by Luke Harding
In Hawaii, by early 2013, Snowden’s sense of outrage was still growing. But his plan to leak appeared to have stalled. He faced too many obstacles. To get access to a final tranche of documents Snowden required greater security privileges than he enjoyed in his position at Dell. Clapper made his ill-fated appearance before the Senate in March. The same month Snowden took a new job with the private contractor Booz Allen Hamilton, yielding him access to a fresh trove of information. According to the NSA staffer who spoke to Forbes, Snowden turned down an offer to join the agency’s Tailored Access Operations, a group of elite hackers. He had entered the final tense weeks of his double life.
Snowden’s last workplace was in downtown Honolulu. It is a shiny, corporate contrast to the RSOC bunker. It occupies the 30th floor of Makai Tower, on Bishop Street, in the financial district. The reception has beige furnishings, framed vintage maps and a television, volume low, tuned to Fox News. Instead of a windowless canteen filled with buzz-cut soldiers, Booz Allen Hamilton staff in suits and Hawaiian shirts stroll through a sunlit courtyard of fountains and choose from dozens of restaurants. The nearest pub, Ferguson’s, isn’t exactly rowdy: it offers bacon-wrapped dates, baked Brie and red pepper tzatziki.
Booz Allen Hamilton’s chairman and president, Ralph Shrader, made complacent assurances about security on the company blog: ‘In all walks of life, our most trusted colleagues and friends have this in common. We can count on them. No matter what the situation or challenge, they will be there for us. Booz Allen Hamilton is trusted in that way. You can count on that.’
Snowden may have allowed himself a wry smile. He was counting on his new employer not to suspect anything. Snowden was reaching the point of no return. Elements in the US government, he knew, would see his actions as a cyber version of Pearl Harbor, a sneak attack. For it to come from within, from a supposed ‘traitor’, would make the wrath all the worse. That Snowden saw it as an act of patriotism, a defence of American values, would soften Washington’s vengeance not a bit.
Snowden’s own name was an apposite one for a man engaged in such risky enterprises. In the 1590s in Britain, John Snowden, a Catholic priest, became a double agent working for Lord Burghley, Queen Elizabeth’s lord treasurer. The historian Stephen Alford describes this Snowden as ‘subtle, intelligent and self-assured’. His job was to spy on Catholic emigrés on the continent who were consorting with the Spanish and plotting against Elizabeth. Snowden used ciphers, secret letters and other tricks. The Elizabethans called such men ‘intelligencers’ or ‘espials’; what they got up to was espiery. (The French term espionage only came into use from the 18th century onwards.)
But Edward Snowden, the modern-day espial, could not use his true name if he was to reach out to the US reporters who worked on national security, and who so far had no clue that Snowden existed. To make contact with them he would need a codename. Given the gravity of what he was undertaking, TheTrueHOOHA seemed jejune. Snowden came up with something new. He chose the handle ‘Verax’, a classical Latin adjective meaning ‘truth-telling’. The word verax is rather rare. It crops up in Plautus, Cicero and Horace. It is used particularly of oracles and supernatural sources.
Snowden intended to become just such a prophetic voice from deep inside the intelligence community. As with his real surname, his codename had a history: two obscure British dissenters also called themselves ‘Verax’. One was Henry Dunckley, a 19th-century Baptist social critic who used the nom de plume in the Manchester Examiner. The other was Clement Walker, a 17th-century Somerset parliamentarian during the English civil war who was eventually locked up and died in the Tower of London. Significantly, verax is also an antonym of mendax. Mendax means ‘deceiving’ and was the handle used by Julian Assange of WikiLeaks when he was a young Australian hacker. WikiLeaks, with their electronic mass-leaking of US army files from Afghanistan, and of State Department diplomatic cables from all over the world, had recently plunged the US administration into uproar. Perhaps Snowden’s allusion was deliberate.
Outwardly, his life continued as before. Read with hindsight, his girlfriend’s blog entries seem poignant. On 1 March, Mills writes that she will be an ‘international woman of mystery’ and that her Friday show later the same evening has a ‘007’ theme.
The performance goes well. Three days later she writes: ‘When I was a child most of my friends would play dress up and fantasize about being a princess, superman or pickle rancher (I have some weird friends). I would imagine being a spy. Running down sewer tunnels to escape treacherous enemies, eavesdropping on important adult conversations, and giving a full report to General Meow. So getting the opportunity to play a Bond and a babe for even a few minutes during my performance on Friday was very fulfilling. And the spy high of Friday night must have subconsciously stuck in my brain, for the following evening E and I randomly pick Skyfall for our date night movie.’
Eleven days later, on 15 March, there is news: ‘We received word that we have to move out of our house by May 1. E is transferring jobs. And I am looking to take a mini trip back East. Do I move with E, on my own, to Antarctica? … For now I’ll spin my magic ball and see where I land.’
On 30 March, in the evening, Snowden flies off to the US mainland. Over the next couple of weeks he attends training sessions at Booz Allen Hamilton’s office near Fort Meade; various intelligence agency contractors have offices next door to SIGINT city. His new salary is $122,000 a year plus a housing allowance. On 4 April he has dinner with his father. Lon Snowden says his son seemed preoccupied and nursing a burden. ‘We hugged as we always do. He said: “I love you, Dad.” I said: “I love you, Ed.” ’
In mid-April, Mills and Snowden get the keys to their new Hawaii home. It’s two streets away from their old one.
Mills writes: ‘My favourite part of moving is the pre-unpacking stage where I can roll around big empty rooms in soft window light (I may have been a cat in my former life). We took time to envision what each room could look like once we crammed our things in them. And even discussed hanging silks in the two-story main room.’
Snowden makes a valedictory appearance in her photo-blog. The pair arrange themselves on the bare floor of their home. Mills, in a striking blue dress, lies on her back and smiles at him; as ever, Snowden’s thoughts are inscrutable since the camera only records the back of his head. His glasses are abandoned several feet away. What is going through his mind?
In the second half of April, Mills travels home to the east coast of the US herself. She cruises antique shops with her mother, helps redecorate her family house and sees old friends. In early May she returns to Honolulu. She blogs about feeling torn between two different worlds. Snowden, meanwhile, is settling into his new job at Booz.
Or so it appears. In reality, Snowden is probably scraping the NSA’s servers. ‘My position with Booz Allen Hamilton granted me access to lists of machines all over the world [that] the NSA hacked,’ Snowden told the Washington Post, adding that that was exactly why he’d accepted it.
Months later, the NSA was still trying to puzzle out what exactly happened; Snowden hasn’t fully explained how he carried out the leak. But as a systems administrator Snowden could access the NSA’s intranet system, NSAnet. This was set up following 9/11 to improve liaison between different parts of the US’s intelligence community.
Snowden was one of around 1,000 NSA ‘sysadmins’ allowed to look at many parts of this system. (Other users with top-secret clearance weren’t allowed to see all classified files.) He could open a file without leaving an electronic trace. He was, in the words of one intelligence source, a ‘ghost user’, able to haunt the agency’s hallowed places. He may also have used his administrator status to persuade others to entrust their login details to him. GCHQ trustingly shares its top-secret British material with the NSA, which in turn makes it available to an army of outside contractors. This meant Snowden had access to British secrets, too, through GCHQ’s parallel intranet, GCWiki.
Although we don’t know
exactly how he harvested the material, it appears Snowden downloaded NSA documents onto thumbnail drives. The method is the same as that used by Manning, who downloaded and sent to WikiLeaks a quarter of a million US diplomatic cables on a CD marked ‘Lady Gaga’ while working in a steamy field station outside Baghdad.
Thumb drives are forbidden to most staff. But a ‘sysadmin’ could argue that he or she was repairing a corrupted user profile, and needed a backup. The thumb drive could then be carried away to bridge the ‘airgap’ that existed between the NSA system and the regular internet.
Why did nobody raise the alarm? Was the NSA asleep? Sitting in Hawaii, Snowden could remotely reach into the NSA’s servers, some 5,000 miles away in Fort Meade, through what was known as a ‘thin client’ system. Most staff had already gone home for the night when Snowden logged on, six time zones away. His activities took place while the NSA napped. Plus Snowden was extremely good at what he did – he was an ‘IT genius’ in the words of Anderson, his friend from Geneva – so he was able to move undetected through a vast internal system.
After four weeks in his new job, Snowden tells his bosses at Booz he is feeling unwell. He wants some time off and requests unpaid leave. When they check back with him he tells them he has epilepsy. It is the same condition that affects his mother Wendy, who uses a guide dog.
And then, on 20 May, he vanishes.
Mills’s blog reflects some of the pain and anguish she felt on discovering that E had walked out of her life. By 2 June it becomes clear something has gone very wrong.
She writes: ‘While I have been patiently asking the universe for a livelier schedule I’m not sure I meant for it to dump half a year’s worth of experience in my lap in two weeks’ time. We’re talking biblical stuff – floods, deceit, loss … I feel alone, lost, overwhelmed, and desperate for a reprieve from the bipolar nature of my current situation.’
Five days later Mills removes her blog. She also wonders publicly about deleting her Twitter account. A creative body of work stretching back over several years, it includes dozens of photos of herself, and some of her E.
‘To delete or not to delete?’ she tweets. She doesn’t delete.
3
THE SOURCE
Gavea, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
December 2012
‘Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist.’
RALPH WALDO EMERSON,
Self-reliance and Other Essays
From the top of Sugar Loaf Mountain, the city of Rio de Janeiro appears as a precipitous swirl of greens and browns. In the sky, black vultures turn in slow spirals. Below – far below – is downtown and a shimmer of skyscrapers. Fringing it are beaches and breakers frothing endlessly on a turquoise sea. Standing above, arms outstretched, is the art deco statue of Christ the Redeemer.
Rio’s famous beaches, Copacabana and Ipanema, lie at either side of a claw-shaped stretch of coast. Copacabana has long enjoyed a louche reputation. And yes, there are lewd sand sculptures of skimpily dressed women with big buttocks, next to green-yellow-blue-white Brazilian flags. But these days Copacabana is more of a hangout for the geriatric rich. Few others can afford to live in the luxury flats overlooking this dreamy Atlantic coast.
On weekday mornings, residents emerge, stretch, and walk their pampered pooches. Skateboarders trundle along a cycle lane; there are juice bars, restaurants, pavement cafes. Over on the beach tanned locals play football – Brazil’s national obsession – or volleyball. Much of human life is here, sitting in the balmy days of winter under the rubber trees. But the girl from Ipanema is a rare sight. You are more likely to encounter her granny.
From Rio’s south-western district of Gávea, the road twists sharply up into Floresta da Tijuca, the world’s biggest urban forest, home to capuchin monkeys and toucans. It’s usually several degrees cooler than the sea-level beaches. Keep going and you eventually arrive at a secluded mountain home. Is it some sort of dog sanctuary? A sign on the metal gate proclaims ‘Cuidado Com O Cão’: beware of the dog. The warning is superfluous: from the house comes a wild yapping and yowling. The dogs – small ones, big ones, black ones, dun ones – greet visitors by pawing at their legs; dog droppings litter a tropical yard; a mountain stream gurgles alongside. If there is mutt heaven, this is surely it.
The house’s non-dog denizen is Glenn Greenwald. Greenwald, aged 46, is one of the more prominent US political commentators of his generation. Well before the Snowden story made him a household name, Greenwald had built up a following. A litigator by profession, he spent a decade working in the federal and state court system. The son of Jewish parents, truculent, gay, radical and passionate about civil liberties, Greenwald found his voice in the Bush era. In 2005 he gave up his practice to concentrate on writing full time. His online blog attracted a wide readership. From 2007 he contributed to Salon.com as a columnist.
From his home in Rio, Greenwald frequently appears as a pundit on US TV networks. This means driving down the mountain in his red Kia (which smells of dog) to a studio in the city’s hippodrome. Security staff greet him warmly in Portuguese – he speaks it fluently. The studio has a camera, a chair and a desk. Seated at the desk, the camera depicts him in the uniform of a killer lawyer: clean shirt, smart jacket, tie. Under the table, and unseen by his audience in New York or Seattle, Greenwald will wear flip-flops and a pair of beach shorts.
This hybrid outfit bespeaks a wider duality, between private and professional. In his private life, Greenwald is soft-hearted. He is obviously a sucker for distressed beasts; he and his partner David Miranda have scooped up 10 strays. They also dog-sit other people’s and keep an additional cat. Greenwald and Miranda met when the journalist came to Rio for a two-month holiday in 2005; it was Greenwald’s second day in town, and he was lying on the beach. They quickly fell in love; Greenwald says he lives in Miranda’s Brazilian coastal home city because US federal law refused to recognise same-sex marriages. (It does now). Miranda works as Greenwald’s journalist-assistant. And when you meet him, Greenwald is mild, easy to get along with, chatty and kind.
Professionally, though, Greenwald is a different creature: adversarial, remorseless, sardonic and forensic. He is a relentless pricker of what he regards as official US hypocrisy. Greenwald has been a waspish critic of the George W Bush administration, and of Obama. He is scathing of Washington’s record. Citizens’ rights, drone strikes, foreign wars, the US’s disastrous engagement with the Muslim world, Guantanamo Bay, America’s ‘global torture regime’ – all have been subjects for Greenwald’s Swiftian pen. In long, sometimes torrential posts, he has chronicled the US government’s alleged crimes around the world. Greenwald’s outspoken views on privacy make him arguably America’s best-known critic of government surveillance.
Fans view him as a radical hero in the revolutionary tradition of Thomas Paine. Enemies regard him as an irritant, an ‘activist’, even a traitor. Two of his books cover the foreign policy and executive abuses of the Bush era. A third, With Liberty and Justice for Some (2011), examines the double standards in America’s criminal justice system. Greenwald argues persuasively that there is one rule for the powerless and another for those in high office who break the law, and invariably get away with it. The book delves into a theme important to both Greenwald and Snowden: the illegal wiretapping scandal in the Bush White House, and the fact that nobody was ever punished for it.
In August 2012, Greenwald left Salon.com and joined the Guardian as a freelance columnist. It was a nice fit. The paper’s editor, Alan Rusbridger, sees the Guardian as inhabiting an editorial space distinct from most American newspapers – with less reverence for the notions of professional demarcation and detachment that, rightly or wrongly, shape much US journalism. More than most media outlets, the Guardian has embraced new digital technologies that have radically disrupted the old order.
Rusbridger observes: ‘We have, I think, been more receptive to the argument that newspapers can give a better account of the world by bringing together
the multiple voices – by no means all of them conventional journalists – who now publish on many different platforms and in a great variety of styles. That’s how Greenwald ended up on the Guardian.’
Greenwald thus personifies a debate over what it means to be a journalist in the 21st century, in a new and noisy world of digital self-publishing, teeming with bloggers, citizen reporters and Twitter. Some have called this digital ecosystem outside mainstream publishing ‘the Fifth Estate’, in contrast to the establishment Fourth. Hollywood even used the name for a movie about WikiLeaks.
However, Rusbridger adds: ‘Greenwald does not much like being described as a member of the Fifth Estate – largely because there’s a persistent attempt by people in politics and the law as well as journalism to limit protections (for example, over sources or secrets) to people they regard (but struggle to define) as bona fide journalists. But he recognisably does have a foot in both camps, old and new.’
For sure, Greenwald believes in a partisan approach to journalism – but one, he says, that is grounded in facts, evidence and verifiable data. Typically he uses detail to smite his opponents, prising corrections from temples of US fact-checking, such as the Washington Post and the New York Times.
In an illuminating conversation with Bill Keller, a former editor of the New York Times, Greenwald acknowledges that ‘establishment media venues’ have done some ‘superb reporting’ in recent decades. But he argues that the default model in US journalism – that the reporter sets aside his subjective opinions in the interests of a higher truth – has led to some ‘atrocious journalism’ and toxic habits. These include too much deference to the US government of the day, and falsely equating a view that is true with one that isn’t, in the interests of ‘balance’.