Edward Snowden Slams Obama for Growing Surveillance State in Joe Rogan Interview

EXCERPT:

SNOWDEN: "And we can all imagine being there, right? Those of us who remember what the world was like post-9/11, fear is a powerful thing. But the guys who are doing that briefing, they're no longer scared of it because they’ve been dealing with it for years. This is the oldest thing. They’ve given this briefing times before. People talk about the deep state, right, they talk about it like some conspiracy of lizard people. It’s not that. It's something much simpler. Deep state is simply the career government. It’s the people who are in the same offices, who outlive and outlast presidencies. They’ve seen Republicans, they’ve seen Democrats, they don’t really care, and they give that same briefing again and again, and they get good at it. They know what they want. They know what this person is saying. Whereas the president, they don’t know who these people are. These people have been there before the president, they’re gonna be there after the president, and so they give this very effective, very fear-inducing speech and then they follow it up with their asks, which are really demands, just politely provided. And anyone in that position who is not an expert on this stuff, who is not ready for this sort of trade-off, and who you have to understand is a career politician, is entirely used to the horse-trading game and go, 'I'll deal with this later,' or 'Not now,' or 'What's the cost benefit here?' And in the intelligence community goes, 'If you give us what we want, no one will ever know about it because it's classified.' It's obviously the easy answer. And maybe Barack Obama honestly did want to get to this later, but what we can say today is for all the good that may have been done in that White House, this is an issue where the president went through two full terms and did not fix the problem, but in fact made it worse.”