The Edward Snowden Affair

by Michael Gurnow

  If Snowden’s thoughts of whistleblowing had not already gone from being a germ of an idea alongside a juvenile attempt to peek behind the surveillance curtain when he was in Geneva to resolute intentions gradually being put into action, they were certainly starting to congeal. He was again growing disenchanted with the government’s actions. One of the reasons he hadn’t already gone public was starting to dissipate. Snowden said it was at this time he “watched as Obama advanced the very policies that I thought would be reined in.” As a consequence, Snowden said he “got hardened.”102 He would reiterate this during an online chat on June 17, 2013: “Obama’s campaign promises and election gave me faith that he would lead us toward fixing the problems he outlined in his quest for votes. Many Americans felt similarly. Unfortunately, shortly after assuming power, he closed the door on investigating systemic violations of law, deepened and expanded several abusive programs, and refused to spend the political capital to end the kind of human rights violations like we see in Guantanamo, where men still sit without charge.”103

  Snowden was back in the States no later than March 2012 because, obviously having given up hope Obama would reform intelligence legislation, he made a donation to Ron Paul’s 2012 presidential bid from a residence in Columbia, Maryland.104 (On July 12 during a Moscow meeting with Russian officials, attorneys and human rights groups, he could label himself a Libertarian.)105 He traveled throughout the U.S. for Dell before taking time off to spend with his family, although he remained on the computer company’s payroll. He had already begun executing his plan. Though Snowden’s going all but silent on his beloved Ars boards in February 2010 could have been due to increased responsibility at Dell, it was likely he had done so as one of the preliminary steps in his intention to blow the whistle: He was reducing his digital footprint. During his last month at Dell he extracted data from its systems which related to eavesdropping programs of the NSA and Britain’s Government Communications Headquarters. Snowden had made a novice mistake, but he didn’t get caught. Dell would later confirm Snowden had left an electronic footprint.106 (Shortly after the press debuted the story of Snowden receiving a written CIA reprimand, he quickly issued a statement refuting the assertion he’d tried to steal CIA files. However, Dell’s report remained uncontested months after it was made. Therefore, his testimony that the “derogatory” note was the result of administrative backlash after Snowden had proved his supervisor wrong about a security flaw is suspect, especially since the event took place the month of the Valentine’s Day query on Ars.)107 One of the most vital stages came next. He applied to work for another government intelligence contractor.

  Booz Allen Hamilton (BAH) is a technology consulting firm which holds government contracts alongside Dell in Hawaii.108 Snowden wanted to switch employers for one simple reason and that was where BAH would have him working: Kunia Regional SIGINT Operations, which is part of the NSA’s Threat Operations Center. The outpost’s focus is China’s classified programs. This segment of the NSA is an infiltration target for Chinese spies, both private and for the Chinese equivalent of the NSA, the Ministry of State Security of the People’s Republic of China, or MSS, as well as for the Second Department of the People’s Liberation Army, known as 2PLA. Snowden wanted information about American surveillance of China because he already had incriminating evidence about the American government’s activities domestically as well as in Europe. He was aware of what Kunia did due to his proximity on the island when he was with Dell and had suspicions of what Kunia might contain. He was not disappointed.

  The location was pivotal but the job he’d applied for was vital. As an infrastructure analyst Snowden would be given the ability to accomplish what he wanted. By BAH’s own definition, an infrastructure analyst provides the ability for “organizations to process, interpret, and use massive data stores in weeks or months.”109 His job would be to move and reorganize files but he was hired as a professional hacker who could locate and exploit vulnerabilities in signal communication systems (“SIGINT” in Kunia’s title is the military acronym for “signals intelligence”). Kunia hacks Chinese telephone and Internet networks. With its over one billion users primarily divided between three carriers, China is the world’s largest mobile network carrier. Furthermore, the NSA provided Snowden with an unguarded, open door. He was part of the team expected to monitor whether other countries were attempting to do the same to America. In cyberintelligence terms, this is referred to as moving from offense, cyberwarfare, to defense, cybersecurity or counterintelligence. It is standard operating procedure to have analysts try their hand at both roles in order to determine their greatest strengths, propensities and preferences. It was a perfect situation. If Snowden triggered an alarm after extracting or moving data while working defense, he could easily account for it using the alibi that he was merely testing a system’s integrity.110

  Snowden didn’t ease into a position at BAH. The firm expressed reservations about his résumé. It did not know about his CIA reprimand. The contractor’s concern was his claim he had been a student at John Hopkins.111 After explaining the institution’s name change, though no university representative could confirm his enrollment, Snowden was given the job.

  Snowden wouldn’t start for BAH until late March or early April 2013, but he moved into a blue, 1,559-square-foot rental house which sat on the corner of the street in Waipahu, Hawaii, in May 2012.112 This is where he made a second donation to the Libertarian presidential candidate.113 Mills joined him the next month.114 Little attention has been paid to Snowden’s second “dark year” and how he occupied his time during this furlough. American Director of National Security Lieutenant General Keith Alexander stated Snowden had held a position at the NSA a year before assuming his position at BAH. It is not clear whether the general is referring to the analyst’s tenure at Dell, which was much longer, or if there was yet another job the whistleblower once had in the Department of Defense.115

  He knew he’d gotten the job with BAH by December, because this is when he first attempted to make anonymous contact with The Guardian’s Glenn Greenwald. Not receiving a response, a month later he tried Oscar-nominated documentarian Laura Poitras. Though non-committal at the time, she redirected him to Pulitzer-winning journalist Bart Gellman of the The Washington Post. Snowden emailed him the following month to mixed results. Time was of the essence, because though it would be several months before he would flee the country and almost three weeks hence when newspapers would release their famed first exposés, Snowden had yet to complete his last data reconnaissance mission.

  He stayed with his family in Maryland while undergoing two weeks of training for BAH at Fort Meade.116 He told his father he had changed jobs due to budget cuts.117 After saying goodbye, he left for Kunia on April 4.118 He would confirm during a one-hour interview in June with the South China Morning Post that the documentation he was providing the newspaper had been gathered two months before.119 Many published disclosures would bear the end date of April 2013.

  There was much speculation as to how the stolen data was physically transported out of Kunia. Two parties quickly formed: those who believed he had nonchalantly walked out of the building with the four laptops he was seen with when he arrived in Hong Kong,120 and people who argued Snowden used the less conspicuous removable flash/junk/thumb drive. The second faction stated the obviousness of removing entire computers from the intelligence compound was impossible given security protocols. This observation was met by the counterargument that a security system’s greatest weakness is the people who run it because they can be socially engineered. Social engineering is psychology in motion. It is the direct and indirect emotional, intellectual and political manipulation of people. In most any other scenario, the argument might be a convincing one. A person bold enough to be freely seen removing laptops from a secure area is assumed to be doing so with express, permitted purpose and freedom. However, an NSA campus is not any secure facility. It is the NSA. Those who argued Snowden had used thumb dr
ives to extract the data had to defend against the NSA policy forbidding any portable recording device on the premises.121 However, Snowden’s job title permitted him to be one of the select few exceptions. It was his job to transport data. Yet even as an infrastructure analyst working defense, Snowden could only set off so many alarms for unauthorized downloads before serious questions were asked. Months later, the NSA would still be unable to provide an accurate assessment of the quantity and quality of the materials stolen, no less the method(s) used. It would even be some time before it was clear his pilfering wasn’t limited to Kunia.

  By May 1, the house he and Mills were renting was empty. This was not because Snowden was about to flee the country; the property owner wanted to put it on the market.122 The couple moved a few blocks away into a home which housed a two-story living room. They had received the keys for their new residence two weeks prior.123 Mills had no clue what was about to take place. Less than a month into his role as infrastructure analyst, Snowden requested a two-week reprieve in order to seek medical treatment for his epilepsy which, he stated, had manifested the year before. He was granted the time off.124

  Early on Monday, May 20, in a very risky move since all NSA personnel are required to file for international travel at least 30 days in advance, Snowden boarded a plane for Hong Kong.125 He told Mills, who had just returned from visiting her family in Laurel, Maryland, he would return shortly. By noon he had checked into the 429-room Mira Hotel located in Tsim Sha Tsui. It cost him $330 per night.126 He had, in his terms, a “basic understanding” of Mandarin from at least seven years prior.127 Unfortunately the predominant language in Hong Kong is Cantonese.

  Greenwald and Poitras arrived in Hong Kong on June 1. They had no idea what Snowden looked like. He told them to go to the third floor of the Mira and look for a man holding a Rubik’s Cube. To ensure Murphy’s Law was not in effect should another person be in coincidental possession of the puzzle toy, they were to ask him when the restaurant would open and he would advise against the establishment.128

  The government had already been informed it had a leak.

  On Wednesday, June 5, The Guardian debuted “NSA collecting phone records of millions of Verizon customers daily.”

  On Thursday, June 6, The Washington Post presented “U.S. intelligence mining data from nine U.S. Internet companies in broad secret program” twenty minutes before the The Guardian published “NSA Prism program taps in to user data of Apple, Google and others.” The newspapers’ source is anonymous. All three editorials included top secret, classified government documents.

  On Saturday, June 9, The Guardian released the first part of a video interview of the man purportedly responsible for the previously announced NSA leaks. The world got to see its first glimpse of Edward Snowden.

  Chapter 2

  How to Blow a Whistle

  “The consent of the governed is not consent if it is not informed.”

  –Edward Snowden, online chat via The Guardian, June 17, 20131

  THE WORLD MIGHT NOT HAVE EVER HEARD of Edward Snowden if it hadn’t been for Thomas Drake.2

  Thomas Andrews Drake is the son of a World War II veteran and the secretary of famed American novelist Pearl S. Buck.3 His first encounter with U.S. intelligence was as an airborne voice processing specialist for the Air Force from 1979 to 1989.4 In civilian terms, he listened to communications as he flew reconnaissance over the Eastern bloc of Germany.5 From there he would meet Bill Clinton during his presidency when Drake worked at the National Military Joint Intelligence Center for the U.S. Navy.6 A lifelong academe, he then did contract work for the NSA evaluating software before being hired by the agency in SIGINT.7 His first day with the NSA was September 11, 2001.8 Within three years, he had been promoted from technical director of software engineering implementation to process portfolio manager. His rising star was shot down after he reported to Congress the NSA’s post9/11 surveillance programs were wasteful and ineffective. Because he told Capitol Hill what the NSA was doing, Drake was reassigned to a professorship at the National Defense University where he would eventually become chair, yet in 2008 he was forced to resign from the NSA.9

  Drake’s contention was that then-NSA director General Michael Hayden had chosen a program called “Trailblazer” over another, titled “ThinThread.” Both programs were designed to contend with monitoring the new and exponentially expanding World Wide Web and the advent and increased use of cell phones. Drake was part of a small but well-versed minority that believed ThinThread might have been able to detect and stop the 9/11 attacks had it not been discontinued three weeks prior (some reports claim it was never implemented). Remarkably Trailblazer was still theoretical on September 11, whereas ThinThread had been fully operational since the beginning of the year.10 Drake and his coalition outlined that ThinThread was more effective in processing gross amounts of data, and unlike Trailblazer, it was mindful of Americans’ pocketbooks and Fourth Amendment privacy rights.11 ThinThread cost $3 million; Trailblazer had a $1.2 billion price tag.12

  Following government protocol, Drake worked his way up the administrative grievance ladder. He appealed to his superiors, the NSA inspector general, the Defense Department inspector general, then the House and Senate. As a last resort, Drake—along with the Republican’s staff expert on NSA’s budget for the House Intelligence Committee, Diane Roark, and the lead designers of ThinThread, William Binney, Ed Loomis and J. Kirk Wiebe—presented a book-length complaint to the Department of Defense in 2002. Roark even went as far as contacting Dick Cheney’s attorney, David Addington.13 What Roark didn’t know was Addington had been the pen behind the Bush administration’s warrantless wiretapping program.14 Though the Defense Department would eventually internally acknowledge that Drake and Co. had been correct in their assessment, the wasteful, ineffective and invasive programs continued.

  There are three motivating factors that permitted the flawed system to persist. One, the government was reluctant to end any security project for fear of appearing unpatriotic. Two, the intelligence agency wanted the illicit data. These two are not mutually exclusive, because any politician labeled unpatriotic during this time risked reelection, and the biggest political donors were corporations who had a vested interest in personal data for marketing and advertising purposes. Three, Hayden was a lieutenant general closing in on retirement. He had only been director of the NSA for a few years and wanted to make a name for himself. He was made a full general a year before retiring in 2006.

  Having played by the rules and even getting those responsible to admit fault yet unable to induce them to change their ways, Drake decided to go to the press. Between February 2006 and November 2007, The Baltimore Sun published a series of exposés on various aspects of the NSA, including the Trailblazer program.

  Eight months later, the FBI stormed the homes of every author of the Department of Defense report except Drake. Binney, having been caught in the shower and still fully nude, was held at gunpoint.15 The FBI was hoping it could elicit through intimidation incriminating evidence against Drake.16 Not a single person was charged, but various items including computers and personal records were confiscated. Then in November, the FBI arrived at Drake’s home.17

  He was charged under the Espionage Act. A team of attorneys led by Steven Tyrrell worked on the case. The goal was to indict all involved. Two years into the investigation, Tyrell was replaced by William Welch,18 who dropped all efforts to implicate co-conspirators and focused solely upon Drake. The government wanted to make a single and very harsh example.

  Drake was brought up on multiple offenses by three divisions within the Department of Justice, the FBI and the NSA. The most serious was “Willful Retention of National Defense Information.” This referred to five documents found inside Drake’s residence.19 All materials had been declassified. A kangaroo court ensued. Led by Welch, the prosecution sought to withhold exhibits, restrict cross-examinations, bar jurors from reading evidence and prohibit the defense from incorporating
whistleblower argumentation.

  Then on May 22, 2011, the television program 60 Minutes aired an exposé about Drake’s circumstance.20 Eighteen days later, all charges were dropped.

  Snowden learned three lessons from Drake.21 Playing by the rules and keeping questionable information in-house accomplishes one thing: personal persecution. The intelligence community as well as the American government demanded absolute conformity and cohesion, and nothing was left up to debate. Two, because The Drake Report had already revealed what Snowden had to say yet no one paid attention, he needed a new format. The Baltimore Sun’s sources had been kept anonymous. It allowed the government to imply and explicitly state there was no manner or method to validate what it considered exaggerated and fabricated claims, and any supplemental documentation could be and was forged or had been taken out of context. It did not matter that Drake would later reveal himself as the source of the leaks; the government had already successfully executed damage control. It had convinced the American public everything was in order and the people responsible were disgruntled workers crying sour grapes because their project had not been chosen. If the story had ended here, Snowden might have left the intelligence community and said nothing. He would have viewed any effort to make matters known as futile and personally dangerous. Yet the third lesson made all the difference. Snowden had witnessed the impact the media could have on such affairs.