The Edward Snowden Affair

by Michael Gurnow

  #All material from The Wall Street Journal is based on secondary sources. The publication refused to provide primary documentation.

  Afterword

  “They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.”

  –Benjamin Franklin, Memoirs1

  DOES THE U.S. GOVERNMENT INTENTIONALLY, exclusively spy on innocent Americans?

  Former intelligence workers, the press and foreign governments claim it does; the White House, NSA and American corporations swear it does not. Everyone has an opinion but one thing is obvious. The intelligence community has the necessary ingredients. It possesses both capability and initiative. The next stage of surveillance, biometrics, is no longer science fiction. The newest wave of technology isn’t sauntering up the porch steps and preparing to ring the doorbell. People are holding it in their hands. The newest incarnation of iPhones offer fingerprint identification. Most every smartphone comes equipped with voice recognition. (The iPhone’s program title even sounds like an intelligence code name: “Siri.”) People can freely download sleep analysis software. The newest gaming consoles house environmental scanners which detect motion, tracks players’ heart rates and conduct motion-pattern analysis, which reads and creates a physiological fingerprint of an individual’s unique body movements and mannerisms. As novelist John Lanchester noted, “Members of the security establishment always want more abilities, more tools, more powers for themselves and fewer rights for us. They never say ‘thanks a lot, we’re good from here, we have everything we need.’”2 Governments across the globe continue to put immense amounts of time, labor and taxpayer money into creating a comprehensive Big Brother program and they intend to make the electronic panopticon a reality by any means necessary. As the joint encryption exposés make clear, private industry’s compliance with government surveillance will be achieved through willful participation, court order, social engineering or outright theft. Those in power have also proven they are willing to go to great lengths to keep people from seeing what lies behind the lead-lined surveillance curtain.

  Some argue America is on the brink of an all-seeing electronic eye, that the surveillance state has already arrived, and Tony Scott’s 1998 action thriller Enemy of the State is now a domestic drama. Lanchester observed a surveillance state—like a police state—is not one where there are watchmen on every corner. It is a world in which the spies are free to do whatever they want.3 Surveillance laws are drawn so broadly almost anything is permitted. In Snowden’s terms, the aperture is very, very wide. Through the gerrymandering of language and the aid of a hidden court’s covert rulings, incidental collection is not viewed as illicit since it is not “direct” spying on Americans; investigations are green lit without “factual predication” because the U.S. government never bothered installing the same system of checks and balances found in local courts; any communication involving a foreigner is considered fair game, as is collected data since only metadata is protected by law; no “reasonable expectations” exist for the privacy of communication records; surveillance is permitted if it can be argued an American is likely to receive, not terrorist, but foreign intelligence; any data an analyst can categorize as “suspicious stuff” is pursued; the permissible contact chaining limit leaves less than a 15 percent chance a random U.S. citizen has not been monitored; all while U.S. intelligence has designated the terms “exercise,” “prevention,” “response,” “metro,” “forest fire,” “recall,” “power,” “smart,” “ice,” “help,” “pork,” “cancelled,” “recovery” and “watch” as dangerous and cause for immediate review.4 U.S. intelligence has abandoned using a spy dragnet on its citizens; on paper, it now has the legal license to cloak the entire country in a surveillance blanket.

  Many hope the worst has past. The world stared into the surveillance abyss when it learned Boundless Informant’s existence had been hidden from Congress, the FISC ruled against another program which had been in operation for months before the court was aware it even existed and millions of dollars of the Black Budget are unaccounted in the congressional record. It is natural to wonder what else is going on that only the watchers know about. The nation shook when White House Press Secretary Jay Carney tried legitimizing illicit international espionage by declaring, “As a matter of policy, we have made clear that we do what other nations do, which is gather foreign intelligence.”5 The “everyone is jumping off a bridge” approach to political decision-making left the American populace crossing its fingers, praying Washington doesn’t adopt the same line of reasoning when debating the topic of Syrian genocide.

  The true fear lies not in what is occurring that will never be known, but what has yet to be revealed. History has shown intelligence agencies are aware what they are doing is wrong, because they have tried hiding it from those who would shut them down. The surveillance debate is punctuated with reluctant confessions. The NSA has grudgingly confessed it does accidentally and has, on occasion, deliberately watched its people. The head of National Intelligence admitted he was lying when he said domestic information wasn’t collected. The admission “only metadata” gradually transformed into “live, raw, full-take data.” The American people discovered if a U.S. citizen is talking to a foreign friend, analysts have permission to “focus [ … ] on the foreign end of the communication.” Listening to only half of a conversation is a technique most find difficult to conceive but one which Washington has clearly mastered. On September 28 The New York Times announced the NSA has created profiles of Americans since 2010. “Irrespective of nationality or location,” the spy agency “augment[s] the communications data with material from public, commercial and other sources, including bank codes, insurance information, Facebook profiles, passenger manifests, voter registration rolls and GPS location information, as well as property records and unspecified tax data” as long as the surveillance somehow relates to foreign intelligence.6 Four days later, the public would be informed the agency had in fact tracked citizens’ locations through their cell phones.7 Eleven days after that an NSA slide would irrefutably display 250 million address books had been collected in the course of a single year. Officials estimate the statistic includes “tens of millions” of Americans’ names, email and street addresses, telephone numbers and business and family relations.8 Offshore surveillance is no longer a conspiracy theory. Because the FISC prohibits the collection of contact data, address book information had been gathered on foreign soil. In December, the world learned American intelligence has been placing agents in the virtual field of online gaming.9 The public expressed concern that surveillance was taking place within a communication medium in which a large minority of users are minors,10 atop the futility of spying on individuals who readily assume pseudonyms. The more the media pushes, the more U.S. intelligence grudgingly squeals.

  For those who had faith, most has been lost. It is one thing to assume those sworn to protect a nation’s interests are up to no good. The citizenry are allowed to live under the happy delusion everything is in order. A government that tells its populace it is undermining the trust of its people is unfortunate, but nonetheless permits everyone to deal with reality as it stands. It is an entirely different affair to contend with the psychological burden of being lied to. Much like Watergate forced Baby Boomers to abandon their post-war vision of utopia, the Snowden affair shattered Generation X’s idyllic notion of a shinier, happier postmodern tomorrow. And the two eras are connected by a thematic bridge. In the 1950s, young Boomers were told technology would eventually solve humanity’s problems. The advent of the Internet all but assured Gen X’s teenagers the pledge had almost been met. As Boomers eased into retirement and their children slid into middle age, the promise was finally fulfilled. However, only the problems of the few had been remedied. For everyone else, technology had made life worse.

  As Snowden had observed, part of the collateral damage are those who believed in President Obama’s campaign promises of dismantling the
surveillance state that was erected by his predecessor, George W. Bush. Obama’s supporters felt betrayed when he defended the various spy programs. They were all but crushed after the press revealed he had made a point to strengthen them. Ron Paul’s constituencies were left shaking their heads. American voters’ apprehension is palpable. Washington was offering xeroxed reassurances to its people in the same condescending tone it was ladling verbal pats on the back to its purported espionage allies, nation states which the Capitol had duplicitously put under a covert surveillance lens. The U.S. populace wanted answers. The Administration gave it platitudes. Washington expected its citizens to innately trust what they were being told and adhere to rules it refused to follow. The White House continues to ignore a petition which had garnered the requisite number of signatures in half the required time, yet the Capitol seemed surprised that people were willing to stop and listen to a 29-year-old who had given up a long-term relationship, six-figure salary and a home in paradise in order to tell his fellows Americans something was wrong. Very, very wrong.

  Ecuadorian foreign minister Ricardo Patiño acutely observed, “It’s a paradox of life that now the whistleblower is being chased by the one being accused.”11 It is little wonder Snowden did not choose to follow in the footsteps of fellow whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg, who had leaked the Pentagon Papers 40 years before. Ellsberg opted to remain in America and stand trial. Snowden elected to leave. As Washington fanatically chased him around the globe, upsetting foreign relations as it went, U.S. representatives cited Snowden’s flight as evidence of his guilt. But the damage had already been done. The Capitol’s dogged pursuit was rightly viewed as a vengeance campaign. American intelligence and the White House had been undermined by a single video game-playing computer genius. Snowden had recruited his information conduits before he began his final round of document liberation. Once completed and after initiating a trio of journalists in the political and technological intricacies of what lay before them, he summarily walked away, leaving his whistleblowing apostles to spread the surveillance word and Washington no other option but to sidestep then whitewash the issue.

  Snowden had set out to start a debate. But he served another purpose. He was a litmus to how the U.S. government, corporations, foreign nations and the media interact with one another. Shortly after he’d landed in Russia, an unnamed White House official quipped, “Mr. Snowden’s claim that he is focused on supporting transparency, freedom of the press, and protection of individual rights and democracy is belied by the protectors he has potentially chosen: China, Russia, Cuba, Venezuela, and Ecuador. His failure to criticize these regimes suggests that his true motive throughout has been to injure the national security of the U.S., not to advance Internet freedom and free speech.”12 It was not that these foreign countries hypocritically agreed with Snowden’s philosophy. China’s willingness to stall for Russia as Ecuador, Venezuela, Nicaragua and Bolivia lent a hand in his escape was merely a reflection of these nations’ opinions of the United States. Snowden’s acceptance by these countries is also a subtle indicator of the level of degradation American civil liberties had fallen. The mandated privacy invasions in Russia and China were being eclipsed, if not already bypassed, by U.S. law and policy. Six years before the Snowden affair, Privacy International had downgraded the United States from an “extensive surveillance society” to an “endemic surveillance society.” The country founded upon freedom now resided at the bottom of the liberty class alongside Russia, Britain and China.13 Moreover, the Chinese and Russian people had been told they were being watched. By comparison, American government had installed a secret court whose rulings were hidden from the public and U.S. intelligence was running programs only it knew about.

  Regardless of which side of the Snowden affair a person takes, there is little argument the Weibo user’s looking-glass hypothetical reflects political reality. If a North Korean dissident arrived in New York with documents proving the communist country was spying on America, Washington would not happily acknowledge an arrest warrant and gladly consent to extradition proceedings that didn’t exist. It is unlikely the press would be publishing pictures of Obama shrugging off the political lunacy after his airplane had been forced down over Iraq upon unfounded suspicions he was taking a “patriot of democracy” to safety. If the shoe were on the other foot, America would not be canceling dinner dates with foreign leaders. It would be at war.

  And for anyone familiar with history or politics, it came as no surprise both the American and British governments used war as a ruse to whitewash their tarnished reputations. It had been done many times before and the tactic is unlikely to end with Snowden. The reason Obama was disgruntled over the press’s “drip and drab” reporting was because he was working blind. The NSA could not tell him what he was up against. Washington had no other option but to dig in its heels and hope the world had a short memory. Greenwald and Poitras hadn’t invented a new technique by countering each fallacious claim with hard-copy evidence, giving the White House less and less argumentative wiggle room with every utterance. The novelty of the Snowden affair resides in its prolonged timeframe. In most cases where the media dances with the government, the conversational waltz is relatively brief. With the NSA disclosures numbering in the thousands and possibly hundreds of thousands, the idea of a marathon debate that could extend well into the next presidency is a very likely possibility. Washington is enraged because the mere thought is exhausting.

  The masterstroke of the media’s presentation of the Snowden files is not its timing but its delicacy. It was a Herculean effort to assess what the NSA leaker had provided and decide on how to present the information. The press made sure to only refute the government’s latest exaggeration, fabrication or outright lie while never showing the other classified cards in its hand. At best, it would only hint at what was coming next so as to keep Washington sweating. The genius of the media’s presentation format was complemented by its decision to humanize the issue. Though Snowden made it clear he wanted the argument to be about the message and not the messenger, he realized the necessity of being the face behind the disclosures. Without him, the government could claim the documents were fabricated. Without him, no one could rightly confirm what was taking place within the confines of the world’s most secretive agency. Without him, the world wouldn’t care as much. He could have easily fled directly to Russia or any other country without an American extradition treaty but the whistleblower opted to put himself in the crosshairs, repeatedly.

  No one is contesting Snowden has nerves of steel. Poitras had fled from the computer screen once she realized what her anonymous emailer had sent her. The whistleblower had stolen the top secret data over a course of several years. It is illegal to have classified documents outside a secure area. The consequences of his actions were compounded every time the NSA leaker stuck around to nab more, because his treasure trove of criminality grew with each theft. But he continued snatching one confidential file after another in order to make his argument more cohesive, more comprehensive, more condemning. Greenwald learned the severity of the situation in August. As Snowden acknowledged, he will live with fear and anxiety for the rest of his life. But the question of motive lingers.

  Though the “Snowden Question” is largely irrelevant, people still wonder if he can be trusted; despite the catalyst being secondary to the result, it is human nature to nonetheless attempt to complete the puzzle. History has already proved one thing. He abided by the first law of whistleblowing: Don’t lie, fabricate or hedge on the details, because the world will put both the claims and the claimant under a microscope. Poitras made sure Snowden was telling the truth so the surveillance debate wouldn’t be buried under a character assassination once he was greeted by the public. The journalists had done their homework. After meeting the man behind the Rubik’s Cube and learning his agenda and motives, they knew each time someone tried to say he was lying, the Snowden collective could prove otherwise.

  While the NSA leaker sa
id he was only an American who wanted to initiate a much needed discussion, others suspected—and have conjectured—he was a double agent whose mission was to undermine the United States.14 It may never be revealed what Snowden did during his two “dark years” between the summer of 2005 until the spring of 2006 and April or May 2012 until March 2013. It is remarkable that in less than half a year of working around intelligence, he had been recruited as an undercover CIA agent. It is equally daunting Snowden accomplished this without a degree. For academes, it is nothing short of a miracle to be accepted into a graduate program without a college diploma. He hadn’t been given a cover to enroll into the University of Liverpool, because the college recognized his name. It does not help his case that he once worked for the notorious Defense Intelligence Agency. Without hints, it is tempting to let one’s inner Ian Fleming run wild.

  History might prove Snowden simply spent his first dark period unemployed and playing Tekken. His trip to Ireland could have been a gift from a rich relative. Perhaps he earned his bachelor’s degree while working overseas and had grown accustomed and opted to promote the image of the uneducated savant spy. His second dark year is less promising for those looking to cast him in the role of a 21st-century Cold War espionage antihero. Snowden had already stolen a number of documents by this time. Alexander even suggested the NSA leaker worked for an intelligence contractor between Dell and Booz Allen Hamilton. Moreover, if he was conducting counterintelligence for another country, as the whistleblower himself stated, it makes sense he would have flown directly to his employer, delivered the information and disappeared into obscurity. But he didn’t. It would be wise to let the ambiguities of life lie but Snowden’s case is different. Too many questions remain unanswered.