In addition, Snowden suggested an alternative means to those who wanted to evade government surveillance. He recommended that they use end-to-end encryption, which results in messages being encrypted before they are sent over the Internet. He told Greenwald, for example, that encryption was “critically necessary” for anyone to evade NSA surveillance. Just as Robert Hanssen had deliberately compromised the NSA’s interception of Soviet communications in Washington, D.C., in the 1990s, Snowden deliberately compromised the NSA’s interception of concealed messages by potential terrorists on the Internet. We cannot know whether or not any of the jihadists involved in subsequent terrorist attacks (such as those in Paris or San Bernardino, California, in 2015) would have used the Internet or phone lines more freely if Snowden had not divulged the NSA’s surveillance of them, but there can be little doubt that his breach of the secrecy envelope had serious consequences for U.S., French, and British intelligence. For example, François Molins, the former head prosecutor of Paris, pointed out that after the Paris attacks the French investigation had run into an obstacle: end-to-end encryption. “We can’t penetrate into certain conversations,” he said about “Telegram,” the end-to-end encryption program that Snowden had repeatedly recommended, and as a result “we’re dealing with this gigantic black hole, a dark zone where there are just so many dangerous things going on.”
The effects of Snowden’s intervention were soon realized by the CIA, according to Michael Morell, who had closely followed intelligence about terrorist groups in the Middle East ever since he had acted as the CIA’s briefer for the president on the day of the 9/11 attack. “Terrorist organizations around the world were already starting to modify their actions in light of what Snowden disclosed,” Morell wrote in 2015. “Within weeks of the [Snowden] leaks, communications sources dried up, tactics were changed.” Even more disturbing, suspects on the CIA’s watch list began switching to an “encryption platform.” Instead of continuing to rely on the Internet to protect their messages, they increased their use of end-to-end encryption, which defeated the effectiveness of PRISM’s capturing Internet traffic before it was encrypted by Internet companies. Indeed, after the Snowden breach, ISIS even provided a tutorial on its websites about using end-to-end encryption. So Morell and others at the CIA helplessly watched as this previous source of unexpected intelligence went dark.
What further heightened Morell’s concern about this sudden loss of NSA intelligence from these sources was the discovery by the CIA in January 2014 of two documents, one 26 pages and the other 19 pages, on a captured ISIS computer in Syria. These documents discussed the advantages of using bubonic plague germs and other biological weapons against Western civilian populations. They even provided a religious justification for using biological warfare against civilian targets in the West. In addition, evidence uncovered from the safe house used by the ISIS terrorists involved in the Paris attack suggested they had been interested in acquiring radioactive isotopes. Without the advance warning that the NSA’s surveillance of the pre-encrypted Internet had provided in the past, could the CIA now contend with such unconventional threats?
The NSA also saw its sources disappearing from its surveillance. Before the Snowden breach, the FBI, the CIA, and the DIA, which were the NSA’s partners in the PRISM program, had compiled a watch list of highly active foreign terrorist targets for the NSA’s PRISM program. These “targets” included logistics officers, bomb builders, weapons specialists, and suicide bomber recruiters. Until June 6, 2013, many of these targets had frequently used Internet services, such as Twitter, Facebook, and Xbox Live, to send what they believed would be hidden messages. After the PRISM story broke in The Washington Post on June 6, the NSA “saw one after another target go dark,” according to a senior NSA executive involved in that surveillance. The NSA has watched about one thousand of these targets take “steps to remove themselves from our visibility.” According to the NSA’s deputy director, Richard Ledgett, in 2016, the vanishings included a group planning attacks in Europe and the United States.
Admiral Rogers, the new NSA director, discussed the damage done by Snowden. He was blunt and direct. Asked in February 2015 whether or not the disclosures by Snowden had reduced the NSA’s ability to pursue terrorists, he answered, “Have I lost capability that we had prior to the revelations? Yes.”
Epilogue
The Snowden Effect
Governments can reduce our dignity to something like that of tagged animals.
—EDWARD SNOWDEN, Moscow, 2016
THE ENORMOUS EFFECT that Snowden has had on America can be divided into three categories: the good, the bad, and the ugly. The good proceeds from the national conversation on the issue of surveillance in 2013 that his disclosures ignited. There is no denying that Snowden’s dramatic disclosures, despite the damage they did to U.S. intelligence, accomplished a salutary service in alerting both the public and the government to the potential danger of a surveillance leviathan. The steady expansion of the NSA’s collection of telephone billing records under the cloak of secrecy, for example, revealed a bureaucratic mission creep that badly needed to be brought under closer oversight by Congress. Snowden’s breach provided another benefit. It pointed to the security dangers proceeding from the NSA’s headlong rush to outsource its computer servicing to private contractors. Opening this back door, as Snowden amply demonstrated, greatly increased the risk that America’s secrets would fall into the hands of its enemies. An intelligence service has little if any value if it cannot keep secret its sources from its adversaries.
The conversation that Snowden began is necessary for another reason. The relentless growth of data-collection technology had come to endanger personal privacy. Smart phones in our pockets, GPS recorders in our cars, fitness bands on our wrists, CCTV monitors in stores, and network-connected devices in our homes leave a digital trail of every move we make. The government can subpoena as part of an investigation, as we know, our personal data, including our Internet searches, social media postings, electronic communications, and credit card records. In addition, the government has its own tools of surveillance. Snowden, by disclosing that the government was vacuuming in phone billing records and Internet activities, hit a sore spot in the public’s consciousness. How far did the surveillance state extend? Did an Orwellian government intercept private conversations of American citizens? Should Apple, Google, and other Internet giants use a doomsday system of encryption to prevent court-ordered searches for data? Were there adequate safeguards against government snooping?
In popular culture, surveillance is often associated with the sinister measures taken by a totalitarian government to suppress individual dissidence. On television we see government agents in black vans operating arrays of tape recorders, following people on the street, and breaking into homes to steal files and tap telephone lines. In the 2006 Academy Award–winning film The Lives of Others, for example, East Germany’s Stasi police use listening devices to gather information to blackmail intellectuals to assist in the eradication of dissent. East Germany was not the only place in the Cold War era using surveillance to suppress dissent. Even in the United States in the 1950s and 1960s, J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI bugged the phones of civil rights leaders, including Martin Luther King Jr., to root out suspected subversive elements. Most Americans viewed this as a reprehensible use of government surveillance, and the very mention of the word, even before Snowden’s disclosure, evoked disquiet among the public. But what Snowden exposed was not any sort of rogue operation but programs authorized by the president and Congress and approved by fifteen federal judges. If one accepts that the nation’s security remains a legitimate function of government, the issue is not surveillance itself; it is the proper way such surveillance is conducted.
The NSA surveillance of telephone records that Snowden exposed was different in its intent from the surveillance of the Cold War. Its target was a selected list of 300 to 400 foreign jihadists living abroad. Many of these individuals residing in Syria,
Iraq, and Pakistan had been identified by the FBI and the CIA as active bomb makers, assassins, and weapon specialists. This was not domestic surveillance, but when any of these suspects telephoned a phone number in the United States, the NSA checked the billing records of the domestic phone number that had been called to determine all the calls emanating from it. The purpose of this search was to assemble for the FBI a list of contacts that a foreign suspect might have in the United States. To expedite this task, it obtained from telephone companies the billing records, without any names attached, of all their users and stored them in a single archive under its control. While this surveillance targeted foreign terrorists, not domestic dissent, the bulk collection of phone records had the potential for more nefarious use, a danger that Snowden brought to the public’s attention. As a result, Congress modified the Patriot Act so that billing records would remain on the computers of the phone companies for a limited time rather than on those of the NSA. The NSA could still search them after obtaining an order from the FISA court, though it could not archive the data for future use, so little harm to individual privacy could be done. Snowden deserves a large share of the credit not only for this change but for making the public aware of domestic surveillance.
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The bad part of the equation is that Snowden deeply damaged an intelligence system that American presidents have relied on for over six decades. The heart of that system was the sources and methods used to intercept other nations’ communications. Until Snowden, the NSA’s wall of secrecy kept these nations from knowing about them or, in some cases, even realizing that they were vulnerable to interception. For example, as previously discussed, the NSA had developed the remarkable ability to tap into an adversary nation’s computers, even though they had been isolated from any network. This innovation had provided President Obama and his national security team an edge of which our adversaries were unaware from 2008 to 2013. However, Snowden deliberately nullified this advantage in 2013 by revealing this technology (which was published in The New York Times and other newspapers). The vast number of documents that he compromised contained many other secret sources and methods.
The full extent of the damage Snowden did may never be fully known, even though the Department of Defense spent the better part of a year, and tens of thousands of investigative man-hours, trying to sort out just the compromised sources and methods pertaining to military and cyber-defense operations. In addition to the direct and significant cost to taxpayers represented by this investigation, one measure of how serious the loss has been was revealed by Michael McConnell, the vice-chairman of the company for which Snowden had worked at the time of the breach. McConnell stated publicly, “Snowden has compromised more capability than any spy in U.S. history.” McConnell had no obvious reason to exaggerate the loss because his company, Booz Allen Hamilton, was partly responsible for the damage. It hired Snowden, as will be recalled, even after its vetters had detected an untruthful statement in his application. McConnell said, “This will have impact on our ability to do our mission for the next twenty to thirty years.” By any measure, two decades of lost intelligence is a steep price to pay.
To be sure, the practical value of peacetime intelligence about the activities of adversary states is not always evident. What is far clearer to the public is the value of intelligence that can thwart terrorist attacks against subways, theaters, and other civilian targets. We have seen that Snowden also deprived the NSA of much of the effectiveness of its PRISM program by revealing it, through the articles published at his specific behest in The Guardian and The Washington Post that explained how it worked. This single revelation compromised a system, duly authorized by Congress and the president, that had been the government’s single most effective tool for learning in advance about attacks in America and Europe by jihadist terrorists.
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The ugly part of the equation is the rampant growth of the public’s distrust of the institutions of government in America. According to recent polls, 4 out of 5 Americans distrust the government. Snowden did not create this new age of distrust, but his disclosures greatly contributed to it, as well as to the worldwide distrust of the U.S. government. This post-Snowden distrust is especially powerful in the section of the international media that assisted Snowden in his release of NSA documents. In defending Snowden, it questions the truthfulness of any government official or member of Congress who discloses information contradicting Snowden’s claims or showing that there was some benefit to the multibillion-dollar intelligence system that he compromised. Even Senator Dianne Feinstein, who herself fought the secrecy of the CIA for years, was not exempt from such distrust when she asserted in June 2013 that the program that Snowden had compromised had helped avert a bloody carnage on the New York subways in September 2009, as mentioned earlier. That she was the ranking Democrat on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, and briefed on the program at the time of the attack, did not prevent a distrustful press from attempting to impeach her credibility and that of the fourteen other members of the Senate Select Committee and the twenty members of the House Select Committee on Intelligence who had affirmed her assertion.
In this culture of distrust, any claim that any of the secrets that Snowden disclosed could have caused any harm is preemptively dismissed as government propaganda. Snowden’s word also is taken over that of government officials because, as The Nation explained, Snowden speaks “truth to power.” Such a formulation of distrust allows those who accept it to dismiss all assertions of government officials representing power who contradict Snowden’s version of reality. Such is Snowden’s glorified aura that even when his revelations expose purported U.S. government actions in foreign lands, including the alleged tapping of friendly government officials’ conversations, such as Angela Merkel’s, these are implicitly conflated with the NSA’s domestic surveillance program, around which a popular movement has emerged questioning its purpose and methods. As a result, a legitimate debate on what should constitute our domestic liberties—and potential limits to those when facing significant security concerns—has largely obfuscated in this mind-set the reality of Snowden’s weakening, durably and structurally, the critical ability of the United States and its allies to address their mounting external security challenges. In this culture of distrust, whatever contradicts the innocent whistle-blower narrative can be preemptively dismissed because Snowden, even though he remains ensconced in Moscow at an unknown location, remains the ultimate truth teller.
I do not accept either this formulation of Snowden or his version of the events in which he was the hero. Opening a Pandora’s box of government secrets is a dangerous undertaking. Whether Snowden’s theft of state secrets proceeded from an idealistic attempt to right a wrong, a narcissistic drive to obtain personal recognition, an intent to weaken the foundations of the surveillance infrastructure in which he worked, or a combination of such factors, by the time he arrived in Moscow, it had evolved, deliberately or not, but necessarily, into a mission of disclosing key national secrets to a foreign power. In the end, such conjectures about Snowden’s motives matter less than that he was helped, consciously or not, by others with interests that differed from those of the United States. The effects on America of such a massive breach of confidence will not easily be reversible.
Acknowledgments
I am deeply grateful to the many individuals who put their knowledge and expertise at my disposal during the course of writing this book. Unfortunately, I cannot give due credit to some of those people to whom I owe the greatest debt in understanding the intelligence issues, because they spoke to me on condition that I keep secret their identities.
I greatly benefited from the insights, erudition, and criticisms provided by those who read draft chapters at various stages of my investigation. I am particularly indebted in this regard to Tobias Brown, Rachelle Bergstein, Richard Bernstein, Sidney Blumenthal, David Braunschvig, Ash Carter, Susana Duncan, Joe Finder, Ben Gerson, Andrew Hacker, William Hase
ltine, Eli Jacobs, Bruce Kovner, Robert Loomis, Gary Lucas, John Micklethwait, Frederick Mocatta, Andrew Rosenberg, Curt Sawyer, Sean Wilentz, and Ezra Zilkha.
I am especially grateful to Harold Edgar, the Julius Silver Professor in Law, Science, and Technology at Columbia Law School; and to Jack Goldsmith, Henry L. Shattuck Professor at Harvard Law School, for sharing with me their legal perspective on the espionage statutes and other legal issues.
I thank Edward Lucas of The Economist for recommending Catherine A. FitzPatrick, a writer and translator at The Interpreter magazine as someone who “possesses a unique knowledge of the labyrinthine world of Russian disinformation.” She proved a godsend for this book. With her deep understanding of the workings of the Internet, she helped me retrieve information from the dark side of the Internet that I otherwise would not have found.
Because I do not believe an investigative book should be written without the author visiting the crime scene and other pertinent venues, I undertook research in Hawaii, Japan, Hong Kong, and Moscow. Where possible, I flew the same flights that Snowden did. I am grateful to Ena and Ines Talakic for their assistance on these research trips. As talented documentarians in their own right, they filmed a number of my interviews on these trips, and generously provided photographs for this book. I thank Alexander Bitter in Hawaii, Joyce Xu in Hong Kong, Ko Shoiya in Japan, and Zamir Gotta, Natalie Filkina, and Svetlana Chervonnaya in Russia for their help in arranging my interviews in those places. I also owe special thanks to Nick Grube, an editor at Civil Beat in Honolulu, for accompanying me to the NSA base where Snowden was working in 2013.
I am indebted to Nancy Novick for her skill, patience and enterprise in helping me find the selection of photographs for this book.
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