How America Lost Its Secrets

by Edward Jay Epstein

  Binney had never provided Poitras with any NSA documents to back up the charges he made that Stellarwind was an unlawful domestic surveillance operation. He could not have done so without violating his sworn oath and, for that matter, U.S. anti-espionage statutes. Binney made it clear to her and other journalists that he was not a lawbreaker. But her new source, C4, was willing to do what Binney (and other insiders) had refused to do. He was offering in these e-mails to provide her with secret government documents, even though it would implicate him as an outlaw. To further whet her appetite, he told her that these up-to-date NSA documents would fully substantiate the allegations that Binney made in her film. Even more important, he said Binney’s 2001 disclosures were still relevant to her cause. “What you know as Stellarwind has grown,” he wrote to her. “The expanded special source operations that took over Stellarwind’s share of the pie have spread all over the world to practically include comprehensive coverage of the United States.” In fact, as Snowden knew from the Inspector General report he had read, the NSA had terminated Stellarwind almost a decade earlier. President Bush ended it after top officials of the Justice Department insisted that he did not have the legal authority for the domestic part of Stellarwind. Instead, he asked Congress to revise FISA to meet the objections of the Justice Department. The result was the FISA Amendment Act of 2006. Unlike the previous Stellarwind program, it did not permit domestic surveillance. It specified that the government could not target any person in the United States or anywhere else in the world under this authority. Nor could it target any foreign person, even one residing outside of the United States, to acquire information from a particular known person inside the United States. As the act recognized that information about U.S. citizens might mistakenly be intercepted by the NSA, it required that such data about Americans be expunged in a bimonthly review by a Justice Department task force. Although the NSA program in place in 2013 was not the comprehensive domestic surveillance that Snowden claimed it to be, Poitras had no way of knowing at this early state that her source was misleading her.

  He offered to substantiate her worst fears about the growth of NSA surveillance: “I know the location of most domestic interception points, and that the largest telecommunication companies in the US are betraying the trust of their customers, which I can prove.” He even proffered evidence implicating President Barack Obama in illegal surveillance. “There is a detailed policy framework, a kind of martial law for cyber operations, created by the White House. It’s called presidential policy 20,” he wrote to her. It was an eighteen-page directive that Obama had signed four months earlier in October 2012. Snowden was offering to reveal to her up-to-date evidence of a surveillance state in America presided over by the president himself. It was what she had been searching for over the past three years. How could she, as an activist filmmaker, resist such a sensational offer?

  He further explained to her that he had placed great trust in her discretion. “No one, not even my most trusted confidante, is aware of my intentions, and it would not be fair for them to fall under suspicion for my actions,” he said.

  Poitras must have found it flattering that a total stranger was willing to disclose to her in e-mails what he would not tell even his “most trusted confidante” about his intentions to commit an illicit breach of U.S. national security. It also put her under enormous stress. She noted in her journal that the pressure made her feel as if she were “underwater.” “I am battling with my nervous system. It doesn’t let me rest or sleep. Eye twitches, clenched throat, and now literally waiting to be raided.”

  Snowden was also taking an extraordinary risk. After all, he had no way of knowing who else she told about him. She had long been concerned, with good reason, that the U.S. government was out to get her. An unknown person offering to supply her with secret documents could be attempting to entrap her. So Snowden could not preclude the possibility that she would consult with others about the offer he was making her. Because her current documentary project included interviews by her with Assange, Appelbaum, and three ex-NSA executives, intelligence services with sophisticated surveillance capabilities might also have taken a professional interest in her communications, as Poitras herself had suspected. Even if Snowden was somehow able to use his position as a system administrator at Dell to ascertain that the NSA did not have Poitras under surveillance, he could not be sure that other agencies, such as the Russian and Chinese intelligence services, were not monitoring his communications with her. It was, however, a chance Snowden was willing to take.

  Snowden, in any case, did not intend to conceal his identity for more than a few months. He told Poitras he had a specific purpose in allowing her to name him in her ongoing film project. Indeed, he said it was essential in his plan to prevent others, including presumably his “most trusted confidante,” from being suspected by law enforcement of helping him in his enterprise. He prevailed on her to accommodate his plan, saying, “You may be the only one who can prevent that, and that is by immediately nailing me to the cross rather than trying to protect me as a source.” His choice of the imagery of crucifixion suggested that like Jesus Christ he was willing to sacrifice himself for the sake of others.

  In keeping with their operational security arrangement, Snowden said that he would first send her an encrypted file of documents that she would not be able to read. Only after his conditions were met and “everything else is done,” he said, “the key will follow.” He was now pulling the strings. To get that key, she had to follow his instructions.

  One of his conditions was that she help him recruit Greenwald and other outlets for his disclosures. “The material provided and the investigative effort required will be too much for any one person,” he wrote to Poitras. He next directed her to contact Greenwald. “I recommend that at the very minimum you involve Greenwald. I believe you know him.” (Snowden apparently did not tell her that he had unsuccessfully attempted to reach out to Greenwald before he had contacted her.)

  His continued interest in Greenwald was understandable. Aside from Greenwald’s opposition to what he called the “Surveillance State,” he was a gateway to The Guardian. That publication had become an important player in the business of disclosing government documents by publishing a large part of the U.S. documents supplied to WikiLeaks, as we have seen. By breaking whistle-blowing stories about U.S. intelligence, it had also greatly increased the circulation of its website. As an establishment newspaper, it also gave these WikiLeaks stories credibility with the media. So despite Greenwald’s inability to create an encrypted channel, Snowden still needed him. He had no reason to believe that Greenwald would turn down the opportunity for a whistle-blowing scoop for The Guardian. After all, the classified documents Snowden would provide him would also give credence to both Greenwald’s book and his many blogs denouncing U.S. government surveillance.

  Aside from Greenwald and Poitras, Snowden sought an outlet inside the American establishment. So he had Poitras write to Barton Gellman, the Pulitzer Prize–winning reporter for The Washington Post. Poitras had met Gellman in 2010, when they were both fellows at NYU’s Center on Law and Security. Poitras had requested help in encrypting her computer from Karen Greenberg, the executive director of the center, who took her “by the hand” to meet Gellman, Greenberg’s resident expert on encryption software. Born in 1960, Gellman graduated from Princeton in 1981 and became an award-winning investigative reporter for the Miami Herald, the Post, and Time magazine. He was also the author of Angler: The Cheney Vice Presidency. If Gellman could be drawn into the enterprise, he could provide Snowden with a gateway to the prestigious American paper credited with bringing down President Richard Nixon in the Watergate scandal.

  Poitras, as the go-between for Snowden, immediately contacted Gellman. After telling him she was involved in a story about NSA surveillance, she suggested that they meet in New York City.

  For their rendezvous, Poitras took a number of precautions to evade anyone attempting to follow her. She
had Gellman first meet her in one coffee shop in lower Manhattan. When he arrived, she had him follow her on foot to another coffee shop, following her anti-surveillance tradecraft. Once assured no one was watching them, she ordered coffee for herself and Gellman. Over coffee, she told Gellman about Snowden, whom she described as her anonymous source. She said that he was willing to supply Gellman with documents that would expose domestic surveillance, if Gellman agreed to write a story on it for the Post. Even though Gellman had left the staff of the Post in 2010, he had previously written several stories on that subject for the newspaper, and he was also highly regarded by the editors there. Gellman was interested in Poitras’s offer (although he would consult a friend at the Justice Department about the legality of publishing NSA documents).

  Snowden had now laid the groundwork for at least two possible outlets. Poitras, however, was having some difficulty in bringing Greenwald in on the plan. Like Snowden, she did not trust writing to him in unencrypted e-mails, and because Greenwald lived in Brazil, she still had not found an opportunity for a face-to-face meeting with him.

  That opportunity arose in mid-April 2013. Greenwald had flown to the United States to give the lead speech at an event in Yonkers, New York, sponsored by the Council on American-Islamic Relations, a pro-Muslim civil rights organization. He had delivered the keynote speech at its previous meeting in San Jose, California, where his impassioned depiction of the American “Surveillance State” received a rousing ovation from the attendees. He was invited to speak at this award dinner for its East Coast chapter.

  Poitras flew from Berlin to New York to see him. On April 19, 2013, she arranged to meet Greenwald at noon in the restaurant of the Marriott hotel where Greenwald was staying. When Greenwald arrived at the restaurant carrying a cell phone, she explained to him that the NSA could surreptitiously turn his cell phone into a microphone and use it to eavesdrop on their conversation. She told him to go back to his room and leave his phone there. When he returned, phoneless, she took further precautions by having them change tables several times. Greenwald accepted these tactics because, as he later said, she was in charge of their “operational security.”

  When they finally settled at a table in the nearly empty restaurant, she showed Greenwald e-mails she had received from Citizen Four. Greenwald, as he recounted, made “no connection” to the “long-forgotten emails” he had received from Snowden under the alias Cincinnatus. Reading the e-mails that Snowden had sent to Poitras, he was impressed with the “sincerity” of the anonymous correspondent.

  When Poitras showed Greenwald Citizen Four’s mission statement in which he said his motive was to end the U.S. “surveillance state,” Greenwald was further impressed with the source. The surveillance state Snowden described closely dovetailed with the surveillance state that Greenwald had described himself in his speech at the Council on American-Islamic Relations dinner in 2012. Of course, the similarity of the phrasing might not have been entirely coincidental. Greenwald’s 2012 speech had been put on YouTube and widely circulated on the Internet just a few days before Snowden first wrote to him on December 1, 2012. Snowden identified himself as a privacy advocate, which was also how Greenwald often identified himself in his speeches. He also echoed other concerns Greenwald had publicly expressed, including defending American privacy from government intrusions.

  Snowden promised the leaks he would supply would provide dramatic results. He asserted in one of his e-mails to Poitras that the “shock” of the documents he would give Greenwald would result in the public’s learning about the secret “mechanisms through which our privacy is violated.” According to Snowden’s assessment, following that initial uproar, they could achieve another objective in their common cause. “We can guarantee for all people equal protection against unreasonable search,” he wrote. In light of this convergence of views, it is not surprising that Greenwald was fully convinced of Citizen Four’s bona fides. He said to Poitras, “He’s real,” and he agreed to help break the story in The Guardian.

  Poitras now revealed to Greenwald that Citizen Four would deliver an entire trove of secret documents to them in six to eight weeks. According to this timetable, the Greenwald scoop and the “shock” Citizen Four promised would come in early to mid-June 2013.

  At this point in April, Snowden was in full control. Although his job at Dell involved endlessly monitoring largely meaningless encrypted messages in the NSA tunnel, he had been able to get three major journalists to react favorably to his proposal. None of them knew his name, position, age, location, or where precisely he worked. Nor did they know the means by which he planned to obtain the secrets that he dangled before them. They also did not know where, or even if, they would meet their source. Their total knowledge about him was the description he improperly gave of himself: a “senior government employee in the intelligence community” (Greenwald speculated that he was a disgruntled CIA station chief).

  Even though they were operating largely in the dark, these three journalists acted as almost any other ambitious reporter would if he or she were offered a major scoop about illegal acts of the government. In addition, the information was in line with what they had previously investigated or written about. None of these journalists had any reason to doubt at this point that their anonymous source was anything but the sincere whistle-blower he claimed to be. They could not have known from his anonymous e-mails that aside from the whistle-blowing documents he promised them, he was in the process of stealing a large number of other documents that concerned the NSA’s sources and methods in foreign countries. These documents, to which Snowden never referred in his correspondence with them, had little if anything at all to do with domestic spying on American citizens.

  CHAPTER 8

  Raider of the Inner Sanctum

  They think there’s a smoking gun in there that would be the death of them all politically.

  —EDWARD SNOWDEN, Moscow, 2014

  THE NIGHTMARE OF THE NSA is a penetration. As the CIA, the FBI, and the NSA found out in the 1990s, no intelligence service is invulnerable to it. Any employee of a large intelligence organization can turn, or be turned, against it. Among the more than ten thousand intelligence workers employed by the NSA, it is a near certainty that over time more than one of them will become dissatisfied with their work. A worker may have a personal grievance about salary, lack of promotion, or treatment by his or her superiors. Disenchantment with the NSA may also proceed from idealistic objections. The NSA is in the business of secretly intercepting messages, and an insider could come to find its spying activities at odds with his or her own beliefs about the violation of privacy. For any of these reasons, a disgruntled insider could go rogue. He or she then might attempt to right a perceived wrong by disclosing NSA secrets to another party. That party might then induce or blackmail the rogue employee into disclosing further secrets.

  To guard against this, the NSA has developed a well-organized system for stratifying its data so that obtaining critical secrets required a rogue employee to burrow into its heavily protected inner sanctum. As part of this system, the NSA divides its data into different tiers depending on the importance of the secrets to its operations. The first tier, Level 1, is mainly administrative material. This data would include FISA court orders and other directives its employees might need to check on to carry out their tasks. Level 2 contains data from which the secret sources have been removed. This tier, available to other intelligence services and policy makers, includes reports and analysis that can be shared. Level 3 contains documents that cannot be shared outside a small group of authorized individuals, because they disclose the secret sources through which the NSA surreptitiously obtained the information. This third tier includes, for example, compiled lists of sources in China, Russia, Iran, and other adversary countries. It also discloses the exotic methods the NSA uses to get some of this data. Level 3 documents also include reports on specific NSA, CIA, and Pentagon operations unknown to adversaries. These Level 3 documents are
described by NSA executives as “the Keys to the Kingdom,” because they could invalidate America’s entire intelligence enterprise if they fell into the hands of an adversary. And, as far as is known, prior to 2013, there had been no successful theft of any Level 3 documents.

  Because of their extreme sensitivity, Level 3 documents were not handled by most of the private firms providing independent contractors. At Dell, Snowden had access mainly to Level 1 and Level 2 data (which he could, and did, download from shared sites on NSANet). These lower-level documents had whistle-blowing potential because they concerned NSA operations in the United States. They did not reveal, however, sources that the NSA used in intercepting the military and civilian activities of foreign adversaries.

  Snowden quit his job at Dell as a system administrator on March 15, 2013, to take another job working for the NSA in Hawaii at Booz Allen Hamilton. Unlike other outside contractors that serviced the NSA, the firm he now chose specialized in handling the NSA’s Level 3 data.

  When Snowden applied to Booz Allen earlier in March 2013, the company had no opening for a system administrator at the National Threat Operations Center, an NSA unit in which it dealt with Level 3 data. It did have an opening for an infrastructure analyst, a lower-paying job involving monitoring threats from China, Russia, and other adversaries. Despite a cut in pay, Snowden took that job. “Snowden was an IT guy, not a SIGINT analyst,” a former NSA Signals Intelligence officer pointed out. “He was working as a contracted infrastructure analyst for NSA’s Information Assurance arm,…[which, ironically as it turned out] protects classified U.S. communications from potential intruders.” Steven Bay, the manager at Booz Allen who hired and supervised Snowden, recalled that the first “red flag” came up soon after Snowden began his training, when “Snowden began asking about a highly classified mass-surveillance program” to which Snowden did not have access (although Bay did). In retrospect, Bay realized that Snowden had applied for the job for a specific reason. “He targeted our [Booz Allen] contract directly,” Bay said. “Somehow he figured out that our contract, and what we did on that contract, were the types of gates he needed to get access to.”