Yes it has. Better yet he has actually been responsible
in the handling of the data. What he did
do was force disclosure of a runaway surveillance train lacking any real
oversight and even vulnerable to foreign espionage because of just that. The proof of that is Mr. Snowdon. If he could do it is obvious that anyone else
determined enough could do the same.
The NSA is now getting
the oversight that it demands. Better
yet, we now understand real capability and something else changes. This data stream will continue to be
collected. We have no problem with
that. What must change are the rules for
querying that data stream. This is also
very powerful.
An investigating
officer needs to be able to go in front of a judge and request a query
targeting known perpetrators. This
should not be given too easily nor should it be used for blind fishing trips or
every sales office can be characterized as a den of thieves. It certainly should be used in the case of a
known crime having been committed.
What is important is that
it immediately strips anyone with criminal intent of access to communications
generally. That is a huge advantage in
blocking and deterring crime. Take it a
step further and simply track cell phones as to location. This all makes impulse criminality actually
dangerous.
We are going there and
Snowdon has made sure that abuse just became very difficult. In the process he may make crime itself very
difficult and may make our own world that much safer.
Extreme power demands
extreme oversight.
Edward
Snowden, after months of NSA revelations, says his mission’s accomplished
By Barton Gellman, Published:
December 23
MOSCOW — The familiar voice on the hotel room phone did not
waste words.
He checked the reply against his watch and described
a place to meet.
“I’ll see you there,” he said.
Edward Joseph Snowden emerged at the appointed
hour, alone, blending into a light crowd of locals and tourists. He cocked his
arm for a handshake, then turned his shoulder to indicate a path. Before long
he had guided his visitor to a secure space out of public view.
During more than 14 hours of interviews, the
first he has conducted in person sincearriving
here in June, Snowden did not part the curtains or step
outside. Russia granted
him temporary asylum on Aug. 1, but Snowden remains a
target of surpassing interest to the intelligence services whose secrets he
spilled on an epic scale.
Late this spring, Snowden supplied three
journalists, including
this one, with caches of top-secret documents from the
National Security Agency, where he worked as a contractor. Dozens of
revelations followed, and then hundreds, as news organizations around the world
picked up the story. Congress pressed for explanations, new evidence revived
old lawsuits and the Obama administration was obliged to declassify thousands
of pages it had fought for years to conceal.
Taken together, the revelations have brought to
light a global surveillance system that cast off many of its historical
restraints after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. Secret legal authorities
empowered the NSA to sweep in the telephone, Internet and location records of
whole populations. One of the leaked presentation slides described the agency’s
“collection philosophy” as “Order one of everything off the menu.”
Six months after the first revelations appeared
in The Washington Post and Britain’s Guardian newspaper, Snowden agreed to
reflect at length on the roots and repercussions of his choice. He was relaxed
and animated over two days of nearly unbroken conversation, fueled by burgers,
pasta, ice cream and Russian pastry.
Snowden offered vignettes from his intelligence
career and from his recent life as “an indoor cat” in Russia. But he
consistently steered the conversation back to surveillance, democracy and the
meaning of the documents he exposed.
“For me, in terms of personal satisfaction, the
mission’s already accomplished,” he said. “I already won. As soon as the
journalists were able to work, everything that I had been trying to do was
validated. Because, remember, I didn’t want to change society. I wanted to give
society a chance to determine if it should change itself.”
“All I wanted was for the public to be able to
have a say in how they are governed,” he said. “That is a milestone we left a
long time ago. Right now, all we are looking at are stretch goals.”
‘Going in blind’
Snowden is an orderly thinker, with an
engineer’s approach to problem-solving. He had come to believe that a dangerous
machine of mass surveillance was growing unchecked. Closed-door oversight by
Congress and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court was a “graveyard of
judgment,” he said, manipulated by the agency it was supposed to keep in check.
Classification rules erected walls to prevent public debate.
Toppling those walls would be a spectacular act
of transgression against the norms that prevailed inside them. Someone would
have to bypass security, extract the secrets, make undetected contact with
journalists and provide them with enough proof to tell the stories.
The NSA’s business is “information dominance,”
the use of other people’s secrets to shape events. At 29, Snowden upended the
agency on its own turf.
“You recognize that you’re going in blind, that
there’s no model,” Snowden said, acknowledging that he had no way to know
whether the public would share his views.
“But when you weigh that against the
alternative, which is not to act,” he said, “you realize that some analysis is
better than no analysis. Because even if your analysis proves to be wrong, the
marketplace of ideas will bear that out. If you look at it from an engineering
perspective, an iterative perspective, it’s clear that you have to try
something rather than do nothing.”
By his own terms, Snowden succeeded beyond
plausible ambition. The NSA, accustomed to watching without being watched,
faces scrutiny it has not endured since the 1970s, or perhaps ever.
The cascading effects have made themselves felt
in Congress, the courts, popular culture, Silicon Valley and world capitals.
The basic structure of the Internet itself is now in question, as Brazil and
members of the European Union consider
measures to keep their data away from U.S. territory and
U.S. technology giants including Google, Microsoft and Yahoo take extraordinary steps to
block the collection of data by their government.
For months, Obama administration officials
attacked Snowden’s motives and said the work of the NSA was distorted by
selective leaks and misinterpretations.
On Dec. 16, in a lawsuit that could not have
gone forward without the disclosures made possible by Snowden, U.S. District
Judge Richard J. Leon described the NSA’s capabilities as “almost
Orwellian” and said its bulk collection of U.S. domestic
telephone records was probably unconstitutional.
The next day, in the Roosevelt Room, an unusual
delegation of executives from old telephone companies and young Internet firms
told President Obama that the NSA’s intrusion into their networks was a threat
to the U.S. information economy. The following day, an advisory panel appointed
by Obama recommended
substantial new restrictions on the NSA, including an end to
the domestic call-records program.
“This week is a turning point,” said the
Government Accountability Project’s Jesselyn Radack, who is one of Snowden’s
legal advisers. “It has been just a cascade.”
‘They elected me’
On June 22, the Justice Department unsealed
a criminal
complaint charging Snowden with
espionage and felony theft of government property. It was a dry enumeration of
statutes, without a trace of the anger pulsing through Snowden’s former
precincts.
In the intelligence and national security
establishments, Snowden is widely viewed as a reckless saboteur, and
journalists abetting him little less so.
At the Aspen Security Forum in July, a four-star
military officer known for his even keel seethed through one meeting alongside
a reporter he knew to be in contact with Snowden. Before walking away, he
turned and pointed a finger.
“We didn’t have another 9/11,” he said angrily,
because intelligence enabled warfighters to find the enemy first. “Until you’ve
got to pull the trigger, until you’ve had to bury your people, you don’t have a
clue.”
It is commonly said of Snowden that he broke an
oath of secrecy, a turn of phrase that captures a sense of betrayal. NSA
Director Keith B. Alexander and Director of National Intelligence James R.
Clapper Jr., among many others, have used that formula.
In his interview with The Post, Snowden noted
matter-of-factly that Standard Form 312, the classified-information
nondisclosure agreement, is a civil contract. He signed it, but he pledged his
fealty elsewhere.
“The oath of allegiance is not an oath of
secrecy,” he said. “That is an oath to the Constitution. That is the oath that
I kept that Keith Alexander and James Clapper did not.”
People who accuse him of disloyalty, he said,
mistake his purpose.
“I am not trying to bring down the NSA, I am
working to improve the NSA,” he said. “I am still working for the NSA right
now. They are the only ones who don’t realize it.”
What entitled Snowden, now 30, to take on that
responsibility?
“That whole question — who elected you? —
inverts the model,” he said. “They elected me. The overseers.”
He named the chairmen of the Senate and House
intelligence committees.
“Dianne
Feinstein elected me when she asked softball
questions” in committee hearings, he said. “Mike
Rogers elected me when he kept these programs
hidden. . . . The FISA court elected me when they decided to
legislate from the bench on things that were far beyond the mandate of what
that court was ever intended to do. The system failed comprehensively, and each
level of oversight, each level of responsibility that should have addressed
this, abdicated their responsibility.”
“It wasn’t that they put it on me as an
individual — that I’m uniquely qualified, an angel descending from the heavens
— as that they put it on someone, somewhere,” he said. “You have the
capability, and you realize every other [person] sitting around the table has
the same capability but they don’t do it. So somebody has to be the first.”
‘Front-page test’
Snowden grants that NSA employees by and large
believe in their mission and trust the agency to handle the secrets it takes
from ordinary people — deliberately, in the case of bulk records collection,
and “incidentally,” when the content of American phone calls and e-mails are
swept into NSA systems along with foreign targets.
But Snowden also said acceptance of the agency’s
operations was not universal. He began to test that proposition more than a
year ago, he said, in periodic conversations with co-workers and superiors that
foreshadowed his emerging plan.
Beginning in October 2012, he said, he brought
his misgivings to two superiors in the NSA’s Technology Directorate and two
more in the NSA Threat Operations Center’s regional base in Hawaii. For each of
them, and 15 other co-workers, Snowden said he opened a data query tool called
BOUNDLESSINFORMANT, which used color-coded “heat maps” to depict the volume of
data ingested by NSA taps.
His colleagues were often “astonished to learn
we are collecting more in the United States on Americans than we are on
Russians in Russia,” he said. Many of them were troubled, he said, and several
said they did not want to know any more.
“I asked these people, ‘What do you think the
public would do if this was on the front page?’ ” he said. He noted that
critics have accused him of bypassing internal channels of dissent. “How is
that not reporting it? How is that not raising it?” he said.
By last December, Snowden was contacting
reporters, although he had not yet passed along any classified information. He
continued to give his colleagues the “front-page test,” he said, until April.
Asked about those conversations, NSA spokeswoman
Vanee Vines sent a prepared statement to The Post: “After extensive
investigation, including interviews with his former NSA supervisors and
co-workers, we have not found any evidence to support Mr. Snowden’s contention
that he brought these matters to anyone’s attention.”
Snowden recounted another set of conversations
that he said took place three years earlier, when he was sent by the NSA’s
Technology Directorate to support operations at a listening post in Japan. As a
system administrator, he had full access to security and auditing controls. He
said he saw serious flaws with information security.
“I actually recommended they move to two-man
control for administrative access back in 2009,” he said, first to his
supervisor in Japan and then to the directorate’s chief of operations in the
Pacific. “Sure, a whistleblower could use these things, but so could a spy.”
That precaution, which requires a second set of
credentials to perform risky operations such as copying files onto a removable
drive, has been among the principal security responses to the Snowden affair.
Vines, the NSA spokeswoman, said there was no
record of those conversations, either.
U.S. ‘would cease to exist’
Just before releasing the documents this spring,
Snowden made a final review of the risks. He had overcome what he described at
the time as a “selfish fear” of the consequences for himself.
“I said to you the only fear [left] is apathy —
that people won’t care, that they won’t want change,” he recalled this month.
The documents leaked by Snowden compelled
attention because they revealed to Americans a history they did not know they
had.
Internal briefing documents reveled in the
“Golden Age of Electronic Surveillance.” Brawny cover names such as MUSCULAR,
TUMULT and TURMOIL boasted of the agency’s prowess.
With assistance
from private communications firms, the NSA had learned to
capture enormous flows of data at the speed of light from fiber-optic cables
that carried Internet and telephone traffic over continents and under seas.
According to one document in Snowden’s cache, the agency’s Special Source Operations
group, which as early as 2006 was said to be ingesting “one Library of Congress
every 14.4 seconds,” had an official seal that might have been parody: an eagle
with all the world’s cables in its grasp.
Most of that data, by definition and intent,
belonged to ordinary people suspected of nothing. But vast new storage capacity
and processing tools enabled the NSA to use the information to map human
relationships on a planetary scale. Only this way, its leadership believed,
could the NSA reach beyond its universe of known intelligence targets.
In the view of the NSA, signals intelligence, or
electronic eavesdropping, was a matter of life and death, “without which
America would cease to exist as we know it,” according
to an internal presentation in the first week of October 2001 as the
agency ramped up its response to the al-Qaeda attacks on the World Trade Center
and the Pentagon.
With stakes such as those, there was no
capability the NSA believed it should leave on the table. The agency followed
orders from President George W. Bush to begin domestic collection without
authority from Congress and the courts. When the NSA won those authorities
later, some of them under secret interpretations of laws passed by Congress
between 2007 and 2012, the Obama administration went further still.
Using PRISM,
the cover name for collection of user data from Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, Apple
and five other U.S.-based companies, the NSA could obtain all communications to
or from any specified target. The companies had no choice but to comply with
the government's request for data.
But the NSA could not use PRISM, which was
overseen once a year by the surveillance court, for the collection of virtually
all data handled by those companies. To widen its access, it teamed up with its
British counterpart, Government Communications Headquarters, or GCHQ, to break
into the private fiber-optic links that connected
Google and Yahoo data centers around the world.
That operation, which used the cover name
MUSCULAR, tapped into U.S. company data from outside U.S. territory. The NSA,
therefore, believed it did not need permission from Congress or judicial
oversight. Data from hundreds of millions of U.S. accounts flowed over those
Google and Yahoo links, but classified rules allowed the NSA to presume that
data ingested overseas belonged to foreigners.
‘Persistent threat’
Disclosure of the MUSCULAR project enraged and
galvanized U.S. technology executives. They believed the NSA had lawful access
to their front doors — and had broken down the back doors anyway.
Microsoft general counsel Brad Smith took to his
company’s blog and called the NSA an “advanced persistent threat”
— the worst of all fighting words in U.S. cybersecurity circles, generally
reserved for Chinese state-sponsored hackers and sophisticated criminal
enterprises.
“For the industry as a whole, it caused everyone
to ask whether we knew as much as we thought,” Smith recalled in an interview.
“It underscored the fact that while people were confident that the U.S.
government was complying with U.S. laws for activity within U.S. territory,
perhaps there were things going on outside the United
States . . . that made this bigger and more complicated and more
disconcerting than we knew.”
They wondered, he said, whether the NSA was
“collecting proprietary information from the companies themselves.”
Led by Google and then Yahoo, one company after
another announced expensive plans to encrypt its data traffic over tens of
thousands of miles of cable. It was a direct — in some cases, explicit — blow
to NSA collection of user data in bulk. If the NSA wanted the information, it
would have to request it or circumvent the encryption one target at a time.
As these projects are completed, the Internet
will become a less friendly place for the NSA to work. The agency can still
collect data from virtually anyone, but collecting from everyone will be
harder.
The industry’s response, Smith acknowledged, was
driven by a business threat. U.S. companies could not afford to be seen as
candy stores for U.S. intelligence. But the principle of the thing, Smith said,
“is fundamentally about ensuring that customer data is turned over to
governments pursuant to valid legal orders and in accordance with
constitutional principles.”
‘Warheads on foreheads’
Snowden has focused on much the same point from
the beginning: Individual targeting would cure most of what he believes is
wrong with the NSA.
Six months ago, a reporter asked him by
encrypted e-mail why Americans would want the NSA to give up bulk data
collection if that would limit a useful intelligence tool.
“I believe the cost of frank public debate about
the powers of our government is less than the danger posed by allowing these
powers to continue growing in secret,” he replied, calling them “a direct
threat to democratic governance.”
In the Moscow interview, Snowden said, “What the
government wants is something they never had before,” adding: “They want total
awareness. The question is, is that something we should be allowing?”
Snowden likened the NSA’s powers to those used
by British authorities in Colonial America, when “general warrants” allowed for
anyone to be searched. The FISA court, Snowden said, “is authorizing general
warrants for the entire country’s metadata.”
“The last time that happened, we fought a war
over it,” he said.
Technology, of course, has enabled a great deal
of consumer surveillance by private companies, as well. The difference with the
NSA’s possession of the data, Snowden said, is that government has the power to
take away life or freedom.
At the NSA, he said, “there are people in the
office who joke about, ‘We put warheads on foreheads.’ Twitter doesn’t put
warheads on foreheads.”
Privacy, as Snowden sees it, is a universal
right, applicable to American and foreign surveillance alike.
“I don’t care whether you’re the pope or Osama bin
Laden,” he said. “As long as there’s an individualized, articulable, probable
cause for targeting these people as legitimate foreign intelligence, that’s
fine. I don’t think it’s imposing a ridiculous burden by asking for probable
cause. Because, you have to understand, when you have access to the tools the
NSA does, probable cause falls out of trees.”
‘Everybody knows’
On June 29, Gilles de Kerchove, the European
Union’s counterterrorism coordinator, awoke to a report in Der Spiegel that U.S.
intelligence had broken into E.U. offices, including his, to implant
surveillance devices.
The 56-year-old Belgian, whose work is often
classified, did not consider himself naive. But he took the news personally,
and more so when he heard unofficial explanations from Washington.
“ ‘Everybody knows. Everybody does’ — Keith
Alexander said that,” de Kerchove said in an interview. “I don’t like the idea
that the NSA will put bugs in my office. No. I don’t like it. No. Between
allies? No. I’m surprised that people find that noble.”
When it comes to spying on allies, by Snowden’s
lights, the news is not always about the target.
“It’s the deception of the government that’s
revealed,” Snowden said, noting that the Obama administration offered false
public assurances after the initial reports about NSA surveillance in Germany
“The U.S. government said: ‘We follow German laws in Germany. We never target
German citizens.’ And then the story comes out and it’s: ‘What are you talking
about? You’re spying on the chancellor.’ You just lied to the entire country,
in front of Congress.”
In private, U.S. intelligence officials still
maintain that spying among friends is routine for all concerned, but they are
giving greater weight to the risk of getting caught.
“There are many things we do in intelligence
that, if revealed, would have the potential for all kinds of blowback,” Clapper
told a House panel in October.
‘They will make mistakes’
U.S. officials say it is obvious that Snowden’s
disclosures will do grave harm to intelligence gathering, exposing methods that
adversaries will learn to avoid.
“We’re seeing al-Qaeda and related groups start
to look for ways to adjust how they communicate,” said Matthew Olsen, director
of the National Counterterrorism Center and a former general counsel at the
NSA.
Other officials, who declined to speak on the
record about particulars, said they had watched some of their surveillance
targets, in effect, changing channels. That evidence can be read another way,
they acknowledged, given that the NSA managed to monitor the shift.
Clapper has said repeatedly in public that the
leaks did great damage, but in private he has taken a more nuanced stance. A
review of early damage assessments in previous espionage cases, he said in one
closed-door briefing this fall, found that dire forecasts of harm were seldom
borne out.
“People must communicate,” he said, according to
one participant who described the confidential meeting on the condition of
anonymity. “They will make mistakes, and we will exploit them.”
According to senior intelligence officials, two
uncertainties feed their greatest concerns. One is whether Russia or China
managed to take the Snowden archive from his computer, a worst-case assumption
for which three officials acknowledged there is no evidence.
In a previous assignment, Snowden taught U.S.
intelligence personnel how to operate securely in a “high-threat digital
environment,” using a training scenario in which China was the designated
threat. He declined to discuss the whereabouts of the files, but he said that
he is confident he did not expose them to Chinese intelligence in Hong Kong.
And he said he did not bring them to Russia.
“There’s nothing on it,” he said, turning his
laptop screen toward his visitor. “My hard drive is completely blank.”
The other big question is how many documents
Snowden took. The NSA’s incoming deputy director, Rick
Ledgett, said on CBS’s “60 Minutes” recently that the
number may approach 1.7 million, a huge and unexplained spike over
previous estimates. Ledgett said he would favor trying to negotiate an amnesty with Snowden in
exchange for “assurances that the remainder of the data could be secured.”
Obama’s national security adviser, Susan E.
Rice, later dismissed the possibility.
“The government knows where to find us if they
want to have a productive conversation about resolutions that don’t involve
Edward Snowden behind bars,” said the American Civil Liberties Union’s Ben
Wizner, the central figure on Snowden’s legal team.
Some news accounts have quoted U.S. government
officials as saying Snowden has arranged for the automated release of sensitive
documents if he is arrested or harmed. There are strong reasons to doubt that,
beginning with Snowden’s insistence, to this reporter and others, that he does
not want the documents published in bulk.
If Snowden were fool enough to rig a “dead man’s
switch,” confidants said, he would be inviting anyone who wants the documents
to kill him.
Asked about such a mechanism in the Moscow
interview, Snowden made a face and declined to reply. Later, he sent an
encrypted message. “That sounds more like a suicide switch,” he wrote. “It
wouldn’t make sense.”
‘It’s not about me’
By temperament and circumstance, Snowden is a
reticent man, reluctant to discuss details about his personal life.
Over two days his guard never dropped, but he
allowed a few fragments to emerge. He is an “ascetic,” he said. He lives off
ramen noodles and chips. He has visitors, and many of them bring books. The
books pile up, unread. The Internet is an endless library and a window on the
progress of his cause.
“It has always been really difficult to get me
to leave the house,” he said. “I just don’t have a lot of
needs. . . . Occasionally there’s things to go do, things to go see,
people to meet, tasks to accomplish. But it’s really got to be goal-oriented,
you know. Otherwise, as long as I can sit down and think and write and talk to
somebody, that’s more meaningful to me than going out and looking at landmarks.”
In hope of keeping focus on the NSA, Snowden has
ignored attacks on himself.
“Let them say what they want,” he said. “It’s
not about me.”
Former NSA and CIA director Michael V. Hayden
predicted that Snowden will waste away in Moscow as an alcoholic, like other
“defectors.” To this, Snowden shrugged. He does not drink at all. Never has.
But Snowden knows his presence here is easy
ammunition for critics. He did not choose refuge in Moscow as a final
destination. He said that once the U.S. government voided his passport as he
tried to change planes en route to Latin America, he had no other choice.
It would be odd if Russian authorities did not
keep an eye on him, but no retinue accompanied Snowden and his visitor saw no
one else nearby. Snowden neither tried to communicate furtively nor asked that
his visitor do so. He has had continuous Internet access and has talked to his
attorneys and to journalists daily, from his first day in the transit lounge at
Sheremetyevo airport.
“There is no evidence at all for the claim that
I have loyalties to Russia or China or any country other than the United
States,” he said. “I have no relationship with the Russian government. I have
not entered into any agreements with them.”
“If I defected at all,” Snowden said, “I
defected from the government to the public.”
Julie Tate contributed
to this report.
