For some it is implausible Snowden would risk being caught in Hong Kong if he didn’t already have protection. For others the convenience of his selected reporters residing in countries where he needed distribution is too coincidental. Then there is the matter how he expertly pilfered from two of the world’s most clandestine agencies. But his being a foreign spy seems unlikely. A career double agent who has completed his last assignment knows the risks of stepping into the light outweigh the temptation to thumb one’s nose at those who have been duped. He took risks, very serious personal risks, in order to tell his fellow Americans what was being done in their name with their taxes as well as inform the world that much the same was taking place across the globe. His falling into the lap of Russia suggests he had come to an early agreement with the country shortly after the former Soviet Union learned who he was on June 9. His willingness to answer instead of simply refusing to respond to the South China Morning Post’s question of whether Russia had offered him asylum is the knowing tap on the side of the nose. The proof is Russia’s harboring him in its Hong Kong embassy. The rest of the story is epilogue. My assessment of how he arrived in Russia may prove to be wide of the mark. Snowden could get a passport and travel to Venezuela tomorrow. But this is improbable. He seems content in Russia. He has done his duty. He has left the work for the next shift.
Regardless of who or what Snowden is and was, his impact is irrefutable.
In America, bill upon bill is being proposed on Capitol Hill. The White House’s premature declassification of data and release of The White Paper is a simultaneous confession and defense of its surveillance activities. Numerous privacy and Fourth Amendment lawsuits have been filed against the federal government.15 Restore the Fourth, a grassroots movement supporting the Fourth Amendment, held rallies nationwide on the Independence Day following the first disclosures.16 A protest march on Washington took place on October 26. Attendees included Thomas Drake and former presidential candidate Gary Johnson.17 In late October after it was revealed that the German chancellor’s phone had been tapped,18 the White House continued to deny wrongdoing by deliberately ignoring the past. Carney announced, “And I noted the other day a readout from a phone call the President had with Chancellor Merkel made clear that we do not and will not monitor the Chancellor’s communications.”19 Under immense political pressure, Senate hearings ensued. During the proceedings Rogers echoed Chambliss’s circular defense of American surveillance, “You can’t have your privacy violated if you don’t know your privacy is violated.”20 Using the congressman’s logic, it is morally permissible to rob someone so long as the crime goes undetected. The chair of the House Intelligence Committee obviously sees the only misstep the NSA has made is having been caught. As for the NSA, Keith Alexander and Deputy Director John Inglis will leave their respective positions in the spring of 2014. Though new faces will be emerging, the spy agency shows no signs of slowing down.
Somewhat predictably given Clapper’s adamant defense, the NSA hasn’t changed its policies; it has merely tightened its security. Instead of conducting surveillance in a manner that won’t plague an employee’s conscience and spur another Snowden to action, the agency instituted an information lockdown. Shortly after the disclosures stared appearing, a two-person data extraction rule was instituted.21 Whenever a file needs to be moved, another agent or analyst must be present. The same in-house legislation had been implemented in 2010 after Manning was suspected of having stolen thousands of files.22 It is anyone’s guess why the regulation was not being reinforced or did not apply to contractors handling top secret documents. Regular audits now take place.23 Snowden was also found to have used the intelligence community’s cloud service to steal files. The surveillance cloud was the product of pre-9/11 interagency information dispersal issues. Ironically and out of stubbornness and hubris, instead of cataloguing the data contained within the various departments’ databases, the post-Snowden NSA decided to keep the massive security liability open and available as well as expand its capabilities. The super storage unit is code-named “Wildsage.”24
Many critics of Snowden pondered whether the surveillance state is as omnipotent as the whistleblower has made it out to be. Their argument is Snowden himself. They cite his ability to evade detection as proof that not everything is being watched and recorded.25 Ignoring that Snowden knew the intelligence community’s blind spots, he also exploited the NSA’s Achilles’ Heel: volume (that is, if one doesn’t count its atrocious grammar, poor spelling and juvenile PowerPoint construction and design). But U.S. intelligence had already begun to remedy this problem pre-Snowden. The NSA has since finished building the $1.5 billion Intelligence Community Comprehensive National Cybersecurity Initiative Data Center at Camp Williams, near Bluffdale, Utah. It is five times the size of the U.S. Capitol. The facility’s capacities are modest. It houses the capability to store emails, cell calls, Internet searches and parking and banking receipts. Its mission is to be able to record and catalog a person’s entire life. The Utah Data Center is estimated to be able to retain between three to 12 exabytes of data, or up to 12,000,000,000,000,000,000 bits of information.26 The intelligence community no longer has to dump its full-take buffer after three days and metadata is now immortal.
Snowden had been wrong about one thing. He understated the NSA’s ability to break encryption codes. He told Poitras, “Assume that your adversary is capable of a trillion guesses per second.” Currently the intelligence agency has “Jaguar,” a supercomputer capable of executing 2.33 quadrillion operations per second. In laymen’s terms, Snowden’s trillion is the next series of zeroes after a million. A quadrillion is the round after that: 1,000,000,000,000,000. Jaguar was slated to be upgraded and metamorphose into “Titan” by the end of 2013, which should enable the NSA to make 20,000,000,000,000,000 password guesses per second.27
Abroad, an entire continent has been alienated. Snowden had inadvertently unified all of Latin America. Brazil may never speak to Washington ever again and U.S. administration has dashed any hopes of forming an alliance with Venezuela after Hugo Chavez’s death. It is not fairing much better with its southern neighbor. Der Spiegel followed Fantastico’s September 1 report with a more in-depth look at American intelligence’s Mexican surveillance.28 Across the Atlantic, divisions have formed. Merkel’s reelection bid was challenged on the issue of NSA surveillance29 but she ultimately won. Due to the spying allegations, she now insists all U.S.-German joint spying activities be contractually bound.30 In late September, India learned its diplomatic offices in New York and Washington were surveilled.31 Instead of responding with technological counterintelligence, India instituted a security technique that makes espionage much more challenging: All sensitive documents are now composed on typewriters and Indian officials have top secret meetings outside embassy buildings.32 France finally found itself center stage in mid-October when the long-standing daily Le Monde reported the NSA had intercepted 70 million French calls and texts in a 30-day period.33 The European Union has proposed legislation which would force Internet companies to disclose when user data is being retained and to whom it is being reported.34 The EU also moved to instate punitive measures against the United States. Various members of European Parliament have called to suspend the SWIFT Agreement with America.35 The first step was taken two days after Le Monde’s exposé premiered: a European council passed a non-binding resolution by a vote of 280-254 to boot the United States from the Terrorist Finance Tracking Program.36 Clear lines of demarcation with America have been drawn by China and Russia. Obama did not meet with Putin at the G20 Summit though he talked with Hollande, Jinping and Japan’s Prime Minister Shinzo Abe.37
Snowden’s cultural influence threatens to rival his political impact.
German lingerie ads have used his name to promote their products, “Dear Edward Snowden, there’s still a lot to uncover” and “Dear NSA, intimates—don’t spy them, buy them.”38 An engineering firm in China registered to trademark Snowden’s name.39 T
he term “Snowball Effect” has been adapted to include sociological results. “The Snowden Effect” is loosely defined as the consequence of an initial report manifesting in direct and indirect gains in public knowledge.40 The European Union holds no grudges. Its foreign affairs department recommended the NSA leaker for the Sakharov Prize, which is annually awarded to freedom of thought and civil rights activists. Snowden received the Sam Adams Associates for Integrity in Intelligence award on October 9. The whistleblower has been called the John Brown of the 21st century.41 He has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize.42
His influence has also permeated the entertainment industry. The animated television satire South Park devoted an entire episode to NSA surveillance.43 Verax, a five-minute independent film about Snowden’s arrival in Hong Kong, went viral in early July.44 Hollywood has already started initial planning on a feature film about the American whistleblower.45 An independent, small-budget movie titled Classified: The Edward Snowden Story is slated for release in September 2014.46 A three-minute PSA about suspicionless surveillance narrated by John Cusak, Maggie Gyllenhall and Oliver Stone among others premiered in October.47 Perhaps the greatest cultural signifier of Snowden’s impact is seen in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. Shortly after the world saw Snowden’s face for the first time, sales of the 64-year-old classic skyrocketed. It witnessed a 5,800% overnight increase in sales. The novel went from 7,397 to 125 on Amazon’s bestseller list.48
Though the NSA whistleblower has changed the lives of millions of anonymous individuals worldwide, he permanently shifted the life trajectory of those closest to him. After Lon fought to see his son, only to be told time and again doing so was a security risk,49 he arrived in Russia and met with Edward a little over four months since the NSA leaker became the most wanted man in the world. To date, his mother has never spoken to the press or offered comment. She did not accompany her ex-husband to the former Soviet Union.50 At the time Snowden was issued the Sam Adams award, Jesselyn Radack, Director for the Government Accountability Project, reported, “Laura Poitras is living in Germany and does not feel she can return to the U.S. without being detained. I believe Glenn Greenwald harbors similar concerns because his partner was detained. [ … ] Also, WikiLeaks journalist Sarah Harrison is stranded in Russia with Mr. Snowden because of the prospect of being detained on terrorism charges in the UK.”51 A small legion of journalists noticed that over one weekend in October, Snowden’s former girlfriend, Mills, had downloaded pictures to her blog which bore cryptic titles that included symbols. It was theorized that though she might not have forgiven Snowden for abruptly fleeing under false pretenses, she was nonetheless covertly communicating with the American exile.52 As for Snowden, Kucherena relayed to the press that the whistleblower has a new girlfriend53 and started working as a security technician for a Russian website on November 1.54 To date, he has offered to personally assist both Germany55 and Brazil56 in their inquiries and investigations into NSA surveillance.
While Snowden, the disclosures and government and corporate reactions have been discussed, analyzed and debated, few have addressed the elephant in the surveillance room. U.S. intelligence was revealed to have additional resources by which to cross-reference data. The White Paper states, “The FBI must rely on publicly available information, other available intelligence, or other legal processes in order to identify the subscribers of any of the numbers that are retrieved.” “Other available intelligence” and “other legal processes” is intelligence jargon for the sister of government spying: corporate espionage. Ironically, the industry term for this is “business intelligence.” In many respects this is a graver concern than government surveillance. Though federal spying is more invasive and has the law on its side, corporate espionage is more pervasive and largely unregulated. It is often more revealing than what the government has collected. The Snowden affair makes clear Big Business and U.S. government are doting bedfellows. It is also obvious Big Business is making a pretty penny from being forced to play along. But the public has only heard of the questionable means Washington goes to acquire data directly from communication sources. What is not being talked about is the intelligence it obtains from civilian data mining enterprises. These businesses come in two flavors: Private data collection companies and corporate retailers.
The latter consists of commercial retail and fast food establishments. Considering Microsoft, Yahoo, AT&T, Google, Sprint and Verizon’s relationship with the federal government, it is not unreasonable to assume the data these two types of businesses collect is also sequestered by Washington.57 Target’s ability to determine a young woman was pregnant before she knew is the tip of the spying iceberg. For example, many cell phone owners forget wifi usage is a revolving door. Most give little thought to accessing and using a store’s wifi, not realizing the company’s systems may be programmed to exploit the Internet connection. Once a connection is made, customer data—including gender, address, telephone number and a consumer’s personal interests (via Internet searches and an individual’s social network pages, which are frequently left open for convenience)—are recorded. In retail outlets, a corporation’s programming may also be set to track a person’s movements throughout the building and catalog the individual’s browsing habits. For the customer, the result is customized advertisements and coupons; for the company, consumer analysis is completed at a fraction of the traditional cost. Sadly, advances in technology permit businesses to supersede any attempts at protecting one’s privacy. Much like the U.S. intelligence’s ability to stalk a phone that is turned off, corporations are now able to access phones even if they aren’t deliberately connected to a store’s wifi.58
The other and much darker side of corporate surveillance is data mining companies. These include firms such as Acxiom, Datalogix, Euclid, Federated Media, Epsilon, Digital Advertising Alliance, BlueKai and Network Advertising Initiative. Acxiom, the leader in the industry, has over 190 million profiles on American adults.59 These entities make it their business to collect every conceivable type of knowledge about U.S. citizens. They first scour the Internet for any information a person is willing to make known before proceeding to public records. Yet these techniques are time and labor-intensive. Both data mining companies and corporations have a surveillance tool which is much more thorough, revealing and, most importantly, automated. They hire software engineers to design and implement third-party cookies.
Unlike a first-party cookie, which initiates a discussion between a user’s computer and a specific website, a third-party cookie is equivalent to someone eavesdropping on a person’s power lunch conversation and selling the transcript to a competitor. One method software designers use to hide third-party cookies is by embedding them in advertisements. When an individual enters a website with an ad, a third-person cookie is set. If the user moseys over to another website with an ad by the same company, a notice of the individual’s continued interest—including the time, date and computer’s IP address—is sent to the business. By this time, the third-party cookie is controlling a person’s computer. When someone looks at shoes on a retailer’s website and then checks the local news, only to eerily find an ad of the footwear in a sidebar, a third-party cookie is at work. Third-party cookies essentially track and stalk Internet users.
Aside from the invasive privacy violations, there are drastic, long-term psychological effects which result from the repetition of third-party cookies’ advertising. Many were confused by Snowden’s objection to surveillance on grounds that it stifled creativity and free thought. When an ad is designed to reappear time and again, it is reinforcing an idea or brand image in a potential consumer’s mind. The Familiarity Principle states a person becomes more comfortable and accepting of an image the more frequently it is encountered. This is basic biology. Familiarity instills trust, often at a subconscious level. Though customers believe they are expressing freedom of choice by picking Brand X over Brand Y, they may be unaware they saw Brand X in a sidebar while browsing onli
ne recipes the week before. They purchase Brand X without realizing the subconscious motivations for doing so. They have literally been brainwashed.
Data brokers take their information, organize it into concise little profiles, and offer it to anyone with an open checkbook. This includes the obvious customers, U.S. government and corporations, but they have other steadfast clients. Many “people locator” websites purchase data mining profiles and resell them to the general public. For a nominal fee, anyone can access a person’s birthday, place of birth, current and past residences, family relations, social security and phone number, educational background, email address, place of current and former employment, and medical, property and court records. Medical insurance firms are curious whether a potential client prints Internet coupons for over-the-counter headache medicine and pays in cash to avoid a rate-hiking paper trail.60 Employment agencies want to know an applicant’s hobbies and proclivities without having to ask. Loan companies are interested in a candidate’s choice of recreational locales, be it a casino, truck rally or library. Once this data is combined with receipts from many of the major corporations, buying habits are then merged with wants and desires. The result is a very concise, detailed picture of an individual’s possessions, activities and goals. This is then compared to established buying patterns. The end result is daunting. The owner of an analyzed profile knows who a person was, is, and is going to be. Corporations refer to this as market research. Privacy advocates consider the process an infringement upon the Fourth Amendment and argue third-party cookie usage violates the last sanctuary of privacy, one’s thoughts. Orwell’s prophecy is modestly conservative by 21st-century standards. The main character in Nineteen Eighty-Four believes, “Nothing was your own except the few cubic centimetres inside your skull.”
The Edward Snowden Affair Page 31
