The core of Snowden’s charge in the media was that the FISA court overreached its authority by issuing sweeping warrants that allowed the NSA to obtain data collected by private phone and Internet companies. In the initial story published in The Guardian on June 6, Snowden disclosed one such FISA warrant to support his charge. It was issued by Judge Roger Vinson of the FISA court on April 25, 2013, and ordered Verizon to turn over to the FBI all its billing records of landline customers for the next ninety days. The FBI presented this FISA authorization to the NSA, which acts as a service organization for the FBI and the CIA in collecting communications data. The NSA, with the FISA warrant in hand, then obtained the Verizon billing records.
Snowden also provided the Post and The Guardian with another secret document: a PowerPoint presentation on twenty slides, sent by the NSA to other intelligence agencies. It described a program it was using for monitoring the Internet. Its code name was the aforementioned PRISM. It was authorized under Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and was designed to collect messages sent over the Internet from foreigners. Such information was in fact obtained with the knowledge of the service providers. It also required a written directive from both the attorney general and the director of national intelligence and a review by the Department of Justice every three months for each and every case. After obtaining this data, the NSA ran programs, as required by law, to filter out all domestic Internet communications, but, as Snowden pointed out, domestic information was also accidently picked up. Whenever the Justice Department actually opened an investigation against Americans in contact with foreign suspects, as it did in 170 cases in 2013, it could obtain warrants from the FISA court to search these Americans’ Internet activities.
These two documents raised legitimate questions for many Americans, including members of Congress, about the proper role of the FISA court, including whether it should conduct its business in secret. If Snowden had released only these two documents that related to unwarranted domestic surveillance and other possible violations of the law by the NSA, it would be difficult for any reasonable person not to see his actions as a potentially valuable public service. Indeed, additional safeguards were necessary in an age in which new technologies enabled mass surveillance of the public. As the three-judge panel of the Second U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals would later find, Congress had not intended Section 215 of the Patriot Act to be used to justify the bulk collection of American records. If he had limited his illegal downloading to the few documents about bulk collection, it would be more difficult to argue that he was not a whistle-blower in the spirit if not the letter of the law, and even a hero in the struggle to preserve our civil liberties. But in fact, Snowden took a great many other secret documents that did not bear on the civil liberties of Americans. He claimed he was acting on behalf of citizens in foreign countries by exposing the NSA’s and the CIA’s spying operations abroad, but that same claim could also be made by any espionage agent stealing U.S. secrets to benefit the people of another country.
As a result, the Snowden case produced a great divide in the American appreciation of him. On one hand, he has been almost universally lauded and lionized by what might be seen as the mainstream media, by numerous academics, and even, as we have seen, by members of Congress. The journalists who assisted him, Greenwald, Poitras, and Gellman, have been celebrated for the roles they played in bringing Snowden’s revelations to the public and received the 2014 Polk Award for national security reporting. The Post and The Guardian, the newspapers that initially published the purloined documents, won the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for public service.
In other circles, the reaction has been very different. American and British intelligence officials, senior members of the Obama administration, and members of the oversight committees of Congress do not view Snowden as a hero or even an authentic whistle-blower. Instead, they see him as a betrayer of secrets who willfully brought damage to the United States and benefits to its adversaries. The holders of this darker view of Snowden base it on classified reports of the full extent of the theft of classified data. Those officials believe that only a handful of the tens of thousands of documents he stole involved domestic surveillance and that those few documents served as a cover for a much larger theft.
Admiral Michael Rogers, who replaced General Alexander as head of the NSA in March 2014, said at a public forum at Princeton University, “Edward Snowden is not the ‘whistleblower’ some have labeled him to be.” He further explained to Congress, “Snowden stole from the United States government a large amount of classified information, a small portion of which is germane to his apparent central argument regarding NSA and privacy issues.”
General Martin Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, went even further. In testifying before the House Armed Services Committee on March 6, 2014, after estimating that the Snowden breach could cost the military “billions” to repair, he added, “The vast majority of the electronic documents that Snowden exfiltrated from our highest levels of security had nothing to do with exposing government oversight of domestic activities.” Dempsey based this assessment on a then still-secret Defense Intelligence Agency report on the breach. The classified DIA report showed that Snowden took “over 900,000” military files from the Department of Defense in addition to the NSA files he had taken. The Defense Department loss in terms of the number of files stolen actually exceeded the loss—in sheer numbers—of NSA documents. Lieutenant General Mike Flynn, the DIA director who directed the study, testified to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence that the breach “has caused grave damage to our national security.”
To be sure, this was not the first time that the cryptological branches of the military had been compromised. The spy ring of John Walker had provided thousands of the navy’s reports on breaking Russian ciphers to the KGB during the Cold War. But the Snowden breach exposing military sources was an order of magnitude greater than any past breach.
The CIA’s assessment was no less grim. Morell, the deputy director of the CIA in 2013, wrote that Snowden’s action went beyond taking the handful of documents, such as the FISA order, “that addressed the privacy issue.” Instead, as Morell put it, “he backed up a virtual tractor trailer and emptied a warehouse full of documents—the vast majority of which he could not possibly have read and few of which he would likely understand—[and] he delivered the documents to a variety of news organizations and God knows who else.” As a result, Morell concluded, “Snowden’s disclosures will go down in history as the greatest compromise of classified information ever.” General Alexander, the head of the NSA at the time of the theft, asserted that Snowden did “the greatest damage to our combined nations’ intelligence systems that we have ever suffered.” Obviously, military intelligence officers would not be on Snowden’s side of the divide (and the Snowden breach ended the careers of many of them, including Alexander). But political leaders in both parties could also be found on the anti-Snowden side of the divide. “I don’t look at this as being a whistle-blower,” the Democratic senator Dianne Feinstein of California, the head of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said after she was briefed on Snowden’s theft. “I think it’s an act of treason.” The Republican representative Mike Rogers of Michigan, her counterpart on the House Intelligence Committee, said on the NBC program Meet the Press that Snowden might be working for a foreign intelligence service. And a former prominent member of President Obama’s cabinet went even further, suggesting to me off the record in March 2016 that there are only three possible explanations for the Snowden heist: (1) it was a Russian espionage operation; (2) it was a Chinese espionage operation; (3) it was a joint Sino-Russian operation. These severe accusations generated much heat but little light. They were not accompanied by any evidence showing that Snowden had acted in concert with any foreign power in stealing the files or, for that matter, that he was not acting out of his own personal convictions, no matter how misguided they might have been.
On
this side of the divide, Snowden’s critics regard the whistle-blowing narrative as at best incomplete and at worst fodder for the naive. They point out that the FISA document that gave him credentials as a whistle-blower was only issued in the last week of April 2013, which was four months after he first contacted Greenwald and almost nine months after he began illegally copying secret documents. They further believe that the evidence contradicts Snowden’s claims that he stole only documents that exposed NSA transgressions into domestic surveillance, that he turned over all the stolen documents to journalists, and that he was forced to remain in Moscow by the actions of the U.S. government. They also find that the unprecedented size and complexity of the penetration of NSA files, compromising hundreds of thousands of secret documents pertaining to U.S. operations against adversary nations, according to the NSA’s and the Pentagon’s estimates, is not easily explained given Snowden’s avowed purpose for his theft.
The deep split in how Snowden is perceived brings to mind the famous drawing of a duck-rabbit cartoon first published in 1900 in the book Fact and Fable in Psychology. The figure is perceived either as a duck or as a rabbit, but it cannot be seen as both simultaneously. Whether a person sees a rabbit or a duck in this test may depend on the information available to that person. Similarly, what may account for the sharp divide between the pro-Snowden and the anti-Snowden camps is a disparity in their available information.
The pro-Snowden camp’s view is largely informed by Snowden himself. Snowden supporters prefer to believe his words rather than his actions. In the anti-Snowden camp are administration officials and the members of the House and Senate intelligence oversight committees who have been at least partially briefed on the continuing investigations of the Snowden affair. The members of the Senate Intelligence Committee, for example, were told by David Leatherwood, the director of operations for the Defense Intelligence Agency, that the military files compromised by Snowden included documents bearing on military plans and weapons systems; foreign governments’ intelligence activities (including special activities), intelligence sources, or methods of cryptology; scientific and technological matters relating to national security; and vulnerable systems, installations, infrastructures, projects, plans, and protection services related to national security and the development, production, or use of weapons of mass destruction. The members of the House and Senate Intelligence Committees, but not the public, have also been privy to an NSA investigation that established the chronology of Snowden’s actions, including changing jobs, copying more than one million classified documents at the Signals Intelligence Center in Hawaii, and flying to Russia.
Additional information does not necessarily change the minds of people who already have a firm view. In the field of social psychology, the testing of “confirmation theory” consistently shows that people tend to more readily reject new information that contradicts their pre-existing beliefs. For example, when Lee Harvey Oswald was arrested in the Texas Theater on November 22, 1963, he said famously, “I haven’t shot anybody.” Ten months later, the Warren Commission presented evidence, including ballistic tests, that it claimed showed that Oswald had shot three people, including President John F. Kennedy, less than an hour before making his statement. Yet many of those who believed Oswald’s public proclamation of his innocence chose to believe that the government had falsified all the incriminating evidence to tarnish Oswald (who had been killed on November 24, 1963) rather than accept that they had been wrong in believing Oswald.
The charges, countercharges, and defamatory name-calling in the Snowden case therefore only deepened the great divide. Those who saw Snowden as a democratic hero exposing the abuses of power of an out-of-control national security state tended to dismiss anything that depicted Snowden in a negative light as a fabrication, while those who saw Snowden as a “traitor” tended to dismiss anything that depicted him in a more positive light.
When it comes to the murky universe of spy agencies, the problem in deciding where the truth lies is further heightened by the possibility of deliberate deception. Spy masters are, after all, in the business of concealing their most sensitive operations. It is often considered essential that important secrets be protected by what Winston Churchill famously termed “a bodyguard of lies.” Top intelligence officials are not exempt from this practice. Consider, for example, the response to a question concerning the NSA’s operations made by James Clapper, the director of national intelligence, to the Senate Intelligence Committee on March 12, 2013. The Democratic senator Ron Wyden of Oregon, who was on the committee, asked the spymaster if the NSA collected data on Americans. Clapper answered that the NSA did not knowingly “collect any type of data” on millions of Americans. Clapper’s answer was clearly untrue, but it did not mislead Senator Wyden or any other members of the Senate Intelligence Committee; Clapper had truthfully testified in a classified session of the committee earlier that week that the NSA did collect Americans’ telephone records. It was the American people who were being misled. Yet none of the senators on the committee corrected this obviously false answer. When Clapper realized he had misspoken, he could not publicly correct the record of the public session, because to do so would be revealing classified information he had sworn to protect. No doubt other intelligence officers find themselves in a similar bind in discussing secret matters. This suggests that there is a risk in accepting statements made by the intelligence chiefs at face value.
But Snowden also has a credibility problem. He has told numerous untruths, including some calculated to help him insinuate himself into the key positions from which he stole secrets and some calculated to cover up the nature of his theft. For example, Snowden got access in the spring of 2013 to the NSA’s super-secret computers that stored these electronic files by working at Booz Allen Hamilton. On his application to Booz Allen in March 2013, as we’ve seen, Snowden claimed to be in the process of completing a master’s degree at the University of Liverpool in computer security sciences. Snowden had not completed a single course there and purposely lied to get access to classified documents and then to get safely away with them.
He was also not entirely truthful with the journalists whose trust he sought when it suited his purpose of protecting himself. For example, as we have seen, in contacting Laura Poitras under the alias Citizen Four in January 2013, he told her that he was currently a “government employee,” although in fact he was working for a private contractor at the time.
Snowden had little concern about misleading journalists when it suited his purpose. For example, he told Alan Rusbridger of The Guardian, Brian Williams of NBC News, James Bamford of Wired, Katrina vanden Heuvel of The Nation, Barton Gellman, and Jane Mayer of The New Yorker that the U.S. government intentionally acted to “trap” him in Moscow by revoking his passport while he was already on a plane to Moscow on the afternoon of June 23. None of these journalists asked Snowden what the basis for his oft-repeated allegation was. If they had, they would have discovered that he had no independent basis for his assertion. When asked about it during the Q&A following his July 12 press conference in Moscow, he indeed said that the only knowledge he had about the suspension of his passport was what he had “read” in the news reports. But all the news stories prior to his statement reported that his passport had been revoked on June 22, while he was still in Hong Kong. ABC News, for example, reported that the U.S. “Consul General–Hong Kong confirmed Hong Kong authorities were notified that Mr. Snowden’s passport was revoked June 22.” By advancing that date to when his plane was in “midair” on June 23, Snowden provided to unsuspecting journalists an untrue alibi for his presence in Russia.
The credibility problem with Snowden assumed a more sinister dimension once he put himself and his fate in the hands of the Russian authorities in Moscow. Even though the Obama administration decided against revealing the extent of the Russian intelligence service’s participation in Snowden’s move from Hong Kong to Moscow, or what intelligence services call an “exfiltration
,” I was told by a presidential national security staff adviser that the government acted to protect the intelligence sources used by the CIA, the NSA, and the FBI to track Snowden’s movements in the latter part of June in Hong Kong. The CIA’s deputy director, Morell, would go no further than to state that during that period he had no doubt that the intelligence services of Russia and China “had an enormous interest in him and the information he [Snowden] had stolen.” Presumably, the last thing these adversary services would want would be to make this “interest” transparent to the United States.
The role of concealment must be taken into account when assessing information bearing on the work of espionage services. When I was interviewing James Jesus Angleton—the CIA’s legendary ex-counterintelligence chief, active in the 1970s—for a book on deception, I learned that intelligence services play by a different set of rules from historians when it comes to their espionage successes. Angleton, a famously baroque thinker himself, impressed on me the complexity of espionage. He said, “It’s not enough just to steal a secret. It must be done in a way that the theft remains undetected.”
How America Lost Its Secrets Page 14
