The Edward Snowden Affair

by Michael Gurnow

  Snowden realized a disclosure of classified information required three things in order to raise the necessary eyebrows: a face so that credentials could not be doubted, documentation for support and the proper venue. He approached the selection of media channels through which he would filter thousands upon thousands of classified government intelligence documents in much the same manner he had extracted the purloined data, with great patience and meticulousness.

  If a person wanted to bring an issue to the public’s attention, most would seek the largest possible audience so it would have the greatest potential impact. However, the two largest news outlets were not an option for Snowden. Neither the news station with the greatest number of viewers, Fox News, nor the daily newspaper with the most readers, The Wall Street Journal, would have been sympathetic to Snowden’s information due to their conservative platforms. Snowden was also sociologically astute enough to know he needed to legitimize and humanize the information with a face but knew an exclusively televised premier of the story would trivialize many of the pertinent details in favor of sensationalism and the opportunity for sound bites. His next, and best, venue was The Wall Street Journal’s rival, The New York Times. There was only one problem. Snowden didn’t trust the Times.

  James Risen and Eric Lichtblau wrote a story about the NSA’s warrantless wiretapping program for the Times in November 2004.22 It did not appear until December 2005 because the White House had caught wind of it. The Bush administration had requested it not be published during the election year on grounds that it might jeopardize ongoing investigations. When the article finally premiered, the Times obliged the government’s request to omit various portions of the original report. Risen and Lichblau won the Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting the following year. The day after the exposé made headlines, the Times Executive Editor, Bill Keller, admitted this was not the first occasion the newspaper had withheld a story due to federal pressure.23

  When asked by the Times on August 13 why he hadn’t brought his information to the famed periodical, Snowden was polite but honest, “After 9/11, many of the most important news outlets in America abdicated their role as a check to power—the journalistic responsibility to challenge the excesses of government—for fear of being seen as unpatriotic and punished in the market during a period of heightened nationalism. From a business perspective, this was the obvious strategy, but what benefited the institutions ended up costing the public dearly. The major outlets are still only beginning to recover from this cold period.”24

  Snowden needed sympathetic ears whose owners had a strong, if not impeccable, track record for journalistic integrity. Though it wouldn’t be obvious for several months, he also wanted people who lived in strategic locations: Europe and South America. Ironically the newspaper with the second-largest distribution in the nation provided him with his second contact after his first refused to respond. On August 8, 2012, the Times ran a doc-op piece on William Binney by filmmaker Laura Poitras.25

  Born in 1964 and raised in Boston, Poitras studied at the San Francisco Art Institute under experimental filmmaker Ernie Gehr, whose 1970 Serene Velocity is preserved in the United States National Film Registry.26 She received a graduate degree from The New School for Public Engagement in 1996. It wasn’t Flag Wars, her first feature-length documentary which examines gentrification in America, which would garner the government’s attention, but her sophomore effort, My Country, My Country. Ostensibly My Country, My Country is a portrait of Dr. Riyadh al-Adhadh and his work as a doctor and Sunni political candidate. The heart of the film is the daily life of American soldiers and those living in occupied Iraq. Though her narrative would merit an Academy Award nomination, it would also place Poitras on the Department of Homeland Security’s watch list. Her “threat rating” is the highest the agency assigns, 400 out of 400.27 Instead of allowing herself to be spooked, Poitras sallied forth. Her next documentary, The Oath, is a tale divided between Salim Ahmed Hamdan and Nasser al-Bahri, one of Osama bin Laden’s drivers and bodyguards respectively. It was shot on location in Yemen and Cuba. The documentary is as much an exposé on the two individuals as it is a critical look into where a portion of the production was filmed, Guantánamo Bay.28 In 2012, Poitras was awarded the most coveted, prestigious award for artists after the Nobel Prize, a MacArthur Fellowship.29

  Snowden saw something not just in Poitras’ subject matter but in her perseverance and refusal to be intimidated. Homeland Security’s fetish for Poitras has manifested in what appears to be the hobby of border detainment. Beginning in Vienna in 2006,30 she has been held in transit over 40 times. Her cameras, phones, notes, baggage and computers are perpetually seized without a warrant and delayed return. It is a sticky legal situation. The government claims since such altercations take place at international zones, constitutional rights aren’t applicable. During an interrogation in Newark, she was instructed to quit taking notes lest she be handcuffed because her pen could be construed as a weapon. Given the government’s reaction to Poitras, there is little doubt it is metaphorically right. She complied. What would appear to be a flippant request, she then asked for a crayon.31 Not only does this follow United States interrogation protocol but implied how she perceived the proceedings. Chilling in its historical import, her airplane tickets are imprinted with “SSSS,” Secondary Security Screening Selection. This signals to security the ticket holder is to be detained upon arrival.32 To accelerate her perpetually delayed alighting time, Poitras started having fellow passengers check her bags. Unfortunately Homeland Security recently became privy to this technique. This method of baggage evasion would later backfire on one of her colleagues reporting on Snowden. Poitras became so exhausted by the perpetual harassment, she took an apartment in East Berlin in order to do her work in peace.33

  Though Poitras was the first journalist to connect with Snowden, she was the last of the trio to speak about her experiences of communicating with the then-mysterious voice behind the screen.34 In January 2013, three months before he would start working for his last NSA contactor, Snowden contacted Poitras anonymously and asked for her encryption key.35

  There are two types of email encryption: symmetrical and asymmetrical. The easiest way to understand the difference is to imagine a box. Within the box is a rotating partition. It also has locks on the front and back. In symmetric encryption, one key opens both sides and the divider can be freely rotated from either side, exposing the box’s contents to anyone who has access. A person who puts something in the box can also take it out of the box. With asymmetric encryption, the two locks are different and require two different keys. Also, when something is placed in the box, the sender must rotate the partition, which then locks into place. The person who made the deposit can open the box again but cannot retrieve whatever was originally put inside. Only the individual with the other key can. Symmetric encryption is understandably faster but less secure than asymmetrical encoding.

  Due to the nature of her work, Snowden knew Poitras would already have encryption programs in place. She sent him the key. She received instructions on how to download extremely secure programs and was told to establish a very long passphrase. By definition, a passphrase is longer than a password, and therefore the possible permutations are exponentially increased and consequently harder to crack. The standard method for gaining unauthorized password access is called a “brute force attack.” To save time, a brute force attack program will not progress alphabetically but instead tries the most statistically probable variations first. For example, in the English language, there is a 26 percent likelihood a word beginning with the letter “s” will be immediately followed by a “t.” (This is why the NSA hires professional linguists to work in cryptology.) Frighteningly, Snowden told her to “[a]ssume that your adversary is capable of a trillion guesses per second.”36

  Snowden then began filling her inbox with outlines of government surveillance programs. She had only heard of one. Alarmed at the obvious legal implications of possessin
g the information, she disconnected from the Internet after deleting the messages.37 She at first believed this was the government attempting to get her to incriminate herself and her sources. (She had just returned from interviewing the founder of the anti-secrecy website WikiLeaks, Julian Assange.) After giving thought to the situation, she decided to try to get Snowden to call his own bluff. She said she “[ … ] called him out. I said either you have this information and you are taking huge risks or you are trying to entrap me and the people I know, or you’re crazy.”38

  Snowden was in a predicament. He made himself more susceptible to discovery with each keystroke. Semantic analysis is a detection method wherein a person can be traced back via word choice and sentence structure patterns. Every line he sent made his linguistic fingerprint more distinct.39 He needed to get Poitras to agree to a personal meeting so a face would accompany the story. Instead of providing more evidence which could flesh out an article without the need to meet its source, he wisely told Poitras his reasons for choosing her. He discussed her history of border abuses and documentary on Binney.40 She remained dubious, but her suspicions eased when Snowden didn’t press her for information as a government agent would. He informed her she would need someone else’s assistance in the story and advised the American attorneyturned-journalist Glenn Greenwald. Snowden recommended Greenwald for an express reason. He needed someone who knew the Constitution inside and out. He also happened to live in Brazil. She in turn suggested he contact Bart Gellman of the The Washington Post. She offered Gellman because she trusted him, having worked alongside the journalist at The Center on Law and Security at New York University.41 He would be the one whose word she would value most on whether to proceed with the anonymous emailer.42

  Glenn Greenwald was born in New York City in 1967 but raised in south Florida. Before graduating from New York University Law School in 1994, he earned his bachelor’s from George Washington University. He was hired into the litigation department at Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz in New York City but within two years would open Greenwald, Christoph & Holland. This permitted him to focus on constitutional law and civil rights. He left the firm nine years later to pursue a writing career.

  He’d started his own political blog, “Unclaimed Territory,” a year before leaving his firm. His early writing dealt with the CIA, Lewis “Scooter” Libby and America’s warrantless wiretapping program. By February 2007 he was a contributor for Salon. Due in part to Greenwald’s work for the website, John Brennan withdrew his candidacy for CIA director and director of national intelligence.43 In hopes of reaching a different, broader audience, Greenwald accepted a position at the 191year-old British periodical The Guardian in 2012. He lives in Rio de Janeiro because of what he claims is The Defense of Marriage Act preventing his partner, David Miranda, from acquiring immigration rights.44

  Greenwald’s first book was published in 2006, How Would a Patriot Act? It explores post-9/11 executive power abuses and was ranked #1 on Amazon.com before becoming a New York Times bestseller. Shortly after joining the Salon staff, Greenwald’s second book hit shelves, A Tragic Legacy. The book-length character study of George W. Bush brought Greenwald back to the bestseller lists. Two more books followed: Great American Hypocrites in 2008 and With Liberty and Justice for Some in 2011. The former focuses upon the incongruities between the marketing and branding strategies of Republican candidates and the politicians’ real lives. The latter examines the American court system since Watergate and the judicial double standard it uses to protect the elite.

  In much the same manner that the intelligence community stacked the deck against itself by transferring Snowden to Hawaii, enabling him to become privy to BAH and Kunia where he might not have otherwise, it was the U.S. government’s fault Greenwald personally knew Poitras. Poitras met Greenwald in 2010 after reading his work on WikiLeaks for Salon. Having been patient with the border harassment, after Newark she gave Greenwald permission to write about her transit tribulations.45

  Snowden had emailed Greenwald in December 2012. Eliciting no response, he followed with a guide to encryption; when no answer came, he submitted an instructional video. Greenwald remained silent.46 Snowden decided to take Poitras’ advice.

  Born in 1960, Barton “Bart” Gellman would be the senior and most decorated journalist among the trio Snowden contacted. He graduated summa cum laude from Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University where he would later be lecturer and author in residence. As a Rhodes Scholar, he studied and received his master’s in politics at Oxford. He would work for The Washington Post for 21 years. Though he covered the Washington D.C. superior court system early in his career, he is known for having been the Pentagon’s Gulf War correspondent. He became an expert on the military. Gellman reported on Somalia, the Iraq War, women in combat, al Qaeda and gay military rights. By 1994 he was bureau chief for Jerusalem. Nominated in 1999 and 2004 in the category of Explanatory Reporting, he won the Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting in 2002. He officially retired in 2010 to focus on his book writing and teaching.47

  Even if Snowden wasn’t familiar with Gellman’s work and approached him upon Poitras’ recommendation, he obviously researched Gellman beforehand. He knew Gellman would be politically sympathetic because of the writer’s decade-long criticism of the Bush administration. Gellman largely focused on the transient nature of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction before shifting to the topic of national security. The journalist’s background in intelligence also includes his work as contributing editor-at-large for Time magazine, where he has written on FBI Director Robert Mueller, and his blog titled “CounterSpy.”48 In Hong Kong Gellman’s 2008 bestseller, Angler, was sitting on Snowden’s nightstand.49 The book is a novelistic telling of how then-vice president Dick Cheney deliberately lied to his party concerning the degree of threat posed by Iraq to garner greater support for war.

  Snowden’s communications with Gellman progressed much more rapidly and smoothly than they had with Poitras and eventually would with Greenwald. Given the speed of the Gellman/Snowden discourse, Poitras had undoubtedly mentioned to Gellman she’d referred him to Snowden while conferring with the veteran journalist in February about whether she should humor the overly cautious email requests.

  In Gellman’s own ambiguous words, “A series of indirect contacts preceded our first direct exchange May 16.”50 It is unclear what Gellman means by “indirect” since the writer admits that even after May 16, Snowden had not disclosed his name. The contextual meaning would seem to imply Gellman is referring to the preliminary exchanges Snowden had with all his journalists: encryption instructions, installation and testing before transmission of any subject matter. Yet Gellman notes, “[H]e [Snowden] wrote in early May, ‘I understand that I will be made to suffer for my actions, and that the return of this information to the public marks my end,’ before we had our first direct contact.”51

  Snowden had assumed the pseudonym “Verax,” which is Latin for “truth teller.” He’d given Gellman the somewhat coy alias “BRASSBANNER.” The historic import of Snowden’s chosen non de plume was not lost on Gellman. The journalist noted in October 1651, Clement Walker died in the Tower of London for having been an outspoken critic of Parliament. Conversely, the publicly lauded Henry Dunckley died without incident in June 1869 after spending a lifetime expressing his disdain for parliament in local newspapers. Both British dissenters had adopted the title “Verax.” Vainly, Gellman tried goading Snowden into prophesizing which of the antipodal histories might eventually reflect his own.52

  Snowden prohibited Gellman from direct quotation for fear of semantic analysis and unequivocally informed him that the U.S. intelligence community “will most certainly kill you if they think you are the single point of failure that could stop this disclosure and make them the sole owner of this information.” On May 24 Snowden told Gellman he intended to make his identity public and sought asylum in Iceland.53 Snowden then pitched his idea of how the Post
should unveil the intelligence secrets.

  Snowden wanted the newspaper to publish all 41 PowerPoint slides he had relating to a program called PRISM atop a cryptographic key in order to prove he was the source of the leaks and therefore reliable due to his employment history. All of this was to be done within a 72-hour timeframe. When Gellman said he could not guarantee the Post could meet Snowden’s terms, the former NSA contractor replied, “I regret that we weren’t able to keep this project unilateral.” Snowden was wagering the potential to lose exclusivity might force the Post’s hand. The implied ultimatum didn’t work. The newspaper felt uneasy about full disclosure and sought government approval of which slides could be made public.54 Washington reluctantly agreed to permit four slides to be printed. Snowden was disappointed because he had “carefully evaluated every single document I [Snowden] disclosed to ensure that each was legitimately in the public interest. There are all sorts of documents that would have made a big impact that I didn’t turn over, because harming people isn’t my goal. Transparency is.”55 He added “I don’t desire to enable the Bradley Manning argument that these were released recklessly and unreviewed.”56

  Manning was a private assigned to Army Intelligence who was found guilty of leaking classified information to WikiLeaks and sentenced to 35 years. Snowden’s citation refers to some of the released documents that purportedly put American soldiers at risk and damaged diplomatic relations. Unlike Snowden, Manning left editors to judge which articles would be withheld in the public’s interest. In Snowden’s professional assessment, “The unredacted release of cables was due to the failure of a partner journalist to control a passphrase.”57

  Desperate, distraught and now running out of time, Snowden had no other choice but to play his trump card. He had wanted Greenwald to cover his story from the start and had merely settled for Gellman. Snowden cleverly nudged the person whose attention he did have—Poitras—in order to get his desired journalist’s attention. Snowden knew it was reasonable to suggest Poitras contact Greenwald as opposed to seeking out another journalist because it was public knowledge the two were Freedom of the Press Foundation board members.58 Snowden also admitted he was familiar with Greenwald’s border harassment article which appeared on April 8. But it was still a risky move. Greenwald had adamantly ignored his requests, and continuing down this road could waste even more time. Where Snowden’s gambit with the Post failed to pay off, it worked like a charm on Poitras. She set out to talk to Greenwald because Snowden had shown he was willing to stand on principle with Gellman and already told her she would need a journalist alongside her. She had to do something in order to stay involved.