated in the preamble of the Constitution, providing for the common defense of the United States. I only just took that to heart. I lived it as well as others did, silent warriors, for years and years and years. That's how I was taught. It's how, it's what I experienced, it's what I provided the American people in secret in the national security space. So NSA kept pushing back, resisting, because it meant change. They were so wedded to their legacy systems that they weren't willing to look at something differently. You know, the famous quote from Einstein, keep doing the same thing over and over again, expecting a different result.

• 2:12:53Speaker 01

  It's a form of insanity. This is institutional insanity. As I was told at one point after I got to NSA, well, joined NSA as a senior executive, Tom, you just don't understand, that's not how we do things around here. So, but this is actually going to improve how we do things around here. Oh, that's not how we do things. They just were wedded to how they did things. So. Huge resistance. In fact, they tried to shut the program down because it was embarrassing, but I'm bringing it back and then I'm meeting people inside NSA, super frustrated because the new director, now it's 1999, Michael V. Hayden, who's central to my story,

• 2:13:30Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:13:31Speaker 01

  Central to my history, central to what then happened with, as though he's done a very good job, okay, of faking or in deluding, he's very articulate and he has a lot of respect still, you know, as a former and he didn't even become CIA director after he was the principal deputy director of the new director of national intelligence. So it's 1999. He said, no, this is the same thing as we encountered in World War II, Manhattan Project. We've got to treat this as a Manhattan Project. We have to partner with industry. We need to buy this solution and it's going to cost a lot of money. You know why? Because it's a really big problem. Why is it a big problem? Because all kinds of data. It's

• 2:14:13Speaker 01

  a big data problem. They actually called it that. The big data problem.

• 2:14:17Danny Jones?

  Mm hmm.

• 2:14:18Speaker 01

  Here's the funny thing. In the 90s, particularly the latter part of the 90s, NSA historically, for a number of years, had published their five top challenge problems. They had more than that, but the five top was for the priorities. One of them was the big data problem. So you can imagine NSA, necessity being the mother of invention, let's go solve it. I met the engineers, met the programs and project and a whole collection analysis, right, and reporting to do exactly that on behalf of the American people. They solved the big data problem, the core of it, prior to 9/11. Had already solved it.

• 2:15:02Speaker 01

  But NSA, no, the corporate decision is, there are people who actually got punished for this internally, punished. We've already made the decision. We're just going to go to, and they spent, we're talking the initial version of this transformation, this whole transformation effort, which I was actually a part of. I was in the inside of it. But it became clear, all they wanted to do was create a contract vehicle.

• 2:15:28Speaker 01

  To spend billions and billions and billions of dollars. Now, I already got an insight on that back in the late eight-

• 2:15:35Danny Jones?

  By partnering with private industry.

• 2:15:36Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 2:15:37Danny Jones?

  Okay.

• 2:15:38Speaker 01

  Commercial, private, but military, we're talking those who had access and had the proper security clearances or could, we're talking, we're talking like the SAICs of the world. We're talking about the Booz Alans of the world. We're talking about the, the IT portions of those companies.

• 2:15:54Danny Jones?

  Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. Okay. So, so just to clarify, when you say you had already solved it, you had already solved it by doing-

• 2:16:00Speaker 01

  NSA had already solved it internally, not by buying it, they already, they were gonna make it, but that was her, that was the historical legacy of NSA.

• 2:16:10Speaker 01

  We will make, we don't, they had contractors going all the way back.

• 2:16:13Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 2:16:14Speaker 01

  But they weren't just going out to industry and just, just wholesale here, we'll just give you a bunch of money, figure it out.

• 2:16:20Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:16:20Speaker 01

  Remember what Eisenhower warned the nation about in his farewell address in 1961?

• 2:16:25Speaker 01

  The rise of military-

• 2:16:26Danny Jones?

  Yep.

• 2:16:27Speaker 01

  In the halls of the rise of military industrial complex. Now it's a military, military industrial intelligence complex.

• 2:16:33Danny Jones?

  Right, right.

• 2:16:35Speaker 01

  If you're a contractor and you have shareholders, but guess what you're gonna, you know, perversely incentivized to do? Why solve the problem?

• 2:16:43Danny Jones?

  You're gonna lit, I mean-

• 2:16:44Speaker 01

  I started seeing it, I was seeing it in the nineties, I was already seeing it on this program. People were like, we're gonna buy, we're gonna buy lines of code. Well, if I'm a contractor, okay, people, there's a joke about, I'm gonna, I'm just gonna code in Yoppa, Winnebago today because I could just crank bunch of lines of code just to get paid more. There was one project that we analyzed, they literally, the government was paying the contractor $8,000 for every line of code.

• 2:17:12Speaker 01

  So we get it, that's what you do, more lines of code. It's not about lines of code, it's about the functions that provide support to the mission, fulfill the mission.

• 2:17:20Danny Jones?

  Yes, right.

• 2:17:21Speaker 01

  Provide for the common defense on behalf of the American people. That's your responsibility and you have a fiduciary responsibility to make sure that the money is spent wisely and that you account for it.

• 2:17:33Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:17:36Speaker 01

  So he decided Trailblazer is the program.

• 2:17:39Danny Jones?

  Trailblazer.

• 2:17:40Speaker 01

  Three nine eleven nineteen nine. He was on Newsweek magazine, front page. He, he was inviting, he was inviting reporters and whining and dining him at his residence on Fort Meade. I mean, he went political and he was dazzling, dazzling the overseers, the, the oversight committee. Cause he, he, he carried that and he had those three stars, right? He's sitting there in front of them and he wasn't, he was not a technologist. That's the last thing he was. He actually used to be a Bulgarian linguist in the military. At one point he actually headed up the very, one of the units that I was a part of in the military, not when I was in, but he goes all the way back. Okay. But he'd also worked, interesting enough, under, in, in George Bush first.

• 2:18:24Speaker 01

  He also had, had been part of basically the military, the intelligence side of the national security council. So he had, he had inroads. He had, he was operating with the players, as it were. That's one reason he was called when he was in Korea. Hey, how would you like to become the director of NSA?

• 2:18:43Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:18:44Speaker 01

  So he's going to buy the solution. The original program was just shy of $4 billion. The amount of money that was spent originally on, on one of the programs, this is one of them, but don't have time to go into all of them. But there was a number of these really skunkworks that were solving these challenge problems NSA that they actually had defined as a challenge problem. This wasn't like, we're just going to go off and just, just play. No, there were labs that they did that too. This was to solve the problem.

• 2:19:12Speaker 01

  So little over $3 million solved it prior, well prior to nine eleven.

• 2:19:17Danny Jones?

  Thin thread?

• 2:19:17Speaker 01

  Thin thread. But if you're spending millions, but then you've got this other program, it's billions.

• 2:19:24Speaker 01

  And it's, you're going to buy it, not make it. Why would you know what was happening is that people's careers promotions are being based on how large you grew your organization.

• 2:19:34Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:19:35Speaker 01

  Money did you bring in? How much money did you allow to a contractor? You didn't, in fact, you became further and further away from the day to day of the and even the big contractors got all kinds of pass through fees because they're just giving it to the substitute actually do they didn't. A lot of cases didn't even do the real work themselves.

• 2:19:49Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:19:50Speaker 01

  Who's doing real work? Oh, it's not about real work. Look, I had already blown the whistle on an earlier program, one of the most, at the time, the most expensive automated data processing system at NSA called Minstrel. Anytime you bring up Minstrel at NSA, probably not as much now because most of the principals have gone or dead. It was a super, super embarrassing. At the time, it was incredibly expensive. You're talking 1955, it was awarded, right? For almost 200, we're talking almost 200 million dollars. That's a ton of money.

• 2:20:20Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 2:20:20Speaker 01

  For an IT system. They bought a bunch of hardware, right? It, it, at inflated prices and then it never delivered. They ultimately spent about 250 million on it by the time they were finished. The same core people that were on Minstrel got it's another bite at the apple.

• 2:20:41Speaker 01

  Under Trailblazer, but way bigger, way bigger. But this is going to catapult NSA because they were, it were under a huge pressure. You're falling behind, becoming less relevant. You're going deaf.

• 2:20:56Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:20:56Speaker 01

  Literally. Bringing all this data back can't make sense of it. Or you're getting to know

• 2:21:04Speaker 01

  more and more, and this is sort of, this is sort of a twist here about what I'm saying. Knowing, knowing no more about less and less.

• 2:21:12Speaker 01

  So you become your, you, you myopia, right? Get incredibly narrow.

• 2:21:17Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:21:18Speaker 01

  Because there's all this stuff that's just like on, as they would say, it's on the cutting room floor in some database, obscure database somewhere. How do I know its value? How do?

• 2:21:29Speaker 01

  This problem was solved. Now, I was part of that because what I was doing was advanced analysis on the technical side. I was analyzing software and how it was being developed, how it was being designed and developed and deployed. So we're talking soup to nuts, full, you call it life cycle, okay, including maintenance, O and M, operations and maintenance. Where a lot of the contractors knew they would get even more money just because they could just milk it, milk it, milk it. We used to joke about that at booze, we just will milk it. And if we can't, if we can't get them to milk it, we'll just repackage it and sell it to some other government agency and milk it some more. So I developed, I developed

• 2:22:11Speaker 01

  using very advanced script, script technology at the time. Okay. Because guess where I'd been when I was on another contract, when I was before Minstrel, I was in the AI, this is early, early, this, this is just part of my background. I was part of an AI department in this government contract office in the late, late 1989, summer, fall of 89.

• 2:22:39Danny Jones?

  Really?

• 2:22:40Speaker 01

  Yes. Expert systems, machine, machine learning.

• 2:22:44Danny Jones?

  And who was developing this?

• 2:22:46Speaker 01

  This was GTE, doesn't exist anymore.

• 2:22:48Danny Jones?

  GTE?

• 2:22:48Speaker 01

  GT is a, it used to be the greatest, the one of the largest rural telephone, pay phone carriers, right? Rural. But they had a government, they had a government operation.

• 2:23:01Speaker 01

  So I blew the whistle on that program. Long story short, but remember in this, I mean, I jumped, I went, jumped back, but this give you, this gives you sort of the grounding of what I was confronted with already as a contractor before I even joined NSA as a senior executive. I went to, I'm going to the details of how I blew the whistle. That's its story all by itself, but we're talking the 91 timeframe. I got kicked off the program. Okay. I was a test engineer, customer, special, basically a special, I had, because I had the background, but I, at the time I was operating, and then later I was actually part of the software engineering team.

• 2:23:44Speaker 01

  On the voice, it was a voice processing system. It was supposed to basically catapult NSA into the digital age when it came to voice processing, which was a space I worked on for years when I was overseas.

• 2:23:56Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:23:56Speaker 01

  So

• 2:24:00Speaker 01

  they, in their infinite wisdom, had issued, they had issued this contract to this, to GTE. I blow the whistle. NSA itself was getting antsy about it because years had gone by. Now it's six years in and where are we going? Where's the, where's the delivery? Where's the delivery? Where's the delivery? So.

• 2:24:20Danny Jones?

  And the AI was the voice processing.

• 2:24:21Speaker 01

  No, and I, but this is before that. I just happened to be there. I'm just saying this gives you, I mean, because AI is huge now. This is a whole nother, that's a whole nother conversation. AI, which I'm, I'm all, I'm also playing with that myself, even at home. It's stunning. I mean,

• 2:24:37Danny Jones?

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:24:37Speaker 01

  But there are risks. There are issues. There is lots of, you know, how do you hold AI accountable? What are its ethical obligations? Oh, wait a minute. AI? Well, it's not actually, it could be artificial at best, but it's definitely not intelligent.

• 2:24:51Speaker 01

  I did a whole talk on this at my opening remarks in Berlin at a conference recently, back in late November, when I was invited to come to this conference.

• 2:24:59Danny Jones?

  Mm hmm.

• 2:25:00Speaker 01

  So

• 2:25:03Speaker 01

  here we are. Oh, so they had, they actually had an investigation. The general counsel comes out from Mountain View. That was their home office. It was Mountain View, California. He comes out, he does his own internal investigation, brings in all of us, a lot of us to interview. And I looked at him, I said, weren't we under, remember, give him, you know, my background, right? My background already, just the summary of it.

• 2:25:29Speaker 01

  He, he's sitting there in his chair and I, and I looked at him at one point in his interview and I said, were we under an obligation to deliver something that actually worked? No, we weren't. Contract plus. All we had to do is show best effort. I just stopped. I mean, my, my, my jaw just like dropped. He didn't care whether or not the program delivered. All he cared about was that the funds kept flowing.

• 2:25:53Danny Jones?

  Hmm.

• 2:25:54Speaker 01

  Didn't matter what was developed. It didn't matter. It didn't work. It didn't matter that it was a piece of crap, and I'm being polite when I say that.

• 2:26:02Danny Jones?

  Hmm.

• 2:26:03Speaker 01

  Didn't matter. This was my now dawning realization after having worked with extraordinary people that you'll never hear about in the field when I flew, right? Especially overseas. Dedicated to the mission, not to just lining their pockets. Yeah, I get in the American capitalists, yeah, make a profit.

• 2:26:24Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:26:25Speaker 01

  But now you're talking obscene levels of profit. And then wait a minute, it didn't matter that we, it's one thing you've spent a lot of money, you actually deliver something. It's a whole nother thing to spend a whole lot of money and not deliver. Increasingly, they weren't delivering. And then they would just, because it's what they call sunk cost in the economics, you just keep spending, dumping more money and money into the hole, right?

• 2:26:49Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:26:51Speaker 01

  So, long story short,

• 2:26:56Speaker 01

  in February of, so to give you a background, that I was very sensitive now to corruption, to fraud, waste and abuse, had already been a whistleblower. I was even a whistleblower in the military, but that's another story. When I was on the compass call mission, big safari.

• 2:27:12Danny Jones?

  Oh.

• 2:27:12Speaker 01

  Right? Big safari is another interesting program. It's sort of the umbrella program of funds. A lot of this, including what I was doing overseas.

• 2:27:18Danny Jones?

  Hmm.

• 2:27:20Speaker 01

  February 2001, I just moved into a new house where I live, right? In Maryland.

• 2:27:27Speaker 01

  I was doing really, really well. Okay? I had special projects, contracts. I was working with like the University of California, Riverside. I was still doing all my consulting, even expanded. I was now a principal in a boutique.com. This is the, the late, the eighty, ninety-eight, ninety-nine, two thousand, early aughts. Flying all over, I was, I used to fly in the nerd bird flight. They call it the nerd bird flight.

• 2:27:53Speaker 01

  Dulles to San Jose.

• 2:27:57Speaker 01

  A lot of spying went on in that plane.

• 2:28:00Danny Jones?

  What was that about?

• 2:28:01Speaker 01

  The nerd bird, because people are flying back and forth, tech lobbyists. This is when the sort of the growth of the tech grows, venture capital, Silicon Valley, venture capital got involved in all of that, right? Okay. Including up to Sand Hill Road to make the case for small boutique dot coms, who are given a bunch of venture capital money, nondescript office, technology level of playing field. They had a, you know, good looking secretary sitting up front, just for anybody that came to the front door, but the building itself was nondescript, some office complex. Meanwhile, in the back room, you know, the couple of three or four or five back rooms, depending how much money they got, they had a bunch of code code cutters, say that loosely, developing the next killer app. That became the phrase, we got to develop the next killer app. Cause people, internet had exploded.

• 2:28:46Danny Jones?

  Yes.

• 2:28:47Speaker 01

  Okay. And the interview, just in a lot, especially with the web. Okay. And browsers.

• 2:28:53Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:28:54Speaker 01

  And it's like, how do we, how do we exploit this? How do we, we're going to make, and people were just, it was staggering amounts of money being dumped.

• 2:29:01Speaker 03

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• 2:29:31Speaker 01

  And the conferences that I went to, this is when, this is the heyday of you would go into, you know, you would go into where they have all, all the companies. And they all started out doing each other, who had the fanciest stand and all the, the little things they would give away and some got really fancy. I mean, it was just, it was quite, it was quite something. It was a world, right? It was quite a world.

• 2:29:53Danny Jones?

  Dot com bubble.

• 2:29:54Speaker 01

  Dot com bubble. And I could tell, I even almost moved to San Jose. I almost moved there, but I realized it had become a gambling environment. People were just rolling the dice. Fact is about the, on average, only about one out of 14 companies ever actually made it. And then they got, would usually get swallowed up by some bigger company.

• 2:30:12Danny Jones?

  Okay.

• 2:30:13Speaker 01

  I saw this happen, right? All in front of me.

• 2:30:15Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:30:16Speaker 01

  So I'm sitting there, February 2001.

• 2:30:20Speaker 01

  NSA was under huge pressure because they weren't solving the problem, just said simply.

• 2:30:28Speaker 01

  Huge pressure from stakeholders and other studies, like you gotta do something. Maybe you need to stir up the gene pool. Maybe you need to bring in senior people with outside experience, both government and industry, and bring them into NSA, put them in senior positions, and let them make the necessary changes.

• 2:30:46Speaker 01

  I was part of about six month period, roughly. There was a couple of people had been hired in a little sooner, where about a dozen of us were hired in from the outside. I applied. They actually went to careerbuilders.com. Remember monster.com? They tried to, they tried to do this like high-tech ITs would do or startups. How do you hire people? They realized on the government, they couldn't go through the normal government cycle because it would just take too long.

• 2:31:12Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:31:12Speaker 01

  Way too long. And they had to have security clearance as the top of that.

• 2:31:15Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:31:15Speaker 01

  So they accelerated, compressed it all. I went through, even though it wasn't the position I originally applied for, I went through a multi-month process, but for NSA, it was basically two months. And then I started going up, I kept getting, I kept making the cut, to the point where I made the cut, two of us made the cut with the person I ultimately reported to when I was hired. And I got hired. They accelerated because I already had a clearance. Okay, so that only took a couple of months. I started in late August. I had a different color badge. I took the oath, and this is critical. I'm now taking the oath as a senior civilian, Defense Intelligence Senior Executive Service. I'm taking the oath

• 2:32:00Speaker 01

  for the fifth time in my career to do what? Support and defend the Constitution of the United States of America against all enemies, foreign and domestic.

• 2:32:10Speaker 01

  I'm taking an oath, not loyalty, not to a person, not to an agency, not to secrets or secrecy, not to corruption, not to cover up. I'm taking oath.

• 2:32:28Speaker 01

  To a piece of paper.

• 2:32:29Danny Jones?

  To defend the constitution.

• 2:32:30Speaker 01

  The thing that defines who we are as a country.

• 2:32:33Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 2:32:33Speaker 01

  Makes us Americans with all the amendments.

• 2:32:39Speaker 01

  Particularly the first 10.

• 2:32:45Speaker 01

  Fifth time I had done, you know, twice in the air force because I had re-upped.

• 2:32:49Danny Jones?

  Yep.

• 2:32:49Speaker 01

  Once in the Navy, once at CIA as an officer there, and then now as a senior executive. In fact, all the jobs I had when I was at NSA over a six and a half year period, my supervisor was always reporting to the the top deck, the civilian head, uh, which was the deputy director.

• 2:33:07Danny Jones?

  Okay.

• 2:33:07Speaker 01

  Who then reported to the director as a military head.

• 2:33:10Danny Jones?

  Okay.

• 2:33:11Speaker 01

  So

• 2:33:13Speaker 01

  first day I reported to my new duty station as a senior executive was nine 11.

• 2:33:22Speaker 01

  And this is where life rapidly shifted in short order. A little bit later that morning. And I paused because even to this day, and I feel it right now emotionally. Okay. It's, you're probably going to see it in my face because almost 3,000 people were murdered that day. And they never should have disappeared. They never should have lost their lives. It never should have happened. I will, I literally am haunted the rest of my life with that reality, the what ifs of history. I still wake up sometimes in, you know, sweating over the what ifs of history.

• 2:34:10Speaker 01

  I pause again because did I know, even though the system was blinking red since 1998, per George Tenet at the CIA.

• 2:34:21Speaker 01

  They knew that Al Qaeda was up to something. Remember 93 when I was sitting there on the terrorism desk?

• 2:34:27Danny Jones?

  Yep.

• 2:34:29Speaker 01

  It's not like we didn't know. It's not, remember we already had cold incident, Kaiba Towers, a bunch of others.

• 2:34:38Speaker 01

  But it wasn't a priority. Bush was the new president. Wasn't a priority. Counterterrorism was not even on the list. It was on a list, but it wasn't where it mattered.

• 2:34:54Speaker 01

  Just wasn't.

• 2:34:57Speaker 01

  And I went home. And

• 2:35:02Speaker 01

  I remember calling in very early the next morning. Of course, I was, I was. I sat in front of the TV. I just sat there, just absolutely, like, it was hard to break away, just.

• 2:35:14Danny Jones?

  Everybody went home?

• 2:35:15Speaker 01

  I went home because I, see, I was so new.

• 2:35:17Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:35:18Speaker 01

  They had crisis teams. Remember, there had been crises.

• 2:35:20Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 2:35:21Speaker 01

  This clearly was going to be something way different.

• 2:35:25Speaker 01

  And remember, there were other planes that they had attempted, or one of them, we know, Shanksville, right? Pentagon, right?

• 2:35:32Danny Jones?

  Yep.

• 2:35:32Speaker 01

  Would have been way worse if they hadn't hit the part of the Pentagon that had just recently been modernized. And then, of course, the two towers.

• 2:35:41Speaker 01

  People don't realize those towers are actually quite susceptible, that type, that type of terrorist attack.

• 2:35:46Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:35:46Speaker 01

  And it wasn't like there hadn't been attempts, Bohika had been exposed, where they're going to hijack airliners. Okay?

• 2:35:53Danny Jones?

  Mm hmm.

• 2:35:54Speaker 01

  Remember? But ninety-three sort of had been forgotten, I guess. Remember what they said? Remember the general, what he said to me personally? Right?

• 2:36:03Danny Jones?

  Yep.

• 2:36:03Speaker 01

  I was right there when he said it.

• 2:36:05Danny Jones?

  Yep.

• 2:36:06Speaker 01

  So I went home because I went part of a crisis team. I called in later, said, yeah, you better come in. And then the next four months are a blur. Total blur. It would take hours and hours, if not days, to unwind those next four years. But it's critical that I then tell you what I was confronted by. Because what I was confronted by was the very thing.

• 2:36:29Speaker 01

  The very thing that I had taken an oath to support and defend. And yet I was confronted in the secret world with, what happens if your own government decides to violate the Constitution? Willfully? As an act of commission? Not omission, commission.

• 2:36:47Speaker 01

  I mean, I'll even ask this rhetorically to any and all of your listeners, okay?

• 2:36:54Speaker 01

  All right, subscribers.

• 2:36:57Speaker 01

  What if you're confronted? You just, as I was, you know, looked the other way? So I'm in, four months later, I didn't even become feeling normal again. And I was sitting there in a Marriott hotel in New Orleans, celebrating Mardi Gras in mid-January with family.

• 2:37:13Speaker 01

  So what happened after nine 11? A whole bunch of meetings were taking place. Cheney, who would basically be given the national security portfolio by Bush, just kind of ceded that to him.

• 2:37:23Danny Jones?

  Yep.

• 2:37:23Speaker 01

  Plus energy.

• 2:37:26Speaker 01

  Went, they went into like, deep, deep emergency mode. Right? And there were certain may have heard of cog, continuity of government.

• 2:37:36Danny Jones?

  Yep.

• 2:37:37Speaker 01

  I used to be a part of that in terms of what happens if, right? Special procedure put into place. And there's actually emergency executive orders on the books, right?

• 2:37:48Speaker 01

  So they went into a version of that.

• 2:37:50Danny Jones?

  Yeah. Can you explain that to people who may not know what it is?

• 2:37:52Speaker 01

  So what happens if, you know, it could be extreme natural disaster, it could be war, right?

• 2:37:58Danny Jones?

  Yep.

• 2:37:58Speaker 01

  Where the president, as the executive, does have certain, where, where certain emergency powers are allowed

• 2:38:07Speaker 01

  to invoke, he can invoke certain, and there's basically a standing set of executive orders, basically that, and some are acts, right? That prescribe what you do. And there's basically, there's, there's facilities where government can reassemble. They can go through training for that. Right? So

• 2:38:29Speaker 01

  he's down in the Situation Room, which is underneath the White House.

• 2:38:33Danny Jones?

  Cheney.

• 2:38:34Speaker 01

  Cheney in particular.

• 2:38:35Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 2:38:35Speaker 01

  I mean, Bush would be there too, but Cheney was, he basically was leading. And of course, they're having these meetings right after nine 11. What else can we do? What else can we do? Are there any other authorities?

• 2:38:49Speaker 01

  There's certain executive orders, without getting into the weeds, that allow the government to increase their ability, right? To provide protection for the, for the country.

• 2:39:03Speaker 01

  Still has to be within the bounds of the Constitution. You're not allowed, even under emergency circumstances, to basically suspend the Constitution.

• 2:39:12Speaker 01

  You're not.

• 2:39:12Danny Jones?

  Right?

• 2:39:15Speaker 01

  But there are things where you have some flexibility. Okay, even under FISA, I'm going to introduce FISA under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which I was like, we had annual training to ensure that because of scandals in the seventies, to ensure that we did not, without a warrant, right? We couldn't just routinely collect, except under special training circumstances. And even then, it was highly controlled.

• 2:39:41Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:39:42Speaker 01

  You couldn't collect, analyze, et cetera, because that's sacrosanct. It's the Fourth Amendment, okay? Super high bar. But you can. And even under FISA, there was provisions to hot pursuit. Meaning you could go after somebody, foreign intelligence, US person, US citizen, resident, resident, basically foreign, but resident, right? Legal resident, right? Slash visitor, but legal. Could be visa, could be green card, or some equivalent, or there are different visas.

• 2:40:14Danny Jones?

  Okay.

• 2:40:14Speaker 01

  Or, interestingly enough, US corporation. That not just stateside, not just boundaries, but also overseas.

• 2:40:22Danny Jones?

  Okay.

• 2:40:23Speaker 01

  Which means even when I was in RC 135, we couldn't just start collecting. Now, we did have a emergency support mission, very, if someone was in distress, ship in distress, or in distress, we then could help assist. But that was specifically to say, help save lives, or rescue, search and rescue.

• 2:40:42Danny Jones?

  Right, sure.

• 2:40:44Speaker 01

  So, FISA had criminal sanctions. You violate it, $10,000 fine, five years in prison for every incident in which you violate the Fourth Amendment rights of a US person.

• 2:41:01Danny Jones?

  Okay.

• 2:41:01Speaker 01

  Criminal use of the 18, US 18, right? That's the criminal code.

• 2:41:11Speaker 01

  I paused because this is, here I was shortly after nine 11, I discovered that they were taking the vast power of NSA. Extraordinary power, power in which they essentially had carte blanche to do just about anything when it came to collection. Mm hmm. But now use that vast power in addition to overseas, use that vast power. Remember they had failed. Remember that's why Pearl Harbor, what happened was so critical because the whole thing, this whole national security establishment was set up after nine, after the end of World War II was to preclude another surprise attack. Yeah. Here, not only were we quote, I'll say surprise, we weren't. Failed to keep 3,000 people.

• 2:41:54Speaker 01

  We did not keep them out of harms way. That's our fundamental, right? We failed the nation. The workforce knew it. Management leadership went into denial mode. They just could not accept, right? Workforce, there's a, I could tell you just horror stories about what was doing to the workforce because that's not, this is not supposed to, it's on our watch. We're suppo, we are the watchers. We're the protectors of the nation electronically. We failed. And they're, they're, they're asking what you can imagine, the Congress is now asking questions, what the heck happened? Now, was it, I will be the first to acknowledge it was a systemic failure. And there's a lot of reasons for that, but NSA had a critical, had a critical part of

• 2:42:37Speaker 01

  all this in terms of what they should have known, could have known and didn't provide in report, even with the mess of their IT and the databases and everything else that I mentioned earlier. I'm finding out that they're now turning the vast ears of NSA in partnership with certain key corporations for access and retrieval.

• 2:43:05Speaker 01

  On the US, it was always, US was always blacked out and allies, right?

• 2:43:13Speaker 01

  You didn't just routinely spy on your friends, quote unquote, you didn't sort of, it was

• 2:43:17Danny Jones?

  When did this happen?

• 2:43:18Speaker 01

  It was bad form. This is not, this is September, this is the, remember September 11th. So in the two weeks after nine 11, I'm finding out the decisions had been made in the deepest of secrecy, super hush hush.

• 2:43:31Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:43:32Speaker 01

  We're going to essentially suspend the fourth amendment. We will bypass FISA. There's special procedures, even at one point I was part of the affidavit process. We go up to the secret court, which is housed in the department of justice to provide affidavit to say, we need a warrant.

• 2:43:51Danny Jones?

  Yes.

• 2:43:52Speaker 01

  From the secret judges, which are actually on rotation appointed by the chief justice.

• 2:43:56Danny Jones?

  And you bypass the secret judges?

• 2:43:57Speaker 01

  Bypass, bypass FISA. They wouldn't even know about it in the early days, early years.

• 2:44:02Danny Jones?

  Holy.

• 2:44:02Speaker 01

  Didn't even know about it, bypassed it. So I'm, I mean, you talk about, what do I do? I'm now, I'm saying, wait a minute. I took a note to support and defend the constitution. Now my government is suspending that part of the constitution.

• 2:44:19Speaker 01

  Because they've, under the impermoder of national security, it's necessary. I began to blow the whistle within September, within channels at NSA. That's where I started. Boss, Office General Counsel, stopped there. Cause then I went to Inspector General later.

• 2:44:39Danny Jones?

  Okay.

• 2:44:39Speaker 01

  Office General Counsel. I'm on a phone call with him. This is early October.

• 2:44:44Danny Jones?

  How much thought did you put into this before you started to blow the whistle? Before you started to?

• 2:44:47Speaker 01

  A lot, but it was all super compressed. Cause remember I had a full-time job. I was leading a team communications. How do you keep people informed as they're coming in? Round the clock, people are burning out. You can't get people burnt out. You can only sustain crisis mode for so long.

• 2:45:00Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:45:00Speaker 01

  Usually about a week or two, and then you just start getting fried. People are having heart attacks. People are collapsing. People are sleeping in the cars out in the parking lot.

• 2:45:08Danny Jones?

  Jesus Christ.

• 2:45:09Speaker 01

  Because they real, oh my God, you can imagine people's guilt, the guilt they felt.

• 2:45:14Danny Jones?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:45:15Speaker 01

  And so they're doubling down, but they're burning themselves out.

• 2:45:17Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:45:20Speaker 01

  And I was in all the leadership team meetings, right? The ones I weren't in, the only ones I weren't in were the ones that were my supervisor, who was the number three person, the signals intelligence director. She would have special meetings with the very top deck, right? I was a much smaller, even smaller. I was part of sort of the 40, but then there were sort of like the seven or 10.

• 2:45:41Danny Jones?

  And by the way, sorry, sorry to just to clarify, who specifically was making the orders to that or who was specifically telling you or instructing you that now we're going to start bypassing the secret court in the FISA?

• 2:45:53Speaker 01

  Well, this is where I had my moment of truth.

• 2:45:54Danny Jones?

  Okay.

• 2:45:55Speaker 01

  True moment of truth. I already was aware that they were shifting equipment, buying equipment from like the HPs of the world to put them on US networks. To quote unquote, consume and just suck up all kinds of data.

• 2:46:08Danny Jones?

  Okay.

• 2:46:08Speaker 01

  Raw, just raw data. No constraints, no, didn't matter. Okay. Bolt collection is what they called it, but it's really mass surveillance.

• 2:46:16Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:46:17Speaker 01

  Without getting into deep, but they started, starting with, you know, phone calls, starting, you know, emails, later expanded very quickly.

• 2:46:27Danny Jones?

  How, how, how long of a time period are we talking?

• 2:46:30Speaker 01

  Only a couple of weeks.

• 2:46:30Danny Jones?

  Couple of weeks, phone calls, emails.

• 2:46:32Speaker 01

  I already started. Remember, I already had the capacity to do all that. I already had all that. Yes. I became directly aware of it. Then I started poking around. I was making trouble already. Good trouble. Okay. Okay. Good trouble. Early, early on. I was already being tagged. America's the new hire and I'm already being tagged. So what do you do? So I confront the office of general counsel. Now, it turns out because this program is so secret, it was in its own compartment. The name of the program. Was its own compartment, which was inside what they call exceptionally controlled information, ECI, which is way beyond even SCI.

• 2:47:12Danny Jones?

  But it was the

• 2:47:13Speaker 01

  Really? It had its own compartment. Its own compartment was the name of the program. This program name in itself was classified.

• 2:47:21Danny Jones?

  You never said it.

• 2:47:23Speaker 01

  Oh, no, I can say it now.

• 2:47:24Danny Jones?

  Oh, you can?

• 2:47:24Speaker 01

  But back then, people who said it was way under their breath.

• 2:47:30Danny Jones?

  What was it called?

• 2:47:31Speaker 01

  Stellar Wind.

• 2:47:32Danny Jones?

  Oh, okay.

• 2:47:33Speaker 01

  We called it colloquially between us cosmic fart.

• 2:47:41Danny Jones?

  It's amazing.

• 2:47:42Speaker 01

  I'm in, okay, so Stellar Wind, interesting name, but there's a whole office that handles program project name.

• 2:47:50Danny Jones?

  Very famous.

• 2:47:51Speaker 01

  But the name is, but the name itself, right? The program name itself, which is extraordinarily rare, because the program in itself, this piece uses a cover. This program was so secret, it turns out.

• 2:48:04Danny Jones?

  More secret than secure comp, comp, what is it, SCI?

• 2:48:08Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 2:48:09Danny Jones?

  Compartment.

• 2:48:09Speaker 01

  Sensitive compartment information.

• 2:48:11Danny Jones?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:48:11Speaker 01

  Now, there's handling caveats, which are basically compartments, or can be.

• 2:48:15Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:48:15Speaker 01

  How do you distribute, right? There's, but just, there's, there's classified, secret, top secret, standard, we, but then there's, then there's the, the SCI world and above, okay?

• 2:48:27Danny Jones?

  Got it.

• 2:48:28Speaker 01

  And it just gets hyper, you know, you get super secret, the more, there's Q level, what we call Q level clearance, which was for like nuclear stuff.

• 2:48:35Danny Jones?

  Okay.

• 2:48:36Speaker 01

  My mom is a secretary at Barksdale, where she met my dad, because he was, you know, in Strategic Air Command, back in the mid 50s, had a Q clearance, because she was the secretary for one of the senior officers.

• 2:48:46Danny Jones?

  Holy shit.

• 2:48:47Speaker 01

  Because she's looking at stuff that's quite sensitive, right? Even though she was an administrative assistant, right?

• 2:48:51Danny Jones?

  Okay, I got it.

• 2:48:55Danny Jones?

  Wow.

• 2:48:56Speaker 01

  So.

• 2:48:57Danny Jones?

  Just a couple of weeks before they start sucking up phone calls and emails from just every, from everybody.

• 2:49:04Speaker 01

  They thought, they didn't know there was another attack. I understand why they did what they did. I understand, I get that. And I remember, under a short term, you're allowed to go after threats without a warrant, but you still have to go seek it shortly thereafter. It's all, it's all, it's all prescribed in FISA. But they just buy, they didn't say, we don't have time for that, forget it. Don't have time for it, just bypass it. They just wanted the data. Now, why? I, I'm now, it's like, I'm incredibly alarmed at the developments within just a couple of weeks.

• 2:49:36Danny Jones?

  Okay.

• 2:49:37Speaker 01

  First week in October, turns out it's also, I didn't know it at the time.

• 2:49:42Speaker 01

  Was officially when the President Surveillance Program went into effect. It's called the PSP under Bush.

• 2:49:50Danny Jones?

  PSP.

• 2:49:51Speaker 01

  PSP, President Surveillance Program.

• 2:49:53Danny Jones?

  Okay.

• 2:49:54Speaker 01

  Umbrella Program authorized by the President. The primary umbrella program at NSA, which became the executive agent. Right? For the program was stellar wind. That was the umbrella program itself encompassing a number of other subprograms.

• 2:50:10Danny Jones?

  Got it.

• 2:50:13Speaker 01

  There was one counsel that I'm aware of, based on my understanding even to the state. There was one particular lawyer in the Office of General Counsel.

• 2:50:26Speaker 01

  He was actually interviewed once as part of a larger NPR frontline report. Actually, I was interviewed for that. Myself, Diane Rourke, Bill Benny, Kierke Weeby, Ed Loomis.

• 2:50:41Speaker 01

  I'm on the phone. I said, what are we doing? We're violating the Fourth Amendment. FISA is the, and there was a whole, there was a whole set of internal NSA. Nothing is done without, you know, you have to have authorities, right? And it goes all the way down to just like individual procedures, standing procedures. NSA had and been refined over the years based on the FISA. FISA been updated five times to keep up with the times since 1978.

• 2:51:10Danny Jones?

  Wow.

• 2:51:10Speaker 01

  Most people don't realize that. So they had special procedures for handling FISA because you're, and now you're quote unquote spying on a US person. With sometimes without a warrant initially, but the normal procedure was you, you have to get the warrant. Right up front.

• 2:51:32Speaker 01

  So I said, what are we doing? He says exigent conditions apply. Direct quote exigent conditions apply.

• 2:51:47Speaker 01

  We just need the data. Don't ask any more questions, Mr. Drake. I say, wait a minute.

• 2:51:54Danny Jones?

  This is the attorney.

• 2:51:55Speaker 01

  Turn the attorney inside the Office of General Counsel, who happened to be read into the, into the program.

• 2:52:00Danny Jones?

  Oh, thank you, Steve, for defining, defining it for my third grade education. Situations that allow law enforcement to conduct warrantless searches and seizures under certain urgent conditions. Okay. Exigent circumstances apply. We have to go outside the Constitution here.

• 2:52:15Speaker 01

  Yes. Right there. Yeah. Now, hot pursuit, that is allowed. Hot pursuit was allowed under FISA for a short period of time.

• 2:52:28Danny Jones?

  Oh, okay.

• 2:52:29Speaker 01

  It was, it wasn't like, yeah, exigent, but it was, there was a legal standard built into FISA, Fourth Amendment compliant, but you could temporarily, because sort of the immediacy of it.

• 2:52:40Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 2:52:40Speaker 01

  You could actually go after, surveil a US person. What if they were intending harm? What if it was that immediate, but remember, okay? That's one reason it was there. That was actually in the FISA. All that was bypassed. Okay, I mean bypass, meaning it was going to be a permanent warrantless, basically a general warrant, which is actually unconstitutional. Now, some would say, people even then said, Tom, you don't understand. You didn't make the decision. Shut up, be quiet. Things will take care of themselves. This is the crisis. Sometimes, you know, we have to do things differently. I kept talking, so back to the conversation with this attorney. I said,

• 2:53:25Speaker 01

  well, then why don't we go to Congress? Congress legislates. One of the things that's happening now, you see this in Trump 2.0, where even Congress, you get into this whole thing about can executive override? Or can they re, well, I guess that's another conversation. Legislates if the law of the land and FISA, which applies in this case, is no longer sufficient.

• 2:53:49Speaker 01

  Remember they passed the Patriot Act a couple of months later, or actually late October.

• 2:53:52Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:53:53Speaker 01

  Basically, which another component in all this to begin.

• 2:53:57Danny Jones?

  Literally the next month, right?

• 2:53:58Speaker 01

  To begin legalizing what was, okay, to be legalizing, they did through acts, which is ex post facto, which in itself, ex post facto law, which in itself, that's unconstitutional. You can't pass a law to, in essence, legalize what you were doing or conducting, even executive action that was unlawful or unconstitutional, particularly if it's unconstitutional.

• 2:54:22Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:54:23Speaker 01

  But remember, FISA ultimately falls under the Fourth Amendment. Okay?

• 2:54:28Danny Jones?

  Okay.

• 2:54:28Speaker 01

  It is a statute in law.

• 2:54:30Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:54:30Speaker 01

  With criminal sanctions if you violate it.

• 2:54:32Danny Jones?

  Mm hmm.

• 2:54:33Speaker 01

  Didn't matter anymore. All this didn't matter. I was told it's quaint document. So another conversation, you know, dustbins of history. We live in different times now, Mr. Drake.

• 2:54:43Danny Jones?

  Okay.

• 2:54:44Speaker 01

  Different times. We're just going to be different. We're just going to take the thing that makes us American, the first thing it defines, the foundational law of the land. Go to Congress. I'm talking to the attorney. Go to Congress, change the law. He says, with what we want to do, they would say no. In that moment, right as he said it, hair standing up on the back of my neck, because I realized in that moment, moment of truth, it didn't matter what law was. It didn't matter. We're not going to even bother. If they're, they're will, they were so worried that if they went to Congress, Congress say no, because they wanted to get away with this. They wanted to do this anyways. Didn't matter.

• 2:55:28Speaker 01

  Like, law doesn't matter in this regard, which is to me, central to even why we have United States of America. I could argue that the First and Fourth Amendment, because of all the abuses of the colonists.

• 2:55:44Speaker 01

  Colonial America.

• 2:55:45Danny Jones?

  Yep.

• 2:55:46Speaker 01

  Because of the severe abuses that rose to such a crescendo and it's got to such a fever pitch that we ended up having a violent American revolution to cast off King George III and all of his officers that would literally show up at people's homes with a piece of paper and say, I can take your effects, your papers, and even you with just the piece of paper.

• 2:56:09Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:56:09Speaker 01

  A general warrant. That's why we have a fourth amendment, which Louis Brandeis later, one of my, one of my all time favorite Supreme Court justices said, it's a right to privacy, wrote his phenomenal paper on it.

• 2:56:25Speaker 01

  It what's defines us as American, right? This is free speech. You get in and remember, okay, first amendment. Those are two things out there. I mean, that's really the basis for what means to be American. He's saying, I said, wow. We're going to spend all that too permanently like it's like permanent now. This is not even temporary.

• 2:56:44Speaker 01

  We're not even going to go back. We're not, we're not even going to, we're not even going to like even, even what, what's the phrase even show even face value. We're not even, we're not even going to pretend, we're not even going to pretend. We're doing all this in secret because you can protect.

• 2:57:00Danny Jones?

  Did you talk to anyone else, any of your colleagues that, that felt the same way you did that expressed your son?

• 2:57:06Speaker 01

  Yeah. Thin thread people in particular.

• 2:57:08Danny Jones?

  People, right.

• 2:57:09Speaker 01

  Here's why, again, without getting all the details, thin thread had already solved the big data problem, also protect the privacy of US persons. It could go through vast amounts of data, leave all the, the ocean where it was, leave the sand on the beach, don't touch it, just see what changes. It protected US persons. It encrypted. It also provided basically two levels of suspicion, didn't go any further.

• 2:57:34Speaker 01

  Right? But they decided not, they would not allow thin thread to be employed even after nine 11, I begged them, we have the program. Nope. We're not gonna, didn't matter. There were solutions, not just thin thread, that were never put into the fight after nine 11. Wouldn't you think because of the failure, you'd want to put the best you had, even if you hadn't used it before?

• 2:57:55Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 2:57:56Speaker 01

  Wouldn't you think you would want to put the best you had in the fight?

• 2:58:01Speaker 01

  You're trying, you gotta protect, you gotta protect more people from getting placed in a harms way.

• 2:58:06Danny Jones?

  What is the, what do you think the ultimate motive is for this, this way of going about it?

• 2:58:11Speaker 01

  Why?

• 2:58:12Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 2:58:12Speaker 01

  Because they were so, this is just psychology.

• 2:58:14Danny Jones?

  Competence of this bureaucracy?

• 2:58:16Speaker 01

  We need to make, that's part of it, but we need to make, he would say, Hayden, the general, we need to make, we just need to make Americans feel safe again. That's not in the constitution to make Americans feel safe. And it's not like we're, we're pansies and we have to be afraid. But it was actually, you have to do the reverse psychology thing. It was, they knew they had failed. They had to project it. Their way was, oh my God, even he's arguing, oh, if we had all this technology prior to nine 11, nine 11 wouldn't, probably wouldn't have happened. They actually had the technology prior to nine 11. He's in denial about what NSA.

• 2:58:50Danny Jones?

  Not only did they have the technology, they had the intel.

• 2:58:52Speaker 01

  Yes, had that too. Oh, I hadn't gotten to that story, which is, which is the, is a punchline for me when it comes to thin thread.

• 2:58:58Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:59:00Speaker 01

  What do you do? This is a moment of truth for me. I was already incredibly alarmed. I'm already gone to the most senior people at that time. I've already gone to the office general counsel. I've already confronted the director of signals, the signals intelligence.

• 2:59:19Speaker 01

  In that moment, as I got off the phone with that attorney, I said, I cannot remain silent. If I remain silent, I am complicit in the subversion of the constitution. I took an oath, sport and defend Brian, facing my entire military career, government career.

• 2:59:35Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:59:36Speaker 01

  I'm not going to let the government violate the constitution. You could have both. This thing about it's black or white, liberty or security. You actually can have both at the same time and compromise neither. There's that famous Benjamin Franklin quote.

• 2:59:52Danny Jones?

  Right. Security for free.

• 2:59:54Speaker 01

  For those who, yes, you can sell both. They aired and even hate himself admitted, we drew that line. He kept, he always used.

• 3:00:02Danny Jones?

  What was it? What is the exact, was like, don't, if when you trade your freedoms for securities, you hide.

• 3:00:05Speaker 01

  A little bit. Those who seek a little will lose both. Basically lose both.

• 3:00:09Danny Jones?

  Right, right, right.

• 3:00:12Speaker 01

  Yeah. A little liberty for security will lose both.

• 3:00:15Speaker 01

  There's a larger quote around that.

• 3:00:16Danny Jones?

  Right, yeah, right.

• 3:00:19Speaker 01

  I moment, in that moment, I knew I could remain silent, but I knew by not remaining silent, I put myself at extraordinary risk. I'm a senior executive. I had taken the oath. I have a fundamental responsibility.

• 3:00:32Danny Jones?

  But you decided to go about doing it.

• 3:00:35Speaker 01

  All through channels.

• 3:00:36Danny Jones?

  Through the, the correct legal way it should be done.

• 3:00:40Speaker 01

  So, I'm going to accelerate this because it's really, because then, how was I punished? Right? And this is where life literally was turned upside down for me. Because even then, I was being tagged as a troublemaker. Okay? So, I decided to blow the whistle. I went to inspector general. I then went secretly, which was allowed under the Intelligence Community Whistleblower Protection Act, an actual act of Congress.

• 3:01:08Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 3:01:08Speaker 01

  I could go, at the time, they modified it later. I could go directly to the intelligence committees oversight, both HIPSE and SISI. I'm just without expanding it, but it's the secret. I could go to them to share my concerns in private.

• 3:01:26Speaker 01

  Now, there's a risk that I could be exposed. It turns out every channel that I went to, all the official channels were exposure channels. So, I'm disclosing, but I'm being exposed at the same time.

• 3:01:38Speaker 01

  You could argue in part, the intelligence committees were already co-opted, owned by the intelligence community in large part. Right? They're beholden, remember? It's secret, right? You go to a secret chamber, even in, in, in the, in the Capitol, right?

• 3:01:52Danny Jones?

  So, you went to these, these, the, these proper secret channels.

• 3:01:57Speaker 01

  Then, I was subpoenaed, equivalent of being subpoenaed. Primipatia testimony, evidence, prima material evidence and testimony to two 9/11 congressional investigations. One was Saxby Shambles. He had, they had been a recently formed homeland security, provide all kinds of information to them, which was basically the precursor to the joint 9/11, the 9/11 joint inquiry.

• 3:02:21Speaker 01

  Both, both, both of the committees.

• 3:02:23Danny Jones?

  Okay. Wow.

• 3:02:28Speaker 01

  All that was suppressed. No one to this day can find my testimony or the highly classified information I gave them.

• 3:02:36Danny Jones?

  Really?

• 3:02:36Speaker 01

  And I didn't keep it at home. And I didn't secret it away.

• 3:02:39Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 3:02:40Speaker 01

  I didn't hide it somewhere in a basket or in a pumpkin.

• 3:02:45Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 3:02:47Speaker 01

  So I can laugh about it now. Okay, but. So that's spring, fall, or summer. I was not part, I was, people think I was interviewed by the nine eleven commission. I know why I wasn't because they didn't want me on the record.

• 3:03:00Danny Jones?

  Hmm.

• 3:03:01Speaker 01

  But no one can find. In fact, I was told later that what I provided in joint nine eleven inquiry was so classified, it couldn't be in the classified report. What does that tell you? They covered up. They helped cover up for NSA. NSA had a lot of, you know, egg on its face.

• 3:03:19Speaker 01

  Now it's-

• 3:03:20Danny Jones?

  And some of the stuff that you said, you still can't even say today.

• 3:03:23Speaker 01

  Not, not the classified stuff.

• 3:03:25Danny Jones?

  Right, not the classified stuff, right.

• 3:03:26Speaker 01

  But they were, they were, they were at the heart of the failure. There gets into great detail because I'm about, this is what happened. So I was able, I couldn't get, I couldn't put any of these programs, or the ones I was telling you about, including thin thread and a bunch of others, weren't allowed to go operational. Because they're continuing to spend, they were fact, oh no, I was sitting in a meeting and, and my supervisor, the director of the signals intelligence director, it says,

• 3:03:52Speaker 01

  nine eleven is a gift NSA. We're gonna get all the money we want and then some. And that's certainly what happened. Congress has opened it up. They opened up the coffers and just started pumping even more billions.

• 3:04:03Danny Jones?

  Who, who said nine eleven was a gift to NSA?

• 3:04:05Speaker 01

  My supervisor, the signals intelligence director, it was just a, it became, it's now this haunting quote. Sitting right next to her. Where she says nine eleven is a gift to NSA. I was in a meeting, she was, people were so, we were going around together because this part, I was led the communications part of my leadership communications team. We're going around to the workforce because people, they need to be held, they need to be, people are just really taking this hard. I encouraged her to go around, not just to console, to be seen and explain, what are we gonna do? And she's sitting in this meeting, this one particular meeting saying, I'm just sitting there with my, like, where she says nine eleven is a gift NSA, we're getting all money we want and then some.

• 3:04:51Speaker 01

  Because they're always, oh, we never got enough money. If we just had enough money, we could, we could, you know, no, it's not about the money. And you'd already solved the core challenge problems already.

• 3:05:02Speaker 01

  So

• 3:05:06Speaker 01

  I then was part of a diff- this just, I think the thing about this is Department of Defense Inspector General. My other colleagues, I was anonymous because I was still working. They were all retired, including Diane Rourke, who was the staffer on the highest permanent committee. She had the primary NSA account, Republican primary NSA account. I had made secret connections with her to, to give her a heads up on what the heck was going on in NSA early on, early on. Okay. After nine 11.

• 3:05:37Danny Jones?

  Okay.

• 3:05:38Speaker 01

  But remember, then I was in with formal, right? With, with investigators.

• 3:05:45Speaker 01

  In fact, under nine 11, they were so, they were so hyper about, see NSA wanted to put childminders along with me. They did not want, they wanted to know exactly what I was going to share. The investigators, to their credit, said no. So, but I was spirited down to a, basically a secret, it was a nondescript government building where, where I was then interviewed in this building. I was interviewed like NSA or for the joint inquiry.

• 3:06:09Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 3:06:10Speaker 01

  They were that, because that's what was happening, all this pushback. Because it was exposing a lot of embarrassing details about how the entire intelligence community had failed to, to prevent. And they're, and all Congress said, how do we stop this again? How do we prevent another nine 11? That was a big thing. How do we prevent another nine 11? So

• 3:06:30Speaker 01

  I was part of this DOD Inspector General investigation, went on for a while. I was the primary source. Thousands of pages, corruption, the fraud, the billions in waste, the thin thread versus trailblazer, thin thread versus stellar wind, um, which was obviously super classified. Um, the, this, that, that had that time and it had been for this, for several years, as it turns out, right? Uh, that went on for a while. I was flagged and tagged left and right. All kinds of retaliation reprisal started occurring. I started getting shifted. That's how I ended up at the National Defense University, out of sight, out of mind.

• 3:07:08Danny Jones?

  Mm hmm.

• 3:07:11Speaker 01

  We accelerate to November 2005. I make a fateful decision. And by the way, as a side note right now, this is about the furthest and longest I've ever publicly said what, how all this transpired. There's a lot more behind what I said in terms of details and fascinating human, you know, dynamics, right? But I've never really gone this far. Right? Because most interviews don't last very long.

• 3:07:35Danny Jones?

  Right, right.

• 3:07:37Speaker 01

  So I'm here. It is November 2005. I decided I had one last chance to make my case to the new director of NSA, Keith Alexander, who actually was much more technologically savvy.

• 3:07:54Speaker 01

  He did not take kindly to my blowing the whistle. I sent him a letter.

• 3:08:01Speaker 01

  Caused quite a stir. But the last thing he Trailblazer, they had decided Trailblazer, it got basically got canceled in 2006. But he was convinced that he could do it better. And there was a following program called turbulence, all these T programs.

• 3:08:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, T programs. See, this is the kicker for me. I'm just on a kind of a weird masking, this masking level. We had the T at NSA. The T in NSA had already been fully demonstrated. Okay.

• 3:08:36Speaker 01

  But low T is what they focused on.

• 3:08:39Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 3:08:39Speaker 01

  As much as they projected high T, I'm just, I have never said this before. It was low T for sure. Look, if you take on and you're you solve the problem, you know, that has its own reward. Not just, it's not about spending money. You want to make sure you create and deploy systems that actually provide for the common defense.

• 3:09:00Danny Jones?

  Yep.

• 3:09:01Speaker 01

  So he didn't like it. Shortly thereafter, middle of December, this above the fold old school print newspaper, New York Times, Eric Lickblow, James Risen publishes for the first time a exposure of this warrantless wiretapping program that had been in existence just after 9/11.

• 3:09:24Speaker 01

  Now, there was a huge scramble in the entire intelligence community, but particularly NSA. They went apoplectic. Bush, there's public statements. You go on the internet, you'll see public statements from Cheney and Bush and a bunch of others about, oh, my gosh. They just blew, it was one of the most secret programs.

• 3:09:42Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 3:09:43Speaker 01

  And it was, is one of the most secret programs in history.

• 3:09:47Danny Jones?

  What year did this come out?

• 3:09:49Speaker 01

  This was December 2005. Still out there.

• 3:09:52Danny Jones?

  Okay.

• 3:09:52Speaker 01

  The article itself.

• 3:09:53Danny Jones?

  And when did Snowden blow the whistle?

• 3:09:56Speaker 01

  2013.

• 3:09:57Danny Jones?

  2013. Oh, way later. Wow.

• 3:09:59Speaker 01

  Okay. Okay. Remember, I've been following all the developments internally. The program was rapidly metastasizing. Even before it got out in public. Remember, I'm going through channels. I'm spending lots of time in front of investigators, sharing with them what I know.

• 3:10:17Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 3:10:20Speaker 01

  At great risk.

• 3:10:21Danny Jones?

  Yes.

• 3:10:22Speaker 01

  Extraordinarily risk. I was, again, I was already, so.

• 3:10:29Speaker 01

  Article comes out, two weeks later, a massive national security leak investigation is launched by the DOJ. I knew, even when the article came out a couple of weeks earlier, in December 2005, that I would be immediately targeted.

• 3:10:45Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 3:10:45Speaker 01

  Because so few people do. In fact, this program was so secret that the only authorizing document was a letter memo that was stored in David Addington's safe, Chief of Staff slash Attorney for Cheney, in his office safe.

• 3:11:00Danny Jones?

  Wow.

• 3:11:01Speaker 01

  Even NSA sent their own attorneys down to get, to get the authorization, because they were so worried they wouldn't have cover. You always look at what's the cover. You want a lawful order. You get into lawful orders? I know that from, from my, you know, the Uniform Code of Military Justice. You only have to follow lawful orders. Nuremberg Trials Principle.

• 3:11:21Danny Jones?

  Yep.

• 3:11:22Speaker 01

  Which was their excuse. I'm just, we're just following orders. No, lawful orders. It wasn't lawful to break the Constitution. And there's lawful means to update the Constitution.

• 3:11:35Speaker 01

  But national security just like was in had this huge carve out like this huge exemption. Remember execute in conditions, but now it's like permanent.

• 3:11:44Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 3:11:45Speaker 01

  We're now in 2005. So accelerate forward. I was tar. I knew that I became a target. A person of interest and a target as of spring 2006. Back up just a couple of months. I wrestled with this for quite a while after my last conversation. Last email with the with the director of NSA. There was one last route I could go, but it wasn't authorized.

• 3:12:14Speaker 01

  I grew up in an era when I became intimately familiar until I met him later, but intimately familiar in terms of the history, Daniel Ellsberg.

• 3:12:21Danny Jones?

  Oh.

• 3:12:22Speaker 01

  Pentagon Papers.

• 3:12:23Danny Jones?

  Pentagon Papers, yeah.

• 3:12:24Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 3:12:26Speaker 01

  He went through channels. No one would listen to him in terms of the bright and shining lie of Vietnam. A whole nother story. He was part of the study that showed it was, but it was buried. It was classified. He not all of them. There were so stuff in there was quite secret that he even he didn't release to the press. He only went to the press unauthorized, ended up facing 115 years because of government malpractice. They ended up the judge through the through the case out. I was I was there wrapped by a young teenager.

• 3:12:54Danny Jones?

  Danny Sheehan.

• 3:12:55Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 3:12:55Danny Jones?

  Big part of that.

• 3:12:57Speaker 01

  So.

• 3:12:59Speaker 01

  I had one last route. I could touch the third rail, go to the press. And NSA, if you go to the press without authorization, and I had gone, I knew it was like if you have to have something published. I had something published and based on my work I did on jackpot in IEEE Computer Magazine in 1996. When I was in when I was doing all my really highly technical stuff. I had to go through the whole with the classification review officer just to make sure it was good.

• 3:13:23Danny Jones?

  Yep.

• 3:13:23Speaker 01

  Took months.

• 3:13:24Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 3:13:26Speaker 01

  Here, I'm going to go to the press without any authorization. But at that time, it was in only it only violated administrative policy. It didn't violate the constitution. It was not a crime. It wasn't criminal to go to the press.

• 3:13:41Speaker 01

  However, I knew if I did, I could end up just like Ellsberg. I already knew that. Some people thought I was stupid and naive and didn't know that. That's not true at all. I knew exactly what the risks were. I knew not only could I lose my job, probably would, but worse, I could be charged on the ESPN. I knew that. So, how do you go to the press? Where they're, and this is, I wouldn't get into all this, part of it is still technically classified.

• 3:14:05Danny Jones?

  Yeah, wasn't the NSA spying on the press?

• 3:14:07Speaker 01

  Yes. They had a special program as part of this larger. It's called First Fruits.

• 3:14:12Danny Jones?

  First Fruit.

• 3:14:13Speaker 01

  Where they're monitoring certain media outlets and even individual reporters and journalists because they were so scared that something would come out, not just about the secret surveillance program, but the torture program.

• 3:14:24Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 3:14:24Speaker 01

  Torture program came out way before this one did. Okay, Abu Ghraib.

• 3:14:28Danny Jones?

  Yep.

• 3:14:29Speaker 01

  Yep. Sly Hirsch.

• 3:14:33Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 3:14:34Speaker 01

  Right. Milai, that's where he became famous as a journalist. So, I had that choice. And I won't go all the details. But I had one chance to make contact with a reporter.

• 3:14:48Speaker 01

  Which worked. And ended up anonymously communicating with reporters for about a year before I knew that I would ultimately have to go face to face. And so I actually, through 2007, I was having infrequent aperiodic face to face meetings with this reporter. At even greater risk. Because as things progressed, I was under extraordinary electronic surveillance. I knew they'd eventually catch up with me. I knew that I might find myself being pulled out of my house or having my house raided or my office down at the National Defense University. And that's exactly what happened.

• 3:15:25Danny Jones?

  Yeah, let me ask you this. What was it like when you realized? Or was there like a specific point when you realized that the NSA had turned all of the surveillance on to you?

• 3:15:36Speaker 01

  The early, this is my technical background.

• 3:15:42Speaker 01

  I knew that they would start monitoring me electronically with, because they could.

• 3:15:49Danny Jones?

  Via your.

• 3:15:51Speaker 01

  Their own means. I could see, I, I set up, I set up logs. I could see where they're attempting to break into my system. I had a network at home. I've been in long into this.

• 3:15:59Danny Jones?

  Okay.

• 3:15:59Speaker 01

  I was, you know, back in the early days, pre-internet, BBSs.

• 3:16:03Danny Jones?

  So you.

• 3:16:04Speaker 01

  Gopher. I was, you know, I, before internet was internet in terms of public eye, back in the eighties.

• 3:16:10Danny Jones?

  You had, you, you had stuff in place monitoring this, being, you're, you're prepared.

• 3:16:15Speaker 01

  Weird things like the Verizon DSL box would get reset. I'd call them up and they'd say, oh, uh, you have to, uh, pass. It's like, wait a minute. Yeah. They were remotely resetting it, but I had multiple firewalls, both hardware and software.

• 3:16:28Danny Jones?

  Wow.

• 3:16:29Speaker 01

  I don't ever believe, although it's possible, I never saw that they actually got into my computers.

• 3:16:34Danny Jones?

  Oh, really?

• 3:16:35Speaker 01

  No, that's right. I don't, I don't have any, I, in some ways I take some pride in that with all their, I knew what they had, what their capabilities were. But the problem was there's what's called zero day exploits. There was always possible, right? So I had to assume I was compromised anyways.

• 3:16:52Speaker 01

  But see if I, people say, well, gee, if you know that, why didn't you get rid of everything? I had nothing to hide to use that, which I don't like that phrase because that comes from Joseph Goebbels. Right? If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to worry about. So who cares what we know about you?

• 3:17:05Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 3:17:05Speaker 01

  Wait a minute.

• 3:17:05Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 3:17:06Speaker 01

  That's not the point. I used to do exercises on privacy and people get to, oh yeah, no, that's me. Why is it you? No, because I don't want them to know. Why? Because that's my, that's me. Oh, so there is some ownership here in terms of your own privacy. Ah, right? Privacy is essential to even living.

• 3:17:24Danny Jones?

  Yes.

• 3:17:25Speaker 01

  A hundred percent. As much as people want to dump stuff out there, right? It's amazing what people put out there, right? But there is something about who we are, the essence of, but that's a different conversation.

• 3:17:35Danny Jones?

  Yes.

• 3:17:35Speaker 01

  So I'm.

• 3:17:38Speaker 01

  I'm getting hu- then they start physically surveilling me. It, one, it was covert, covert. This is where John Kioraku knows that really, really well, better than I do. But it was clear that they, and then it started to be overt. They wanted to make clear that we're on to you. Like, they were now sort of-

• 3:17:55Danny Jones?

  They want, they want you to know-

• 3:17:57Speaker 01

  Yes, yes.

• 3:17:57Danny Jones?

  That they're following you.

• 3:17:58Speaker 01

  Wanted me to know. I was getting stopped quite frequently. They would have random searches. My searches weren't random. At all. Coming to the gate, right? They had already alert based on the tags, the car description.

• 3:18:11Danny Jones?

  It's intimidation.

• 3:18:12Speaker 01

  Oh, of course. Huge.

• 3:18:14Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 3:18:15Speaker 01

  So, that went on until my colleagues, NSA, all retired, and then Diane Rourke were raided. All in the same day in July of 2007. I knew that I was now the primary target and probably had been for a while. I was still at NSA. They probably had suspicion that I was in contact with a reporter. Although later they actually thought I was really in contact. I was using, they actually thought I was, that was a cover, a cutout. There was like a cover. And that I was like a convenient hangout, as they call it, right? Just a hang-

• 3:18:55Danny Jones?

  A limited hangout?

• 3:18:56Speaker 01

  A limited hangout with her, but I was real, had really been in contact for a longer period of time with the New York Times. Even-

• 3:19:02Danny Jones?

  Oh, really?

• 3:19:03Speaker 01

  They later made up a whole chronology that I, but it turned out I wasn't, right? I had never had any contact with the New York Times.

• 3:19:09Danny Jones?

  That's crazy.

• 3:19:11Speaker 01

  So I knew in July that I was, I was now the target.

• 3:19:16Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 3:19:19Speaker 01

  And it was clear, based on the last couple of meetings with the reporter, Siobhan Gorman, who at the time was worked for the Baltimore Sun. Later went to the Wall Street Journal. Now she's more in private.

• 3:19:32Speaker 01

  In consulting practice, has been for quite a while.

• 3:19:36Speaker 01

  I knew that there was, there were agents in the room. Including, by the way, I found out later that they were actually using a significant number of agents from the mole hunter unit FBI. Those are the ones that are trained to go after spies.

• 3:19:51Danny Jones?

  Like legitimate spies, foreign spies.

• 3:19:53Speaker 01

  But that's how I was being treated worse than a spy. That's clear. I was, I was now the threat. I was the leaker. I found out later that Cheney had issued a fine and fry the leaker. He just said, fine and fry them. I don't care. Just make sure it's someone, you know, apparently, you know, it has to be senior enough. But fry, burn them, burn them. Make an object lesson of them. That's how I interpreted it.

• 3:20:19Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 3:20:19Speaker 01

  So late November, I'm getting ready to go to work. I had, I had two vehicles at the time. I had my hybrid, which is a Prius. And then I had one, a Toyota RAV4 EV. It was all electric. Limited, it was a limited, uh, run. They had, they, they, I'm getting ready in the other bedroom, right? They get in my car, go down to the metro and go down. And then there was a bus that would shuttle me over from the coast guard headquarters over, over, or literally get, take me to one of the metro stations, drop me off by bus, a government bus in front of, and then I walked to my office where I was teaching, had been for a couple of years.

• 3:21:02Speaker 01

  It was actually during that time is when I met, we'll probably want to take a break here shortly, but that's when I met, met Elon Musk.

• 3:21:08Danny Jones?

  Oh.

• 3:21:09Speaker 01

  During that, during the time I was at the National Defense University, uh, where I was teaching in the, uh, industrial ecology, the armed forces.

• 3:21:15Danny Jones?

  Okay.

• 3:21:16Speaker 01

  And I was, I was a co-lead on their space industries team. That's how I ended up going to SpaceX.

• 3:21:21Danny Jones?

  Oh, wow.

• 3:21:22Speaker 01

  With, with some students.

• 3:21:24Danny Jones?

  Okay.

• 3:21:24Speaker 01

  Yeah. A bunch of different, we went to Cape Kennedy, we went out to, we went out to Cheyenne Mountain. I mean, went inside the Cheyenne Mountain, right? Uh, we went to a number of different sites.

• 3:21:35Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 3:21:37Speaker 01

  So.

• 3:21:40Speaker 01

  I'm getting ready for work. I look out the window and I see a bunch of agents streaming across the front yard and a bunch of cars pulling up as they're piling out.

• 3:21:46Danny Jones?

  Oh, no.

• 3:21:47Speaker 01

  And that's where, I mean, the moment is another one of those moments because, you know, this is years later, right? But that article had come out, right? Almost two years ago, right? This is talking. And so, remember, they've had this multimillion dollar national leak investigation going on as to who were the sources for the New York Times in particular. I got caught up in that for all the reasons I gave earlier because I was with so few people knew about the program. Even though they argued later, oh, just some disagreement between two programs in Trailblazer while they, you know, that's, that was like the limited cutout as to why they came after me when in fact it hadn't, it wasn't that

• 3:22:28Speaker 01

  at all. It was the, the fact that stellar wind had been revealed, even though I did, had not, I had not provided any classified information about the program to anybody outside of channels.

• 3:22:40Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 3:22:41Speaker 01

  Not even the reporter.

• 3:22:42Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 3:22:43Speaker 01

  So you can imagine knocking on the door. They later, they, they said, you know, if you, they told me later, if you hadn't opened it, they knocked twice. We, they had a battering ram with them. No kidding that they would have used the batter ram to punch through the door. And then you can file, file a claim for damages.

• 3:22:59Danny Jones?

  Your son answered.

• 3:23:00Speaker 01

  Son answered the door because it's upstairs. I just, I said, Zachary, go answer the door. He's had the presence of mind. He's, it's.

• 3:23:09Danny Jones?

  And you knew, you didn't say.

• 3:23:10Speaker 01

  Oh, I knew, I knew.

• 3:23:12Danny Jones?

  But you didn't tell him?

• 3:23:12Speaker 01

  I hadn't told anybody. Man, I kept this a secret from my own family.

• 3:23:15Danny Jones?

  No, I mean, you didn't tell the FBI's at the door.

• 3:23:17Speaker 01

  No, of course not.

• 3:23:18Danny Jones?

  How old was he?

• 3:23:19Speaker 01

  He was, he was, okay. Ninety-five. He would have been 12.

• 3:23:25Speaker 01

  Middle school. So normally my spouse would take him to, to the middle school, right? In the local town. And then I would pick him up, right? After school. So, yeah. Bunch of agents come in, they, they start sweeping the house. I had a choice. They read Miranda rights. I didn't have to cooperate. Obviously, I could have said, I'm getting, you know, you're gonna have to deal with my attorney. I didn't have attorney at that time, right? At that moment, I didn't have an attorney. So.

• 3:24:00Speaker 01

  I said, this is one final time to blow the whistle. I named president.

• 3:24:07Speaker 01

  The vice president. Senior people, including Hayden, about what had gone down over the last six plus years. No, we're not here for that.

• 3:24:21Speaker 01

  We understand you violated, you know, certain laws and so we're here to collect evidence.

• 3:24:27Speaker 01

  And

• 3:24:30Speaker 01

  we can interview you or you don't have to. I didn't have to be interviewed. Obviously I had Miranda rights. I could have remained silent. I said, no, I'm gonna, I'll. It was very good. An interview is interrogation. That was one of three, by the way. They took notes. They, I knew anything I said would be.

• 3:24:46Danny Jones?

  Right, of course.

• 3:24:47Speaker 01

  Used against me. It was.

• 3:24:53Speaker 01

  That was an interesting experience all by itself. I remember at one point, there was an anecdote where one of the techs is coming up from a basement. I was really into computers, a lot of retro stuff going way back into the seventies. This was a highly modified, my first computer I had that I owned was an Atari eight hundred home computer. That's where I learned everything. Like, that's where I learned computing, programming, networking, you know, dial up, right, all that, right? And he comes, it was a highly modified, basically was a closed circuit version modified in box. I looked at him, I said, you know, the last time they, they modified that operating system, so ten K is was, was back in the late seventies. You really think you'd need that?

• 3:25:34Speaker 01

  And he stopped at the top of the stairs going into the basement in my office and he looked, he looked down, looked up and he says, nah, we don't need it. He went back and put it back on the shelf. But they took a bunch of, of Amiga stuff. I was also into Amiga, right? That was kind of a follow on to the Atari eight bit in terms of the technology. Went through all of my library. I mean, they just ransacked the house. That's all. Meanwhile, they're ransacking my office and my car. Looking for evidence.

• 3:26:05Speaker 01

  I knew in that moment that I was behind several eight balls and I knew that I would probably get charged. I knew that. I interviewed twice more. The last interview was in April of 2008. I was placed on administrative leave in November 2007. The last interview, the last interview was in April. It was a setup. They brought in the chief prosecutor. It was the first time I met the chief prosecutor at the time. It was a different one later. But the chief prosecutor said, "We have more than enough evidence." Just short. He confronted me. He said, "We have in a, in a, in a windowless room in an FBI facility outside of DC." Right? It was the windowless room right behind where the mole hunters were. I'm no kidding.

• 3:26:51Speaker 01

  He said, "We have more than enough evidence to put you away for a long, long time. You better start talking now."

• 3:26:59Speaker 01

  Because he said, "How would you like to spend the rest of your life in prison?" And you can imagine, I'm sitting there.

• 3:27:07Speaker 01

  We might be able to, you know, 25 years, 20 years, no guarantees. That's better than life in prison. In 2008, I had just turned, I was, oh, I hadn't quite turned yet. I was 50, I was 50, I was 52, right? I knew I could no longer continue having any, any, said, "Nope.

• 3:27:30Speaker 01

  You're gonna have to deal with an attorney from now on."

• 3:27:32Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 3:27:33Speaker 01

  I, they already, they're moving to revoke my clearance because I was a senior executive. It was either you could have a set of your peers or the director himself.

• 3:27:42Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 3:27:43Speaker 01

  Okay. I said, "I'm just gonna resign." I resigned.

• 3:27:47Speaker 01

  Got an attorney, criminal defense attorney.

• 3:27:50Speaker 01

  They tried to get me to plead out multiple times between April of 2008, the first time, with confronted by the chief prosecutor, and April of 2010. Now we're in a new administration. I wasn't indicted.

• 3:28:04Danny Jones?

  Obama.

• 3:28:05Speaker 01

  Obama. Bush, it's important to note, even though it began under Bush, I was not indicted under Bush. They had a draft indictment. I have a copy of that. But I was not indicted under Bush. I was indicted under Obama.

• 3:28:18Danny Jones?

  Wow, the irony.

• 3:28:20Speaker 01

  Huge irony.

• 3:28:23Speaker 01

  And the reason Bush even made sort of passing reference to it in his memoir, right? Biography of his autobiography where he says, you know, he just, why go after? Cause it's like, for him, it wasn't like, I think even he had problems with Cheney later. They kind of like, kind of went their ways a little bit after the second, in the second administration.

• 3:28:45Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 3:28:46Speaker 01

  There's a passage in the book that makes sort of indirect reference to, uh, because I think you realize he had actually, without even admitting it fully, that he had gone over the line. Right? Because he had listened to Cheney.

• 3:28:59Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 3:29:00Speaker 01

  So.

• 3:29:04Speaker 01

  I'm sitting, I'm working at Apple now. I had no job. I couldn't get any work. That's a whole story in itself. I couldn't get work. I was persona non grata. I was, you know, I was hot potato. There's

• 3:29:14Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 3:29:15Speaker 01

  literally persona non grata.

• 3:29:17Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 3:29:17Speaker 01

  No one hired me. I formed my own company, a small LLC.

• 3:29:22Speaker 01

  No one would touch me. In part, when they would find, even my security clearance didn't show anything was negative. They said, you're under national security investigation. We would, I understand. So here it is, April 2010. I'm sitting at lunch. I'm working at Apple in Bethesda, Maryland, one of the stores.

• 3:29:39Danny Jones?

  Okay.

• 3:29:40Speaker 01

  Where I worked for 13 years.

• 3:29:43Speaker 01

  Quite a jump, quite a distance going from senior executive to wage grade specialist in a retail store. Okay. I'm sitting there, I get a call from my attorney.

• 3:29:56Speaker 01

  My attorney says, uh, where are you? And remember, I had this attorney now for two years. He said, uh, oh, I'm at lunch. He said, did you know you were just indicted? Now there'd been a, uh, it was Kafkaesque. Again, we'll go into the detail where he, myself and I was, and the prosecution team with NSA personnel were there in that same window of the room again. It was clear that they were moving to indict me. And it was basically, you're on notice. Right? You're basically, we're on notice as to why we're doing this. And they actually, in essence, had the outline of the indictment.

• 3:30:38Danny Jones?

  Wow.

• 3:30:39Speaker 01

  So I got indicted. I was not pulled off the street. I ended up having to, I was, it was an arraignment. I pled not guilty to all 10 charges, five under the S P R Act, one for obstruction of justice, four for making false statements to FBI agents during the interviews, which in themselves were actually true.

• 3:30:54Danny Jones?

  Well, when that, when your lawyer called you, didn't he also tell you that they approached your wife?

• 3:30:58Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 3:31:00Danny Jones?

  How did that go?

• 3:31:01Speaker 01

  Not very, she still works there.

• 3:31:04Danny Jones?

  And what, what, what did he, what exactly did he say?

• 3:31:07Speaker 01

  Oh, they, they had one of their security officers inform her that, um, that, um, her husband had been indicted. And was facing 35 years in prison.

• 3:31:23Danny Jones?

  And then what?

• 3:31:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, I don't want to get the cost of family. I mean, this is where you, so, and then what? Well, what do what you, you know, my criminal defense, I had spent umpteen money. Remember there is a whole lot of history I just bypassed because.

• 3:31:36Danny Jones?

  John told, well, just when Karyaku was in here, he was saying that they gave her an ultimatum.

• 3:31:43Speaker 01

  Uh, they tried, they later did a, uh, interrogated her. So what they, that was, but then they interrogated her and they tried to get her. There's this thing called basically you sort of the pillow privilege.

• 3:31:54Danny Jones?

  Mm hmm.

• 3:31:54Speaker 01

  Where.

• 3:31:55Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 3:31:55Speaker 01

  You have spouse.

• 3:31:56Danny Jones?

  Yes, right.

• 3:31:57Speaker 01

  I never told her anything. She had nothing to share because I had never told her anything anyways. But they were threatening to take away her clearance, way clearance, remember? It's like.

• 3:32:06Danny Jones?

  And she's, she worked, she had worked at NSA and still does to this day.

• 3:32:09Speaker 01

  She's worked at NSA her entire life.

• 3:32:11Danny Jones?

  Wow.

• 3:32:14Speaker 01

  Or related contracts. She's been a contractor, although she was a, for a short time, she actually worked summer hires, intern, then hire.

• 3:32:23Danny Jones?

  And she had not been aware of this whole investigation?

• 3:32:26Speaker 01

  I never told her. Of course, I wasn't gonna say anything. I didn't want to expose them. I had to protect them too. I'm protecting, I'm protecting, I'm protecting the nation, but then I have to protect, I have to protect the constitution against my own government. I gotta protect my family at the same time.

• 3:32:41Danny Jones?

  All these years, you're going through all this shit and you didn't say a word to your wife?

• 3:32:46Speaker 01

  No word. Well, I had learned how to be silent.

• 3:32:49Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 3:32:49Speaker 01

  You gotta remember.

• 3:32:50Danny Jones?

  I know. It's just like, it's hard to.

• 3:32:52Speaker 01

  I could keep secrets.

• 3:32:53Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 3:32:54Speaker 01

  Isn't there irony there in there?

• 3:32:55Danny Jones?

  I just can't imagine how fucking hard that must have been.

• 3:33:01Speaker 01

  I'm unwinding it now.

• 3:33:04Speaker 01

  I'll say, share something off the record with you, um, maybe during the break, but I, uh, because I don't really want, there's certain things I don't advertise still to this day.

• 3:33:11Danny Jones?

  Okay. Well, let's take, let's, let's take a quick break right now. I gotta pee anyways and we'll, I'm back.

• 3:33:18Danny Jones?

  All right. Where were we? Uh, we just talked about how, um, you got news from your lawyer?

• 3:33:24Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 3:33:24Danny Jones?

  That you were indicted and, uh, one of the special agents, I guess, contacted your wife and let them know you were indicted. And, um,

• 3:33:35Speaker 01

  I'm now facing

• 3:33:39Speaker 01

  a very dark future.

• 3:33:41Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 3:33:42Speaker 01

  Because the indictment included five charges counts under the espionage act. Same, it's the same espionage act it was used against.

• 3:33:53Danny Jones?

  John?

• 3:33:55Speaker 01

  Well, yes.

• 3:33:56Danny Jones?

  Okay.

• 3:33:58Speaker 01

  It was the same, at this time, I was only the second American, in this case, the whistleblower, who had been charged. Ellsberg was the first.

• 3:34:06Danny Jones?

  Ellsberg was the first for.

• 3:34:07Speaker 01

  For non-spy, for non-spy activities.

• 3:34:11Danny Jones?

  And for context, can you explain for people who aren't familiar with him? He was involved in the Pentagon Papers leak?

• 3:34:15Speaker 01

  He was a senior, he was a senior, it's very similar in terms of his position in government. And, um, he exposed, was part of the study, but then exposed the Pentagon Papers to the press. Caused a huge stir. It was, it was no doubt partially responsible for the demise of the Nixon administration. And he ended up facing 115 years in year, 115 years in prison and went to trial. And the trial went on for a couple of years. Until they broke into his psychiatrist's office looking for dirt. And the judge threw the case out because of malpractice.

• 3:34:52Danny Jones?

  Oh, so.

• 3:34:53Speaker 01

  Misconduct on the part of the prosecution.

• 3:34:58Danny Jones?

  So did that count as some sort of precedent?

• 3:35:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, well.

• 3:35:03Danny Jones?

  Or did that screw it up?

• 3:35:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, the way, well, you know, the Supreme Court left room open to go after a source with the same charge.

• 3:35:12Danny Jones?

  Got it.

• 3:35:13Speaker 01

  There was more protections. This gets into a whole, you know, press reporting, right?

• 3:35:18Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 3:35:18Speaker 01

  Is the press liable or is it the source? Now that's changed, especially under Obama, where it was clear they were also saying, hey, press, you know, you could be next. And then under, well, in terms of Sterling, that he's another one charged on the espionage act, Jeffrey Sterling, another CIA employee.

• 3:35:38Danny Jones?

  Hmm, not familiar with that one.

• 3:35:39Speaker 01

  Ended up in prison.

• 3:35:42Speaker 01

  He,

• 3:35:44Speaker 01

  they tried to get James Risen, right? This is the same one who was the co-author of the December 2005 article, wrote, wrote this, this article about Operation Merlin. Interesting. And they thought that Jeffrey Sterling was the source. And they end up, they end up trying to get him to testify against his own, his own source. Alleged source.

• 3:36:13Speaker 01

  Several times until they dropped it. Remember, all under Obama.

• 3:36:17Danny Jones?

  Oh, wow.

• 3:36:17Speaker 01

  There's an.

• 3:36:18Danny Jones?

  Operation Merlin.

• 3:36:18Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:36:19Danny Jones?

  Uh, involving providing flawed nuclear weapon design information to Iran?

• 3:36:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, it backfired.

• 3:36:26Danny Jones?

  The leak aimed to expose the CIA's missteps and potential dangers into national security.

• 3:36:31Speaker 01

  They're sharing actual nuclear technology. Okay, even though it was quote unquote flawed.

• 3:36:39Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 3:36:41Speaker 01

  As a way to get inside their program.

• 3:36:45Danny Jones?

  Like a Trojan horse?

• 3:36:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, kinda like that, but it was, this is the sort of arrogance, I'd say the arrogance is that we'll be able to get away with it. It backfired.

• 3:36:57Danny Jones?

  So like if we give you?

• 3:36:59Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 3:36:59Danny Jones?

  The technology, we'll now understand the technology.

• 3:37:02Speaker 01

  Slip it in, that's right. And they'll, they'll think it's real and they'll take advantage of it because they have cutouts, right? There's cutouts.

• 3:37:07Danny Jones?

  Yeah, right.

• 3:37:09Speaker 01

  It's kind of the operational limited hangout. I mean, limited hangout can be used, but in this case, it was actually an operational cutout.

• 3:37:15Danny Jones?

  Wow.

• 3:37:15Speaker 01

  Not a limited hangout, it was a cutout. Oh yeah.

• 3:37:21Speaker 01

  Oh, there's all kinds of programs like that.

• 3:37:23Danny Jones?

  That's so crazy.

• 3:37:23Speaker 01

  Think about, think about Switzerland, which is supposed to be a super secure system. Look that one up. That's a good one.

• 3:37:29Danny Jones?

  Which one was that?

• 3:37:30Speaker 01

  So this one has to do with certain types of encryption. These are, these are devices that protect like the secrets of Switzerland. We, US had already managed to compromise that too. It's, it's fascinating. I mean, the spy, I mean, this you get into, you know, the combo of the technology of James Bond you see in movies and John le Carr, which is a pen name and, and just all the games people play, right? All the games, spy versus spy. Actually a game I used to play on my Atari eight bit.

• 3:38:03Danny Jones?

  Oh, wow.

• 3:38:04Speaker 01

  Spy versus spy. There was a whole comic book series on spy versus spy and it's hilarious. Sort of like Tom and Jerry.

• 3:38:10Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 3:38:11Speaker 01

  Or Wile E. Coyote and Road Runner, right? It's just funny. It's funny, but it's real. It's real stuff and it has consequences. Right? People don't realize the extent, I mean, the games, the cutouts, the distractions, misinformation, the propaganda. In my world, when I was in, you know, there's, there's ways you can, what's called meekening, right? Meekening is a way to fake out somebody, you know, this electronically. They think it's a real signal, like a nav, but it's actually, it's actually fake.

• 3:38:41Danny Jones?

  Oh, wow.

• 3:38:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think obviously you can cause disruptions and I wouldn't even get it. There's classified means by which I used to engage, right? Certain, certain types of signals.

• 3:38:54Speaker 01

  Get inside the decision loop, literally, or the command stream.

• 3:38:58Danny Jones?

  Oh, wow.

• 3:38:58Speaker 01

  Fascinating stuff, but you know, it's all, you gotta keep it all under wraps for obvious reasons. It was similar to what happened. We actually, we actually had Osama bin Laden's cellphone. There's a different system that's used the. So you have a couple of different protocols in terms of cellphone technology, the communication protocols. Uh, there's an, there's an international, oh, I say international, there's. You know, I have Verizon, AT&T, Verizon kind of uses, uh, it's a CDMS. Uh, we get, well, again, all the, the different types of waves with inside the cellphone frequency band.

• 3:39:38Speaker 01

  Well, he was using a cellphone that would access a satellite, no satellite comms out over the Indian Ocean. Well, some intrepid reporter exposed the fact that we had a cellphone number, of course. Which I would consider to be a secret that at least was worth keeping for a while.

• 3:39:56Danny Jones?

  Yep, I would think so.

• 3:39:57Speaker 01

  That's one of those, and of course, he stopped using it and he went to a courier system, which was way more secure. Way more. How do you get, so that's, and then the CIA is playing games trying to get inside the courier network.

• 3:40:09Speaker 01

  You know, so it's.

• 3:40:11Danny Jones?

  There's a lot of, there's a lot of weird shit about bin Laden. There's, uh, the stories of Billy Waugh, who was tracking him, taking photos of him. Um, not as familiar with Billy Waugh, he was in Vietnam and then he, uh.

• 3:40:22Speaker 01

  I am not.

• 3:40:23Danny Jones?

  Really, really old. He got really, really old and he kept going to, uh. CIA headquarters and say, send me back over there, send me back over there. He was like 80 years old in the Middle East. Um, and he was like spying on bin Laden, taking photos of him and stuff. He was like with, right across the street from him many times. Tried to ask them, like, can I take him out? Can I take him out? They would never let him engage. In Billy Waugh, for probably legal reasons, but. Or in Obama, in Osama bin Laden, and he was like, crazy stories, how he was jogging right by his compound. Every day, like, he was like watching him pull up in his Mercedes, walking into the mosque every, every day. And Billy Waugh was fully dressed up and like, dressed up as like an African American going for a jog.

• 3:41:07Danny Jones?

  Crazy shit. Like, one day, he says, there was one story where he said Osama's dog, his, one of his guard dogs was like chasing him down the road.

• 3:41:16Speaker 01

  The kicker was he was right outside a military academy in Abbottabad.

• 3:41:19Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 3:41:20Speaker 01

  Just crazy. John, John, we probably get a lot more insight on that. It's just. And it was under Obama that we ultimately took him out. We had, we had him though at Tora Bora. That's the kicker. But see, the decision was made, Iraq, we gotta go into Iraq. Iraq had nothing to do with nine 11. Nothing.

• 3:41:37Danny Jones?

  Have you ever heard the story about how he had, um, Stephen, we pulled this up before. But Bin Laden had some sort of like pancreas disease or kidney problem. And he was flown to a hospital in Saudi Arabia and escorted by CIA agents into a hospital.

• 3:41:56Speaker 01

  That I hadn't heard.

• 3:41:57Danny Jones?

  Can you find that, Steve?

• 3:41:58Speaker 01

  Jeez, that one I hadn't heard. I, I knew I had heard about the pancreas and being.

• 3:42:02Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 3:42:03Speaker 01

  Kind of spirited out, right? For treatment, but I hadn't heard about that one. It wouldn't surprise me.

• 3:42:09Danny Jones?

  Find the article.

• 3:42:10Speaker 01

  Wow. Yeah, that's another dynamic of nine 11 that was kept. There was the pages that were kept out of the report.

• 3:42:20Speaker 01

  The missing pages.

• 3:42:21Danny Jones?

  Oh, yeah. What was the story with that?

• 3:42:23Speaker 01

  Because of the links to the Saudi government.

• 3:42:28Danny Jones?

  Hmm.

• 3:42:29Speaker 01

  Protecting. Now, this gets into the details that we wouldn't have time to go into.

• 3:42:33Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 3:42:34Speaker 01

  But this is where, you know, what was missed?

• 3:42:39Speaker 01

  With, with the hijackers, but there were, there are a couple of them were living in California.

• 3:42:43Danny Jones?

  Yeah, California.

• 3:42:44Speaker 01

  Being supported. And where was that support coming from? Well, follow the money. We always, there was this whole thing. We had a whole thing in the safe. Follow the money.

• 3:42:51Danny Jones?

  And there was a Saudi intelligence guy who I think set up a safe house for them in California.

• 3:42:56Speaker 01

  Yeah. And what I didn't, I skipped over the part where I was able to take thin thread, point it to the main databases. This is right after, you know, nine 11. I was given a couple of million dollars based on all, all I had, you know, the background. Everything I learned in terms of agile development. So you, you develop, you iterate. Okay. And then you go back. So you, you, you code a little Tesla, code a little Tesla deploy, code a little Tesla deploy. And you just keep, you just keep doing that in very, very tight cycles. We ended up, they, I still, I begged, right? I begged to deploy thin thread to the 18 most. So there's a whole nother storyline here, which again, we don't have to go into.

• 3:43:39Speaker 01

  The Defense Authorization Act has an intelligence component.

• 3:43:46Speaker 01

  There was $14 million set aside to deploy Thin Thread. I am not kidding you. It was, remember, language is authorization language that once it's approved, you appropriate the money, you are then, you, the executive branch then actually has to

• 3:44:03Speaker 01

  execute. If you, if it says 18 million or 14 million, 9 million of it was supposed to deploy Thin Thread to the 18 most critical, which are classified terrorist collection sites in the world. Some very interesting locations, say what they are. Operational.

• 3:44:24Speaker 01

  Congressional language. Signed into law by the president.

• 3:44:31Speaker 01

  This goes back to, this goes back to 2002, late 2000, late 2000, because they delayed, they delayed because of 9/11.

• 3:44:39Speaker 01

  Another 5 million, different program, another I'm intimately familiar with, called Sweep Forward, which is an extraordinary out of the box,

• 3:44:49Speaker 01

  Skunk Works, an analytic program using non-traditional means of various types. Culture, history. Just a much, and even esoteric sources, I'll just say it that way. Which gets into another part of someone I ended up meeting who actually predicted 9/11. He's a precognitive psychic. Completely nonlinear. Got to know him really, really well. That's a whole story in itself.

• 3:45:20Danny Jones?

  I had a guy in here once, we don't have to go down this rabbit hole, but it's just an interesting, an interesting little sidebar. This guy was, he dedicated his life to studying.

• 3:45:34Danny Jones?

  Precognition and dreams people were having that would predict the future.

• 3:45:37Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 3:45:38Danny Jones?

  And there's like hundreds of cases of people having dreams about nine 11 before it happened.

• 3:45:45Speaker 01

  He, he had, he had had a crisis in a life and when he came out of it,

• 3:45:53Speaker 01

  he had this special gift and he can't even fully explain it. It's, it's one of those things because it's, it kind of, remember what Arthur C. Clarke said?

• 3:46:02Danny Jones?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 3:46:03Speaker 01

  And it's, it, people, for some people, it's weird stuff. How do I explain if I can't explain it? It sounds too kooky. Why, why? But he actually had worked with police. This is not unusual, even in the US where you have psychics working in police departments. To track or to go to the site of a crime or alleged crime and they would pick up additional information. He got very good at it. He was even on special undercover operations, right? Even at great risk himself. He had a dream about nine 11, went to the authorities and they just, they couldn't believe, you know, he's a very unassuming man, right?

• 3:46:36Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 3:46:37Speaker 01

  They just like, what are you talking about? He had a dream, right? We all have dreams, don't we? We all have dreams. He dreamed about nine 11, before nine 11. There was also an entire communication system set up by, by the terrorists, which I don't, I won't go into detail here. It was used, how do you communicate worldwide with, with the, with the cell? It's a cell and the cell itself was broken up. How do you communicate in the open without anybody knowing about it? Well, without going to the details, they did, right? That was fascinating. Well, anyways, so I'm just, I'm leaving it hanging.

• 3:47:12Danny Jones?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 3:47:12Speaker 01

  Five million was set aside for this special analytic program.

• 3:47:17Speaker 01

  Called Sweet Ford. NSA completely ignored it, defied the Authorization Act.

• 3:47:23Danny Jones?

  Crazy.

• 3:47:24Speaker 01

  Why?

• 3:47:27Speaker 01

  Circle the wagons, even though Congress is in signed into law, nah, we got a better solution. They didn't have any solution. That was the problem. But the thing was, none of, neither program was ever part of what they call the official production chain on the analytic side, nor on which in it's in there, it sort of was both. So they just, it was convenient to just ignore it. So I got 2 million. I ended up becoming the executive, basically the, the program manager, the executive program manager. I had an actual program manager that, that reported to me unofficially, right? This is why I was still in the signals intelligence. So this is like November, December, January. We just rapidly evolved Thin Thread to make it even better.

• 3:48:12Speaker 01

  They wouldn't let us go operational. Remember, we didn't. So remember, th- this came out. That thing came out later. This is before the Intelligence Authorization Act. So I was able to get permission to point Thin Thread against the databases NSA, the primary databases. So vast, we're talking terabytes on end of, of terabytes of data.

• 3:48:33Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 3:48:34Speaker 01

  And we set it up, we turned it on for about 24 to 30, roughly 24 to 36 hours. And guess what? Well, we found out that about 40% of the database was corrupted, the databases. Then we found all kinds of information, pre and post 9/11 regarding the plot in terms of movement and a lot of other evidence that they had not been able to uncover or discover. Thin Thread did because of the way it was, it worked.

• 3:49:04Danny Jones?

  Good lord.

• 3:49:05Speaker 01

  So what do you think? If you were sort of, if you're, have a responsibility to look at yourself to be better going forward. So another 9/11 doesn't happen. What would you, what would you think? Once you, that you'd want to improve the way in which you discover information, even from the existing databases, the traditional RDMS, the relational database systems. Why, why, why would, nope, guess what they did? Immediately shut the program down. Famous scene, first Indiana Jones movie.

• 3:49:38Speaker 01

  Warehouse, ark on a crate with wheel, on a, on a little cart with wheels. You see it going down what appears to be this incredibly long, you know, aisle, turns left, never to be seen, whoops.

• 3:49:52Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 3:49:53Speaker 01

  Never to be seen again. Well, they figured it out later, right?

• 3:49:57Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 3:49:57Speaker 01

  Because a certain power is mag- magnetic, right?

• 3:50:00Danny Jones?

  Right, right.

• 3:50:02Speaker 01

  That's what happened to this, to Thin Thread. This sweep forward was summarily shut down. It was a research project, shut down. This, I live with all this. I'm, I'm an American. You know, I was brought up in Texas in Vermont, two republics before they became states. Vermont, in fact, the constitute part most a lot, a lot of the constitution of the, of what then became United States of America was based on the Vermont Constitution. Came the 14th state.

• 3:50:34Speaker 01

  I just, you know, I just, so there I was, okay? I'm facing 35 years in prison. What do you do? I had spent umpteen amounts of money to my private criminal defense attorney. He no longer wanted to represent me in part because I had no money left.

• 3:50:51Danny Jones?

  How much they say it would cost?

• 3:50:52Speaker 01

  A million dollars, a million dollars between the point I was indicted and just the start of the trial.

• 3:51:00Danny Jones?

  Jesus. Do you think it's possible that they got to your attorney?

• 3:51:05Speaker 01

  No.

• 3:51:06Danny Jones?

  No.

• 3:51:07Speaker 01

  He was being practical in part.

• 3:51:09Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 3:51:10Speaker 01

  He agreed to stay on. We tried to get other high-powered lawyers to take it pro bono without, without cost. Because certain law firms are required as part of their community service, quote unquote, to do, take pro bono cases for cases in which they're significant enough, but the per- the person, in this case, the client doesn't have the money.

• 3:51:34Speaker 01

  Guess what? The firm said, yeah, you can represent Mr. Drake, but you gotta leave the firm.

• 3:51:40Speaker 01

  And they weren't going to leave the firm.

• 3:51:41Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 3:51:41Speaker 01

  And that's, it was the reason why is because of conflict, because they had senior government clients.

• 3:51:46Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 3:51:48Speaker 01

  So I'm, I'm in front, so he part, the public offenders, that was, I was indigent, I was literally formally declared indigent by the court, which meant I was now eligible to be, to be represented by the federal public offenders.

• 3:52:04Speaker 01

  Uh, deer in the headlights.

• 3:52:05Danny Jones?

  Mm hmm.

• 3:52:06Speaker 01

  The last time it was the, the Nicholson, you might remember there was a, he was a spy, Navy spy. That was last time that that court and we're going back, you know, we're going back 30 years. This is the, it was the year of the spy. It was 1985. The year, the so-called year of the spy.

• 3:52:24Speaker 01

  Pollard, there was a number of, a number, right during that period. Now, the court had no institutional memory, right of how, I mean, there was all kinds of special procedures to put into place. They had a special skiff built inside the courtroom. Just, I could, I could, uh, meet with my attorneys.

• 3:52:41Speaker 01

  So I'm behind several eight balls. I'm staring into Pandora's box and guess what staring back at me, the abyss.

• 3:52:50Speaker 01

  I also knew I had to influence the court of public opinion. But the problem is you say anything outside of the, of the, in the federal court. Guess what? They can actually use that against you.

• 3:53:04Speaker 01

  But I knew I had, I was going to have to influence the court of public opinion. I also knew that I was going to need someone. And so I, I was just extraordinary individual, Justin Radak, had written an op ed in LA Times just after I was indicted. And I ended up, um, she became my primary, she's not a criminal defense attorney. But she became my primary whistleblower. So she provided legal counsel, advocacy, and she was the liaison with the press.

• 3:53:34Speaker 01

  So I met her in May. Um, you, you sign, basically you sign an agreement, right? Um, it's a representation letter. It was, it, excuse me, at the time she was with the government accountability project. So, and then there was other attorneys as well, and my original criminal defense attorney agreed to, at the government rate, which was nowhere near, he was charging me, well, start originally 550 an hour and gave me a $50 an hour break. You know how fast your money goes? Even though I had a, I'm middle-class America, but I'm a senior executive. I'd done really well in industry, right? I've, you know, pulling down 200,000 a year plus, right? But you know how fast your money goes?

• 3:54:13Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 3:54:14Speaker 01

  When you're being charged.

• 3:54:14Danny Jones?

  Oh, yeah.

• 3:54:15Speaker 01

  Over two years, 500 an hour.

• 3:54:20Speaker 01

  So I couldn't afford a million. There was no way. Other attorneys later, they wouldn't want either. I said, oh, it'll be 750,000. Nope. So public defenders were, was the only, basically the only person I could, people I could rely on for criminal defense.

• 3:54:36Danny Jones?

  So once you had the public defenders, how long did that process take between then and then the time you had to actually go in front of the judge?

• 3:54:44Speaker 01

  The first, there was an initial hearing in October, November timeframe. That was after they got their clearance. They had to have a clearance before everything is, remember the government's saying that I,

• 3:54:56Speaker 01

  that I had not just damage now security.

• 3:55:01Speaker 01

  I had not just grave damage. It was exceptionally grave damage. It was the highest level of damage.

• 3:55:07Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 3:55:08Speaker 01

  And you're dealing with top secret sensitive compartment and information, allegedly.

• 3:55:17Speaker 01

  So they had to have a clearance. They didn't have a clearance of this kind and not even close. They basically what called collateral. It's like basically just a national background investigation check. It's there's a, there's, and that was it. I mean, it's basically straight secret. So they, they had to go through that whole process, which in itself was, you know, that was a journey for them.

• 3:55:34Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 3:55:35Speaker 01

  We used to talk about it. So the hearings began in the fall and all kinds of shenanigans were played, right? All I wouldn't, because it's just, it unwinds week after week, month after month. Because they, they kept alleging that I had really damaged. I was worse than a spy because not only did I give up secrets, like a spy does, but I give them to a, a, a press outlet, a reporter, which means everybody got to see the secrets.

• 3:56:04Danny Jones?

  Yeah. Did they ever come, how many times did they try to come at you with some sort of a plea deal?

• 3:56:11Speaker 01

  Uh, once, once I was indicted, there was no further attempt at a plea agreement.

• 3:56:16Danny Jones?

  Okay.

• 3:56:19Speaker 01

  They already tried and failed prior. I didn't even tell you the other attempts, right? Prior. So we get to the spring. Things are starting to develop rather quickly. So it's important to note, remember I said my, Jocelyn Radak, my attorney on the outside, although she was partnered with the public defenders, right? She even filed briefs, right? There is, there is a, there was an advocacy brief that she provided on my behalf, right? And the judge actually accepted. It was one of his first orders of business, right? Was he actually accepted the brief? Well, and remember, one of the few public hearings, because practically every hearing had to be behind closed doors. They had a whole, there was a special security officer. They had to basically empty the room. Only certain people were given access. There was

• 3:57:02Speaker 01

  a special court recording recorder, right?

• 3:57:05Danny Jones?

  Mm hmm.

• 3:57:05Speaker 01

  Because it was national security. So in essence, it became a star chamber.

• 3:57:14Speaker 01

  So

• 3:57:17Speaker 01

  most of the hearings were again in secret. We get to the spring.

• 3:57:22Speaker 01

  I was awarded the Ridenhour Truth Telling Prize.

• 3:57:27Speaker 01

  For what I did. It's out there. I gave, I gave a speech. Jocelyn introduced me.

• 3:57:35Speaker 01

  Jane Mayer, I'd met with her off the record with Jocelyn, ends up dropping, she's an investigative journalist of, of some renown. She dropped everything she was doing. This was in early 2011. And remember, we're now, you know, think about when I was raided. Now we're, you know, this has gone on for a while. She dropped everything she was doing, did a compressed investigation of my entire case in history. Sources that were willing to talk with her off the record. Most were off the record, but were real, you could quote, right? But you couldn't attribute.

• 3:58:13Danny Jones?

  Sure.

• 3:58:14Speaker 01

  So that came out in the New Yorker in May.

• 3:58:21Speaker 01

  The secret share, long form article, many, many thousands of words. Then I was interviewed by Scott Pelley. Sixty minutes. That's the one where all kinds of people ended up like seeing because it's sixty minutes.

• 3:58:36Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 3:58:38Speaker 01

  That was pretty dramatic. It was, that was a very interesting experience in itself. Washington Post and other publications started weighing in. It's like, uh, maybe he is a whistleblower and oh, and Post, uh, kind of remember like Watergate era, like, uh,

• 3:58:53Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 3:58:54Speaker 01

  Woodward and Bernstein. So it came to a fever pitch. So the, the week before, a week and a half before I was scheduled a trial. We were going through the final days was actually selecting the jury. Right. And there's strikes and everything else. You have to have the 12 and the alternates and there was four selected. So they came in the well of the courtroom. They approached, I didn't know it at the time, but I knew something was up. And remember in the press, it's like, what's going to happen? Ellsberg was willing to fly all the way out from Kensington, California to be out, out on the federal courthouse steps to say how, what, how critical.

• 3:59:34Danny Jones?

  Wow.

• 3:59:34Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 3:59:37Speaker 01

  So in the well of the Senate, the chief prosecutor, William Welsh. Interesting history. Reported at the time, Lanny Brewer, head of the criminal division, who reported to Eric Holder, who I actually confronted earlier in the Apple store because he loved his Apple products, whole story in itself.

• 3:59:56Speaker 01

  So he's, he approaches right after that. So he approaches my public defenders in the well, right below the dais where the judge sits and, and says, we would like to enter into, if you're, if the defendant agrees, we'd like to enter into plea negotiations.

• 4:00:19Speaker 01

  That was an extraordinary

• 4:00:23Speaker 01

  seven days from that Friday all the way to Thursday the next week. Remember this trial schedule start that following Monday, basically the 40th anniversary of when the Pentagon Papers were released.

• 4:00:33Danny Jones?

  Wow.

• 4:00:35Speaker 01

  Kind of interesting juxtaposition in terms of history.

• 4:00:37Danny Jones?

  Oh, yeah.

• 4:00:39Speaker 01

  I remember I got into Elsberg really, really well at this point.

• 4:00:45Speaker 01

  They then tried to get me multiple, I lost count. It was like five, six attempts first. Well, five years in prison, then it was like two years in prison and then it was like one year in prison. And then it was still pleading out as a felon. Pleading out to a felony. I had told them back in April of 2008, when I, the original chief prosecutor confronted me that I would never plead bargain with the truth. And I wasn't going to do it then, but you can imagine the pressure I was under.

• 4:01:13Danny Jones?

  Oh, yeah.

• 4:01:13Speaker 01

  And it gets very, it gets sensitive for me in terms of my criminal defense. But they, they, they actually tried to strong arm me into pleading out

• 4:01:25Speaker 01

  under the criminal code to two years. So you can handle two years. There was no way I was going to plead out to something I hadn't done. And I already admitted during the interviews that I had gone to the press. Even though it was only administrative policy violation.

• 4:01:41Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 4:01:41Speaker 01

  I took it out of the press way back in 2006 and 2007. Long story short, this was just, I mean, it was just right. They come into my house, the public defenders, they're putting pressure on my, on my spouse. It's like, oh, you know, you know what they do to you in prison. They tried to pull all that angle. And we're, this is our bread and butter. We, we know how to do plea agreements.

• 4:02:04Danny Jones?

  Right, right.

• 4:02:06Speaker 01

  Last break of the day, that Thursday prior to the Monday, when the trial began.

• 4:02:16Speaker 01

  I would never plead out, but if there was an off-ramp that emerged, however faint or slim it was, you better take it. Here's why. Because if you don't, they could basically just go basically do an interlocutory review, have the higher court, this is the Fourth Circuit, review the decisions, because they were already starting to complain about the judge. Have it review and they could just suspend it. Did it with Jeffrey Stern. They basically hung him out to dry for almost two years before they came back, waiting for the decision. It's a way to suspend it, takes all the heat off the press, right?

• 4:02:56Speaker 01

  I was still being pressured to plead out, okay? I'm talking to Justin Radak, I'm on the phone, out in the hall of the courtroom, right outside. They kept changing the language, right? Because the last thing he wanted to do was hook me on classified. I said it cannot, there was no classified, they'd already demonstrated, in fact, it was acknowledged by both parties, that no classified information was released. So, plea agreement, no jail time, no fine, there was administrative fee, and 240 hours

• 4:03:37Speaker 01

  of community service. Misdemeanor for doing what? Under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. Because it's a federal, remember I was charged in federal, you have to stick within the federal crime, under the Code 18, US Code 18. So, it was for doing what? Exceeding authorized use of a government computer.

• 4:03:59Danny Jones?

  Jesus Christ.

• 4:04:00Speaker 01

  I know. Huge relief. Pro forma sentence, the judge still had, but we're now agreeing to a plea.

• 4:04:09Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 4:04:10Speaker 01

  They drop, the proviso was, they drop all the felony counts, and no time in jail, and nothing involving classified. So, that's what happened.

• 4:04:20Speaker 01

  Um, and huge victory. I mean, it was just, it was like, wow. I mean, all these years.

• 4:04:27Danny Jones?

  No felonies, no jail time.

• 4:04:28Speaker 01

  No felonies, no jail time, two and three hours of community service. That was in July 15th of 2011. The judge did note at the time, I was sent to Fort Detrick to the community service director. At Fort Detrick, this is outside of, of, um, Frederick, Maryland.

• 4:04:46Speaker 01

  It just so happened that a, um, he was a civil engineer. But he also was part of the Veterans History Project, Library of Congress. He said, how it's like to interview veterans, given your, he saw my military background. Because the community service, like, we're not gonna have you paint rocks. That's not who you are. Okay, that was like, they were, paint rocks, what, on, on base?

• 4:05:07Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 4:05:10Speaker 01

  Or, or go, you know, bust up rocks, not just paint them.

• 4:05:13Danny Jones?

  Right, right.

• 4:05:14Speaker 01

  Or dig holes and fill them in again, or the equivalent.

• 4:05:16Danny Jones?

  I'm sure.

• 4:05:17Speaker 01

  Not gonna do that.

• 4:05:17Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 4:05:19Speaker 01

  I ended up, over the next number of months, it took paperwork, I had a probation officer, the first one, the first two that came out realized, they thought I was some hardcore, I had really done something bad, and they realized, nah, so some, one of the probation officers about to retire, shows up in his motorcycle, visits the house, they had that right to visit your house, visited me one time, and the rest was just over the phone or through the mail.

• 4:05:43Danny Jones?

  Oh, that's great.

• 4:05:44Speaker 01

  So, guess what I did? Is my community service interviewed veterans who were to, to the present day, including veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan, and I got to interview Daniel Ellsberg, who had never been interviewed for the Veterans History Project.

• 4:05:59Danny Jones?

  Oh, wow.

• 4:06:00Speaker 01

  Fascinating, Joint Chiefs of Staff, chiefs, um, uh, people, veterans from the Battle of the Bulge of, I,

• 4:06:12Speaker 01

  Sheet metal machinists from World War, from War Two, um, Korean War in between.

• 4:06:20Danny Jones?

  Hmm.

• 4:06:21Speaker 01

  Campaigns.

• 4:06:22Danny Jones?

  That's amazing.

• 4:06:22Speaker 01

  Yeah. And Afghanistan, Iraq. Stunning. I mean, just. And all kinds of interviews, you know, press, everything you can, you can imagine. This is 2011. Now, I didn't know at the time, although it was, I had obviously secretly hoped that someone like Snowden would, would reveal how far all these secret surveillance programs had metastasized.

• 4:06:49Danny Jones?

  Mm hmm.

• 4:06:50Speaker 01

  But this is 2011. So I was on, I was on the circuit for quite a while.

• 4:06:56Danny Jones?

  Mm hmm.

• 4:06:56Speaker 01

  Overseas, Europe, Canada, Australia.

• 4:07:04Speaker 01

  And I had to find a way to, after a shattered life.

• 4:07:09Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 4:07:10Speaker 01

  Um, how do you end up, um, rebuilding it? And

• 4:07:17Speaker 01

  you know, just the psychological, uh, I mean, there's a whole lot that the ordeal uh, created a lot of suffering. I had PT, I don't PTSD at one point, I was actually, it's a weird condition. I was actually, um, you know, people sweat. I actually started sweating blood.

• 4:07:35Danny Jones?

  What?

• 4:07:36Speaker 01

  Yes, sweating blood. It was weird. I thought like, what the heck's going on here?

• 4:07:40Danny Jones?

  Like blood coming out of your skin?

• 4:07:42Speaker 01

  Blood started coming out of pores. If you look it up, it's a special medical condition. It's a, it's really interesting. I actually, I, it's the stress. Let's put it this way. You, I'll give you the.

• 4:07:56Danny Jones?

  Hematodrosis.

• 4:07:58Speaker 01

  Yes, that's exactly what I.

• 4:08:00Danny Jones?

  Hematodrosis, also known as hematidrosis.

• 4:08:04Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 4:08:04Danny Jones?

  Is a rare condition where a person sweats blood. It occurs when capillary blood vessels that feed the sweat glands rupture.

• 4:08:12Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 4:08:12Danny Jones?

  Blood to be exuded.

• 4:08:13Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 4:08:14Danny Jones?

  Holy shit.

• 4:08:15Speaker 01

  Holy shit is right. I am not kidding you. It was, it was like dramatic. So imagine an anvil. This is how I, that's all how I'll share. What was it like up until the plea agreement? And then the, the pro forma sentencing. Felt like an anvil had been sitting on my, on me, just crunching, pressing for all those years. Never mind the whistleblowing before 2007.

• 4:08:42Speaker 01

  You know what it was like when the anvil released itself, but the anvil, so I was just being compressed? Like, like in a press, a hydraulic press.

• 4:08:52Speaker 01

  Life turned inside out. The only thing I had left was my integrity. What else was left? They took everything else away and were about to take away my life. In terms of confining it to a prison.

• 4:09:06Speaker 01

  I had PTSD. I didn't know it at the time. This was one of the symptoms, though.

• 4:09:10Danny Jones?

  How did your wife continue working for the NSA after all this? That's so crazy to me.

• 4:09:17Speaker 01

  Awkward is a, is a very simplistic way of what awkward. I was actually separated for a while because it caused some real issues, as you might imagine.

• 4:09:30Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 4:09:31Speaker 01

  I used, where I, where I located myself.

• 4:09:36Speaker 01

  You know, a battle fatigue, my father used to call it battle fatigue. That's what they referred to it. That was the PT, that was a term for, we didn't tell PTSD, right?

• 4:09:44Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 4:09:45Speaker 01

  Vietnam. I know now exactly what it's like. To stare into the abyss at a distance.

• 4:09:57Speaker 01

  And be completely empty.

• 4:10:01Speaker 01

  Not pleasant.

• 4:10:05Speaker 01

  Everything you ever stood for, everything you ever took an oath, the constitution. Every, all, every, all of your service to the country, faithfully serving the country. Completely blown apart.

• 4:10:20Danny Jones?

  They systematically dismantled your life for?

• 4:10:22Speaker 01

  I took an oath, remember the fidelity to the oath. I was, that meant something to me.

• 4:10:29Danny Jones?

  Yeah. Yeah, I think the CIA missed a couple of things in your psychological evaluation.

• 4:10:35Speaker 01

  Probably did. Now, they did profile me. It's really interesting. You know what they said later? So part of what happened with me is they actually said, and this came out after Snowden. If you go out there, you'll see a chart. It's basically, it's a rogues' gallery of spies. Guess who's also on there? We're talking the real spies in US history.

• 4:10:57Speaker 01

  Snowden's on there and I'm on there. They all have flags under the countries to which they quote unquote gave up secrets or were operating on behalf of. No flag.

• 4:11:07Danny Jones?

  There's this?

• 4:11:08Speaker 01

  You'll see it. If you go out there and do a cert, it's the insider threat insider threat program.

• 4:11:14Danny Jones?

  Insider.

• 4:11:15Speaker 01

  They gave briefings. They actually formed a joint committee. I'm not just joint DOJ, DNI, a joint, sorry, a joint, right? They formed a joint task force, insider threat task force.

• 4:11:31Speaker 01

  And they put together briefings and they kept updating them. And for the longest time, and I understand even recently from another source, I'm still being flagged as representative, historically, of an insider threat to the government. You know what they said about me? I self-radicalized.

• 4:11:48Danny Jones?

  Oh my gosh.

• 4:11:51Speaker 01

  So underneath our portraits.

• 4:11:55Speaker 01

  And by the way, the picture they had there was from the Ridenhour. It was a picture ironically enough for my truth telling prize. It was a picture, a press picture.

• 4:12:05Speaker 01

  All the spies had flags under their, under their portraits, quote unquote. Remember, Rogue Gallery. No flags under Snowden or mine. None. We were, we were men without a country.

• 4:12:19Danny Jones?

  They just put an image of the US Constitution next to your guys' faces.

• 4:12:23Speaker 01

  Well.

• 4:12:26Speaker 01

  It just.

• 4:12:27Danny Jones?

  Well Snowden's was different because he was a contractor, right?

• 4:12:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, but I had been one like him. And remember, he worked at Booz Allen one time, so did I. But you're right. I was a senior executive when all this happened. He was a contractor working in Hawaii.

• 4:12:39Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 4:12:40Speaker 01

  And he was faced with a similar thing. He, but he saw what had happened to myself and the others and said, he knew, given what he was going to bring out, that he would end up in prison for the rest of his life. Yeah, right there.

• 4:12:53Danny Jones?

  You right next to Snowden.

• 4:12:55Speaker 01

  See, so, but do you see a flag?

• 4:12:58Danny Jones?

  Nope.

• 4:12:59Speaker 01

  All the others have flags.

• 4:13:01Danny Jones?

  Couple guys, four guys at the bottom.

• 4:13:02Speaker 01

  Right. But we don't have flags.

• 4:13:06Danny Jones?

  Didn't this guy like shoot up his base?

• 4:13:08Speaker 01

  Oh yeah, that's our part. We're in the same, we're in the same league. Same league. I'm, I'm, you're, you're, you're sitting across from a real, you know, bad guy.

• 4:13:19Danny Jones?

  You think the NSA is still fucking with you? They're still tracking you, paying attention to you?

• 4:13:22Speaker 01

  No.

• 4:13:23Danny Jones?

  No.

• 4:13:24Speaker 01

  It'll be interesting. Well, what I told you off the record, it'll be interesting to see any time, technically, if you speak, write, speak, you're supposed to run it through.

• 4:13:37Danny Jones?

  Oh, yeah, because you were an employer.

• 4:13:39Speaker 01

  Correct.

• 4:13:39Danny Jones?

  You were employed.

• 4:13:40Speaker 01

  There is what's called a lifetime obligation, but the non-disclosure agreements I signed, which they technically think are loyalty owes to secrecy, they're not. Actually, it reflects directly the paragraphs in the executive orders governing classification. You cannot use classification, and it's still on the books, to use as cover for, for, for embarrassment, cover for wrongdoing, cover for violations of the law.

• 4:14:05Danny Jones?

  Hmm.

• 4:14:06Speaker 01

  How ironic. Because they kept throwing that in my face. You've signed multiple times, military NSA.

• 4:14:14Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 4:14:15Speaker 01

  Non-disclosure agreements. Okay, so what takes priority? The oath to the Constitution or the non-disclosure agreement? I realize, joining this secret system, deep state, national security system, that you are giving up certain rights.

• 4:14:28Danny Jones?

  Hmm.

• 4:14:29Speaker 01

  But you certainly don't just give them all up.

• 4:14:31Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 4:14:33Speaker 01

  They're just have some restrictions. I had restrictions in the military.

• 4:14:36Danny Jones?

  Hmm.

• 4:14:40Danny Jones?

  Fucking crazy story, man.

• 4:14:42Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 4:14:44Speaker 01

  So it took a while to, you know, I kept working at Apple.

• 4:14:48Danny Jones?

  Hmm.

• 4:14:49Speaker 01

  And you go back to a quieter life, but then when Snowden, of course, that just re, that just reignited everything.

• 4:14:56Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 4:14:57Speaker 01

  I was on every, you can imagine, every major Lou Dobbs, for example, had me, I mean, I lost track after a while. I was getting special permission to leave work at Apple just for these interviews.

• 4:15:09Danny Jones?

  Wow.

• 4:15:09Speaker 01

  Because there are so few people that could, could talk about what had happened to Snowden.

• 4:15:13Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 4:15:14Speaker 01

  I ended up going to Moscow in 2013.

• 4:15:17Danny Jones?

  Oh, really?

• 4:15:18Speaker 01

  Americans with myself, Coling, Raleigh, Justin Radak and Ray McGovern. And we went there to present in the San Adams Award. It was a candlestick holder. We spent many, many hours with them one day.

• 4:15:30Danny Jones?

  Wow.

• 4:15:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, that was a very interesting experience being in Moscow.

• 4:15:34Danny Jones?

  Also, let's go back. What was the story with Musk again? Tell the story with Elon, Elon and SpaceX.

• 4:15:40Speaker 01

  Thanks. Okay. So now we'll kind of the things where I didn't elaborate.

• 4:15:43Danny Jones?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 4:15:44Speaker 01

  You want to hear?

• 4:15:44Danny Jones?

  Yes.

• 4:15:45Speaker 01

  Live. Okay. So I mentioned I was teaching as the, I was actually the NSA rep to the National Defense University in ICAF. There was actually one over at the War College. And then there was, there was one at ICAF. They had just created, it was a new position.

• 4:16:03Danny Jones?

  Okay.

• 4:16:03Speaker 01

  So NSA Chair at ICAF, Industrial College of Armed Forces. Because it's the Industrial College of Armed Forces, they have civilians, military, and even overseas, they actually come, it's a compressed masters program over about a year, full time. The companies that send them, they still get paid full time. And then military or civilians still, still get paid full time, but their full time job is being in this masters program. Fort McNair in DC.

• 4:16:31Danny Jones?

  Okay.

• 4:16:32Speaker 01

  Beautiful. You look across to the cherry blossoms in the spring in the Lincoln Memorial and it's, so Anacostia. So I, I was teaching a leader, strategic leadership, information technology.

• 4:16:51Speaker 01

  Cohort groups, I 15 to 20 students. And each of the professors would lead up an industry team. I ended up on the, well, you had choices, right? And I end up on this because of my background, in part, national technical means. I end up on the space industries team.

• 4:17:10Danny Jones?

  Oh, wow.

• 4:17:11Speaker 01

  In the spring of 2007

• 4:17:15Speaker 01

  is when that portion of the masters program kicks in. So you visit local sites. That includes government, Goddard, contractors.

• 4:17:27Speaker 01

  We went to JPL, that's California trip. Fascinating, absolutely fascinating. We went to Cape Kennedy. We went out to Colorado.

• 4:17:38Speaker 01

  On the trip to California, which at the time was SpaceX headquarters.

• 4:17:45Speaker 01

  We, um, all of course, I'm leading in this, I'm the one that's leading the team at this point. We ended up going to SpaceX and meeting Musk and he, he, it was amazing. We sat there in the lunchroom, right? Lunchroom, which was basically off sort of the main, it was amazing. Sort of the, the early dragon mockup was there.

• 4:18:09Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 4:18:09Speaker 01

  They were still working on improving the, the original Falcon, uh, the, the Merlins, the Merlin engine, but the early Falcon, there's like a Falcon one, remember they, they got, this is before any successful launch occurred.

• 4:18:23Danny Jones?

  Okay.

• 4:18:24Speaker 01

  So you imagine they were under enormous pressure. Remember he was also at Tesla. You have to remember, that's the other thing is Tesla. But the Roadster hadn't come out yet. It was, it was in advanced development, but the Roadster hadn't come out yet.

• 4:18:36Danny Jones?

  Right. Oh yeah. This was very, very early on.

• 4:18:39Speaker 01

  Two thousand seven.

• 4:18:40Danny Jones?

  Yeah. I had just graduated high school.

• 4:18:44Speaker 01

  It was a ma- it was, I mean, he's in his mid thirties. I remember we walked in sort of the office, right? And so like a startup office. He says, yeah, that's where he sits, right? But we don't see much of him there. Cause you imagine he's a very out and about, right? And very hands on.

• 4:19:02Speaker 01

  Very much the entrepreneur, very much the marketing, very much, right? That's who he is.

• 4:19:06Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 4:19:07Speaker 01

  And he regaled us, I have to say it this way, right? No matter what else you think of Musk and what's going on right now with him, right?

• 4:19:14Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 4:19:14Speaker 01

  And his association with Trump. And all this apparently unfolding within the government where he's taking teams and visiting certain agencies already. He regaled us for over two hours plus. His entire vision of becoming a spacefaring species, why he wanted to go to Mars, the technology, right? Behind all this.

• 4:19:40Speaker 01

  And why he also wanted to commercialize space as well. I mean, it was just, it was just an amazing, just incredibly passionate. And of course, this is in like an open cafeteria, clanging noises, machines, you know, forklifts going by. I mean, there's all like just the hubbub and activity. Something I think he very much like that's where he kind of gets his energy from. And he just was fired up and he just, you could, I mean, it was just fascinating. It's like, he walked away and says, wow, right. He could sell ice to Eskimos. I mean, that's

• 4:20:15Speaker 01

  Yeah. So it's, it was, that was, yeah.

• 4:20:22Speaker 01

  I reminded more of that because no one, I mean, this is before Musk went political.

• 4:20:29Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 4:20:30Speaker 01

  Yeah. Way before.

• 4:20:31Danny Jones?

  Well, it's just interesting to see the rise of people like Musk and Peter Thiel, who have made so much money off government contracts.

• 4:20:38Speaker 01

  Well, this is, this is, this is kind of irony and hypocrisy at the same time. I'll be very blunt. The bulk of his money, even on the Tesla side, his credits, credits.

• 4:20:49Danny Jones?

  Yep.

• 4:20:49Speaker 01

  He, he, I mean, this, he's, this reminds me, because remember the era I grew in was Steve Jobs, Bill Gates.

• 4:20:56Danny Jones?

  Yes.

• 4:20:57Speaker 01

  So you're, so this, but these are the tech bro, tech bro, the, the merge, they came out of the nineties. They're now in their fifties, most of them.

• 4:21:08Speaker 01

  And now they're ascendant and they're, they, they want to create a technocratic utopia. I'll just say it. That's, that's sort of their vision and there's different flavors of it.

• 4:21:15Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 4:21:16Speaker 01

  And there's different, there's, people are trying to sort of speak to this philosophically or with political philosophy, like what does this mean to create this technocratic utopia? Some of them are a very personal level, right? I'm going to live longer than normal, right? Cryostasis type stuff. I mean, it's just, some of it's kind of out there, right? I'm, you know, almost like interstellar type technology, right?

• 4:21:41Danny Jones?

  What do you make of Palantir?

• 4:21:43Speaker 01

  Wow. Palantir. See, for me, Palantir was before, I mean, I'm well aware of Thiel.

• 4:21:52Speaker 01

  Another tech bro, billionaire, Palantir is very much in the surveillance business.

• 4:21:58Danny Jones?

  Yeah, oh yeah.

• 4:21:59Speaker 01

  They started picking up very aggressively, a lot of some of the early contracts. Where when things became privatized in terms of when things started coming, all this exposure as I was a part of, right? You have to remember, there was a bunch of things that hit the press during the time I went in the 2006, 2007 timeframe. Mark Klein, that special room, right? The AT&T room. Where we actually had special like NARIS devices just sucking up everything in the optical networks.

• 4:22:27Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 4:22:27Speaker 01

  I used to consult to Nortel Networks before they collapsed. I, this is, this is again, my background, right? I just, I just was on a contract in, in Triangle Park, North Carolina. Deeply involved in what do you do? They, it's just like, what, we have all this, this dark, all this dark net, right? Dark optical, what do we, we're talking like 40 gig like capacity in terms of bandwidth. What do we do with it? Like, what do we do with it? People, this goes back, right? We didn't know what to do with it. We have to develop programs. So they're buying up a super high inflated prices. All these small companies, they were building apps, right? And services for the new net, the, the high end net.

• 4:23:07Danny Jones?

  Hmm hmm.

• 4:23:08Speaker 01

  Yeah. Palantir is head over heels and then some, and fully, fully embedded in the national security establishment.

• 4:23:16Danny Jones?

  Money from In-Qtel and all this stuff.

• 4:23:18Speaker 01

  Well, In-Qtel actually goes back. So I'm familiar from my CIA and then my, I'll just say it this way, we're going into detail. Even at NSA, I would liaison. There was a time period where I was a lead because nine 11 happened. How do we, we, we had to, oh my gosh, we better like, what else, are there any other pockets out there? What are other people doing? How do we help? This is like predicting the future at one level, but also had to develop technology and processes, even organizationally to deal with quote unquote, the new threat or emerging threats.

• 4:23:48Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 4:23:49Speaker 01

  I spent some time at CIA going over and exploring this. We're talking like really getting into it. We're like talking workshopping it. Did they call it workshopping it?

• 4:24:00Danny Jones?

  Hmm hmm.

• 4:24:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, fascinating. Just, I mean, it's, but In-Qtel was an early, you know, this, this was one of those, you know, early seeds. I mean, basically they were seeding and they were giving significant amounts of money to promising companies.

• 4:24:15Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 4:24:16Speaker 01

  And some existing companies that were.

• 4:24:18Danny Jones?

  Google is one of them, right?

• 4:24:20Speaker 01

  Incutel is just one, there's a number, but that was a more public for, I mean, it was their own, in essence, a government, there's all these like special government entities.

• 4:24:34Speaker 01

  John Hopkins University.

• 4:24:36Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 4:24:38Danny Jones?

  Wow.

• 4:24:41Speaker 01

  Tom. And then, um.

• 4:24:45Speaker 01

  That's the sweep.

• 4:24:46Danny Jones?

  Yep.

• 4:24:47Speaker 01

  There's a whole lot of other. All kinds of other background to this.

• 4:24:51Danny Jones?

  Mm hmm.

• 4:24:54Speaker 01

  But then the last few years, um. I've had near death experiences in my life and those, that's a whole story in itself. What is it like to be like, not just on the edge, but. You know, in the tunnel. Um, and coming back. That's, um. But a few years ago, uh, when I was at Apple, I, something was happening to me in terms of my health and it turned out I actually had a very rare form of lymphoma. And it was equivalent to stage four, invaded my kidneys and invaded my bone marrow and I had to retire early. I realized I had to devote whatever energy I had left.

• 4:25:34Speaker 01

  Um, I was 65 years old. Um, I was planning on working a few more years before I wanted to move on, maybe go back to teaching. But then I'm confronted by. An expiration date that appeared to be rapidly approaching. The close, the closure distance, like two fighter planes, far faster, cause the closure, right?

• 4:25:55Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 4:25:56Speaker 01

  I could see the event horizon of my own death. Appearing in front of me and it wasn't far in the far into the future. So, um. They did a diagnosis, um, in October of 2022 and then I had a relapse. I was back, I was in the hospital for two and a half weeks. I was, had another relapse in early 2023. I was put on a very advanced therapy, which had severe reactions.

• 4:26:22Danny Jones?

  What year were you diagnosed?

• 4:26:23Speaker 01

  2022.

• 4:26:24Danny Jones?

  2022. Oh, wow.

• 4:26:25Speaker 01

  October.

• 4:26:25Danny Jones?

  Holy shit.

• 4:26:26Speaker 01

  Had a relapse. Was put on a first generation targeted therapy after immunotherapy and chemo booster didn't work.

• 4:26:34Danny Jones?

  Yep.

• 4:26:35Speaker 01

  I then had another, they had to take me off all of that. That goes back to September 23. A long story and NIH with a new diagnosis. They realized something wasn't right. Advanced blood test determined the rare form of lymphoma. It's the Waldenstrom variant. I had to really get into this. I took this on just like I did anything else in life. I said, you know what lymphoma, you showed up, you're about to kill me, but you're not, you're an uninvited guest. It's time for you to leave. So I partnered as my own advocate with, with extraordinary set of doctors, right? Just extraordinary. And I'm now, I say the second path of recovery,

• 4:27:19Speaker 01

  but it looks, it looks like I'm pretty stable. I'm on a second generation version of the therapy. It's a pill I take every day. Super expensive, but it's a pill I take every day.

• 4:27:29Danny Jones?

  What is the pill called?

• 4:27:31Speaker 01

  Akela Brutinib. Calquins is the brand name.

• 4:27:34Danny Jones?

  And what is the, what is the mechanism of action?

• 4:27:37Speaker 01

  Targets a special protein where the cells, the lymph cells basically malignant. There is a, there is a particular marker and it basically what it, that's the, that's how it phones in, you know, this sensor. You're basically it's, it's help. It's because obviously my immune system was totally overwhelmed.

• 4:27:57Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 4:27:57Speaker 01

  I couldn't do the CAR T, which they take blood out. They super energize your T cells, put it back into you because my kidneys are compromised.

• 4:28:04Danny Jones?

  Yeah. What is the CAR T? CAR T is, is what they do with kids, right?

• 4:28:07Speaker 01

  Well, CAR T is, it's very expensive, but it's basically a one and done. But some people have psychotic reactions. They have to be in a special facility.

• 4:28:15Danny Jones?

  Psychotic?

• 4:28:16Speaker 01

  Psychotic because, oh yeah, because it's really intense.

• 4:28:20Danny Jones?

  Okay.

• 4:28:21Speaker 01

  But I, I didn't qualify.

• 4:28:23Danny Jones?

  Okay.

• 4:28:23Speaker 01

  They wanted me to go that route if things got, but I didn't qualify. At one point I even thought I was going to be bone marrow, but 10% of people who do bone marrow die. And, you know, I wasn't gonna, that's worst case scenario. So then I was like, okay, what do I do? I can, I can control everything I eat.

• 4:28:41Speaker 01

  Now it's, you know, what's the cause of it? None of the doctors could say for sure. They said it could be environmental. It could be triggered by a whole host of things. You know, I talked a little bit about, I was putting enormous pressure. The anvil.

• 4:28:56Danny Jones?

  Yep.

• 4:28:57Speaker 01

  The hydraulic press for many, many years. Who knows? I don't know, right? I don't know for sure. I can suspicion, but I don't really want to conjecture. Some people say, a lot of people have, a lot. A small number of people have kind of a lymphoma, but it's called smoldering. It never manifests. It just, it just, your immune system keeps it like.

• 4:29:16Danny Jones?

  Keeps it at bay.

• 4:29:17Speaker 01

  That's correct. If you looked at the CAT scan and the PET scan, you know, which is they put a small vein, that's a radioactive isotope. And basically in a sugar solution, and it's IV'd into you. Pretty much every lymph node in my body was lit up.

• 4:29:32Danny Jones?

  Whoa.

• 4:29:33Speaker 01

  And it was getting to the point where I was gonna have problems on the urinary side of the house to be a little bit more TMI, where it was gonna close off, right? So they got, they were really worried because the last thing you want to do is to go in. I mean, remember this is a blood cancer. It's a liquid cancer.

• 4:29:51Danny Jones?

  Mm hmm.

• 4:29:51Speaker 01

  It's not, it's not, it's not in the form of a tumor. It is, yeah, it's a tumor, but it's a, it's.

• 4:29:56Danny Jones?

  It's everywhere.

• 4:29:57Speaker 01

  That's right. It's like, wow. So I'm now on a second generation, which is this calquence. And I'm on a renal friendly diet. There's certain things I have to avoid or minimize.

• 4:30:12Danny Jones?

  Like what?

• 4:30:14Speaker 01

  I don't, can't eat a whole lot of tomatoes or basically I can't eat bananas. Alcohol is out. Yep. Broccoli's out, spinach is out.

• 4:30:22Danny Jones?

  Did you ever try the ketogenic diet?

• 4:30:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, there's aspect to that that I'm incorporating, but as long as it's renal friendly.

• 4:30:29Danny Jones?

  Okay.

• 4:30:29Speaker 01

  Um, there's certain fruits, like, uh, I can't eat grapefruit because it would, but that's not unusual for a lot of people with these types of medicines because it would interfere with the absorption of this pill. Um, and then I have certain dietary supplements. To help boost my immune system and just stabilize me. And there's still some things that are balancing out because I they thought this is interesting. They thought just allow just indulge a bit because it's obviously extremely personal to me because I'm there. Right. They thought when they first began to run the blood test, they actually came into my in my bedroom in the hospital and they said, are you vegan? All the indicators was I was hardcore vegan.

• 4:31:13Danny Jones?

  Really?

• 4:31:13Speaker 01

  My but I'm not. There was a time in my life that I was a lactoovo, right? For hell, other health reasons, because I was very sickly as a kid. I was not vegan by any, not even close.

• 4:31:24Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 4:31:25Speaker 01

  But the profile of the blood test was I was vegan.

• 4:31:29Danny Jones?

  Wow.

• 4:31:30Speaker 01

  Hemoglobin was in the five range. Anybody knows about your incredibly anemic, super anemic.

• 4:31:38Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. I had to have, I had 20, I lost count, 20 units of blood over a period of four months, just to keep me going.

• 4:31:48Speaker 01

  So life and I get a little emotional still. Okay.

• 4:31:54Speaker 01

  Life is incredibly precious.

• 4:32:00Speaker 01

  And so I just live each and every day. I get up and I got up in the morning, right? In the hotel and pinch myself virtually.

• 4:32:08Danny Jones?

  Mm hmm.

• 4:32:08Speaker 01

  I'm still here. I get to live another day, seize it. Live it to the fullest each and every moment. What else do I have?

• 4:32:18Speaker 01

  Against the backdrop of my entire life.

• 4:32:22Danny Jones?

  Good God.

• 4:32:22Speaker 01

  Cause I don't, I'm not, I don't, I realize we have an expiration date at a certain point.

• 4:32:26Danny Jones?

  Mm hmm.

• 4:32:28Speaker 01

  But I'd rather it be further into the future.

• 4:32:31Danny Jones?

  Did you, did you have any kind of autoimmune issues prior to this?

• 4:32:36Speaker 01

  Not that I'm aware of.

• 4:32:37Danny Jones?

  No.

• 4:32:38Speaker 01

  Now I'm wondering.

• 4:32:39Danny Jones?

  Did you ever get COVID?

• 4:32:41Speaker 01

  No, interesting enough, no indication that I got COVID, none. Um, apparently some people don't believe that. It's like, well, everybody.

• 4:32:51Danny Jones?

  I never got it. No, not that I'm if I got it, I was asymptomatic, but I got antibody. I got antibody test and I didn't have the antibodies.

• 4:32:57Speaker 01

  Well, it also turns out that certain blood types, interestingly enough, are more immune. I'm O positive.

• 4:33:05Danny Jones?

  Okay.

• 4:33:05Speaker 01

  And apparently even when the O positive, I happen to have apparently, this is what I've been told, that my type of my blood type makes it harder for the COVID to.

• 4:33:16Danny Jones?

  Interesting.

• 4:33:17Speaker 01

  Yes, with a spike protein. Now, having said that, because I worked at Apple initially, it wasn't required. Um, but then they forced, if you wanted to continue working and remember, remember I'm in massive debt, right? I'm still, I'm still crawling out of it.

• 4:33:35Speaker 01

  Have nowhere near in the income I had discretion or otherwise, basically have no retirement, right?

• 4:33:42Speaker 01

  Um, I have, I have a 401k from Apple. I have a small annuity from, I was able to convert. There is an annuity, uh, but nowhere near.

• 4:33:50Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 4:33:51Speaker 01

  Okay. And obviously my, my salary, my hourly rate, Apple is nowhere near what I used to make or what I made in industry. Okay. Just not, even though Apple pays pretty well and has a lot of benefits. So I ended up having the original COVID shots. We're talking FISA Moderna.

• 4:34:08Danny Jones?

  Multiple?

• 4:34:09Speaker 01

  Multiple with several boosters.

• 4:34:11Danny Jones?

  Oh, wow.

• 4:34:12Speaker 01

  Over the intervening two years. But the last one that I took.

• 4:34:16Danny Jones?

  And this was what year?

• 4:34:17Speaker 01

  This is, you're, you're talking, so remember they, it took, uh, you know, they did the, the, again, Trump, I say Trump to his credit. You know, they put all, everything they could, you know, in, into the, um,

• 4:34:33Speaker 01

  Accelerating.

• 4:34:34Danny Jones?

  Warp speed.

• 4:34:35Speaker 01

  Warp speed, literally, right? Into coming up with the RNA, right, the mRNA.

• 4:34:42Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 4:34:43Speaker 01

  And it would have been, I'm just thinking, it was, is it, I was in actual Australia in late 2019, just ahead of the wave, as it turns out. So that would have been, it would have been into 21. So, starting in early, as I'm just trying to remember now, early 2021, when they started to release.

• 4:35:03Danny Jones?

  Holy shit.

• 4:35:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was 2021. There was that first, and then like you had to get another one four or six months later. And then I was still there all the way through until the fall of 2022.

• 4:35:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, although for part of that time I worked from home.

• 4:35:22Danny Jones?

  Okay.

• 4:35:23Speaker 01

  So I didn't.

• 4:35:26Speaker 01

  I'm aware of people that have had, you know, reactions. I'm aware of people that have gotten long, like have had other, especially with the multiple.

• 4:35:34Danny Jones?

  Yeah, people had strokes.

• 4:35:36Speaker 01

  People are.

• 4:35:37Danny Jones?

  Myocarditis.

• 4:35:38Speaker 01

  Yep, I'm aware of that. And I, yep, and I, and I've, you know, I've, I don't, I won't go down the path because I've wondered, but I don't. Part of it is the lymphoma itself has its own sort of unique, it's sort of the, what happens to it is sort of the later stages.

• 4:35:53Danny Jones?

  Sure.

• 4:35:53Speaker 01

  One of them, and then it turns out, when you have the targeted therapy that I did, it has side effects, they're known. There's a small percentage of people, usually over 60, that develop rapid heart palpitations.

• 4:36:07Danny Jones?

  Mm hmm.

• 4:36:07Speaker 01

  As a result of the therapy. Okay.

• 4:36:11Danny Jones?

  This therapy?

• 4:36:11Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 4:36:12Danny Jones?

  Okay.

• 4:36:12Speaker 01

  Yeah. So imagine your resting heart rate, whatever that is, average person, somewhere between 55 and 75.

• 4:36:19Danny Jones?

  Uh huh.

• 4:36:20Speaker 01

  Imagine that triple to four times. How'd you feel?

• 4:36:25Danny Jones?

  Not good.

• 4:36:26Speaker 01

  Imagine that, not just for seconds or minutes, imagine that for an entire day plus.

• 4:36:31Danny Jones?

  Ugh.

• 4:36:32Speaker 01

  That's what I experienced.

• 4:36:34Danny Jones?

  Good God.

• 4:36:34Speaker 01

  I had to have a whole bunch of heart tests to make sure that I was, I, because you can't sustain that. You just can't, it's like, I used to run, that was, I used to run, I used to run competitively. So it turns out I had an extremely robust heart, but they did say there's a point at which it's just gonna start breaking down.

• 4:36:53Danny Jones?

  Hmm.

• 4:36:54Speaker 01

  So.

• 4:36:56Danny Jones?

  And that subsided.

• 4:36:58Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, I do have. So I do take special medicine, very small dose.

• 4:37:05Speaker 01

  But the this second generation, there is actually a third generation that's emerged in the last couple of years, but they don't want, there's no need to change it as long as this one is now it's because I'm in a recovery mode. It's more of a suppressant. It's not like getting it doesn't have because after even after the first one within months, it got rid of all the malignant cells, literally cleared them.

• 4:37:26Danny Jones?

  Wow.

• 4:37:27Speaker 01

  With only four left, but those four started coming back after I had the severe reaction from the first generation. So, you know, it's just like our bodies are just incredible, these incredible biological, you know, machines. They stunning. It's stunning. But, uh, yeah, I life's precious. I just gonna say that.

• 4:37:49Danny Jones?

  You are a testament to that, man. You have been through hell and back.

• 4:37:52Speaker 01

  Well,

• 4:37:54Speaker 01

  I'm still just gonna keep showing up. People, people, well, there's people said, why do you do this, Tom? Why do you even bother with interviews? Why do you do any of this? I said, well, part of this is for history, but part of it is for the next generation.

• 4:38:08Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 4:38:09Speaker 01

  You know, I've, you know, my youngest son is 29. I mean, and there's, I worked with a lot of young people at Apple. I mean, what world are we leaving behind? What world do we want to keep?

• 4:38:21Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 4:38:22Speaker 01

  Remember what happened when frankly came out at the constitutional convention?

• 4:38:25Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 4:38:26Speaker 01

  There was a woman reporter reportedly asked him, what did you guys do in there? Create a republic, you know, if you can keep it. Yeah, well, that's the great experiment, right? That is the great experiment of America. I don't want to see that disappear. There's no, and we don't need to compromise ourselves. We just don't.

• 4:38:43Danny Jones?

  Yeah, man. I mean, everything that you just alluded to and described in your story and what you were trying to expose unfortunately seems like we've seen continue to rot over the decades. And we are in, it doesn't seem like the country's in a great spot in regards to the control of this private military industrial complex that seems to run the world and be connected to fucking everything.

• 4:39:14Speaker 01

  That's a very

• 4:39:17Speaker 01

  Street language way to express what we're facing.

• 4:39:22Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 4:39:23Speaker 01

  And part of it is like, well, then how do we see part of it? I think we're in retrograde. That's the fear I have is we're in retrograde. I thought we're supposed to, I mean, this is the great promise of America. What do you leave behind, right? For the next generation?

• 4:39:37Speaker 01

  Think, think of you're young, you're young, right? You're a young one. I mean, I, I think even, even though my son's 29, my youngest son's 29. His, his future, his history, what are we inheriting?

• 4:39:50Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 4:39:51Speaker 01

  I don't want them to inherit the wind.

• 4:39:55Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 4:39:55Speaker 01

  So I've, I've, I've said this, but I'll say it again.

• 4:40:01Speaker 01

  Where do I center myself? I go back, say, origin story.

• 4:40:07Speaker 01

  Constitution before that, the Declaration of Independence, that extraordinary document. The one that has, there's certain inalienable rights. Well, I've dedicated the rest of my life to defending what? Life, liberty, pursuit of happiness.

• 4:40:23Danny Jones?

  It's a beautiful story, man.

• 4:40:24Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 4:40:25Danny Jones?

  You're a good man, Tom.

• 4:40:28Danny Jones?

  That was the first five hour podcast I've ever done.

• 4:40:35Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 4:40:36Danny Jones?

  You got the record.

• 4:40:37Speaker 01

  A first.

• 4:40:38Danny Jones?

  A first.

• 4:40:39Speaker 01

  Broke the mold.

• 4:40:40Danny Jones?

  And now we got Patreon questions.

• 4:40:41Speaker 01

  Okay, go for it.

• 4:40:42Danny Jones?

  So thanks again for coming, man. Tell people that are listening and watching on YouTube or Spotify. Where they can A, get ahold of you, find out more about you, anything like that.

• 4:40:56Speaker 01

  I'm on social media, both Blue Sky and on X.

• 4:41:00Danny Jones?

  Okay.

• 4:41:00Speaker 01

  That's probably in terms of public.

• 4:41:02Danny Jones?

  Okay. Okay, perfect. I'll link that stuff below.

• 4:41:05Speaker 01

  So people, if, you know, they can follow up there or just follow me there.

• 4:41:09Danny Jones?

  Okay.

• 4:41:09Speaker 01

  And, you know, if I've had people to DM me and then follow up from there.

• 4:41:13Danny Jones?

  Awesome.

• 4:41:14Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 4:41:15Danny Jones?

  Cool. Well, thanks again, man. This has been incredible.

• 4:41:19Speaker 01

  I appreciate the space that you provided in which I could show up and share a far greater insight into what happened to me and some fascinating history that apparently people find rather interesting, just given everything. I just happened to be there. This is sort of the Waldo, where's Waldo? But this was Waldo, you know?

• 4:41:44Speaker 01

  Remember, it always comes back to, well, who is I representing? Yeah, I was spying for him. I was actually serving the nation.

• 4:41:56Speaker 01

  And providing for the common defense for who? The American people, period.

• 4:42:04Speaker 01

  Now, have I gotten to know a whole lot of people around the world as a result of being an asterisk American and being semi-public? Yes.

• 4:42:12Danny Jones?

  Yeah, but you paid the price for doing the right thing.

• 4:42:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, but I would do it all over again. There'd be some tweaks here and there, but I'd do it all. Ellsberg has said that.

• 4:42:21Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 4:42:22Speaker 01

  He just wished more people would have, you know, said something, but a lot of people knew what he knew, they just remained silent.

• 4:42:30Speaker 01

  But then guess what? In silence, right? If you remain silent.

• 4:42:35Speaker 01

  I mean, at one point, they were telling when all this sort of broke and remember this goes back. It's like even Clapper, right? He used to be very senior. In the, in DOD.

• 4:42:48Speaker 01

  He actually said, I just wish

• 4:42:52Speaker 01

  people in the Navy security, basically, I'm paraphrasing him. Just be like my, is, you get, this is how he said, be like my grandchildren, seen and not heard. Direct quote, seen and not heard. This probably says more about who he is as a grandfather.

• 4:43:04Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 4:43:05Speaker 01

  And who he is as a person. I got, I met him. That's a whole, I met Clapper. When he, he headed up the advisory board at NSA, I used to have me, we used to have meetings with the advisory board. Seen and not heard? Just what? Shut up, do your job, follow orders?

• 4:43:20Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 4:43:21Speaker 01

  Follow orders. Wow.

• 4:43:22Danny Jones?

  That's how you climb the ladder.

• 4:43:23Speaker 01

  My father ended up on the ground for six months, doing what? Fighting the Germans.

• 4:43:32Speaker 01

  Have we forgotten history? Well, you know, history doesn't necessarily repeat, but it certainly rhymes.

• 4:43:39Danny Jones?

  That's a fact.

• 4:43:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, but life is life and you know, I have a garden and I've got my hobbies and I I hold deep family and friends, right, close? Because that's what matters. Remember in the end, what matter, what does matter, right? What really matters?

• 4:43:57Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 4:43:59Danny Jones?

  Very, very powerful story, man. I'm really happy we were able to do this.

• 4:44:02Speaker 01

  So Patreon questions.

• 4:44:04Danny Jones?

  Patreon. All right, that's it for YouTube. Good night, everybody.

• 4:44:06Speaker 04

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