by Luke Harding
The next day a further message arrived for Poitras, in which the source for the first time gave his name: ‘Edward Snowden’.
The name meant nothing; Poitras knew that if she searched Snowden’s name on Google this would immediately alert the NSA. Attached was a map, a set of protocols for how they would meet, and a message: ‘This is who I am. This is what they will say about me. This is the information I have.’
Snowden now contacted Greenwald himself, using his new encrypted channel. ‘I have been working with a friend of yours … We need to talk, urgently.’
The whistleblower finally had something he had been craving for nearly six months – a direct, secure connection to the elusive writer. The source was evidently familiar with Greenwald’s work. The two messaged. Snowden wrote: ‘Can you come to Hong Kong?’
The demand struck Greenwald as bizarre and it left him ‘really confused’: what would someone who worked for a US security agency be doing in a former British colony, part of communist China and far away from Fort Meade? ‘I didn’t understand what Hong Kong had to do with this,’ Greenwald says. His instinct was to do nothing. He was working on things that appeared important at the time; a book deadline loomed. ‘I kind of stalled a little bit,’ he says.
Snowden tried again via Poitras, urging her to get Greenwald to fly to Hong Kong ‘right now’.
Sitting alone in his Chinese hotel room, expecting exposure at any moment, Snowden was growing frantic. His plan to escape with a cache of top-secret NSA and GCHQ material had worked thus far with remarkable ease. That was supposed to be the hard part. But the easy bit – passing the material to sympathetic journalists – was proving tricky.
Greenwald contacted Snowden via chat. ‘I would like some more substantial idea why I’m going and why this is worthwhile for me?’
Over the next two hours Snowden explained to Greenwald how he could boot up the Tails system, one of the securest forms of communication, which uses the anonymising Tor network. Eventually the task was done.
Snowden then wrote, with what can only be called bathos: ‘I’m going to send you a few documents.’
Snowden’s welcome package was around 20 documents from the NSA’s inner sanctuaries, most stamped ‘top secret’. Among them were the PRISM slides. There were files that filled in the gaps on STELLAR WIND, the main case study of top-level impunity in Greenwald’s latest book.
It was, quite simply, treasure – a rich trove of extraordinary data. At a glance it suggested the NSA had misled Congress about the nature of its domestic spying activities, and quite possibly lied to it. Greenwald: ‘I always equate things with dog behaviour. Snowden was treating me like a dog and putting a biscuit in front of my nose. He was showing me top-secret programs from the NSA. It was unbelievable. There are no leaks from the NSA. It was enough to make me hyperventilate.’
Snowden was smart enough to indicate this was just the start – and that he was in possession of a very large number of secrets. Greenwald now comprehended. He picked up the phone to Janine Gibson, the Guardian US’s editor in New York. He said it was urgent. When Greenwald began explaining about the NSA documents, Gibson shut him down and said: ‘I don’t think we should be discussing this on the telephone.’ She suggested he come to New York.
Two days later, on Friday 31 May, Greenwald flew from Rio’s Galeão international airport to JFK, going directly to Guardian US’s SoHo HQ. He sat in Gibson’s office. He said a trip onwards to Hong Kong would enable the Guardian to find out about the mysterious source.
The source could help interpret the leaked documents. Many of them were technical – referring to programs, interception techniques, methods, that practically nobody outside the NSA knew existed. Most were not written in human language but in a kind of weird lexicon understandable only to the initiated. A few made no sense at all, as comprehensible as ancient Assyrian tablets.
‘This was a very serious thing. And the most exciting thing it was possible to imagine,’ Greenwald says. ‘Snowden had picked documents that got me completely excited. They worked with everyone at the Guardian. Some were mind-blowing. What we had was the tiniest tip of the iceberg.’
Stuart Millar, the deputy editor of Guardian US, joined the discussion. Both executives felt that Snowden’s manifesto came across as overwrought. In portentous terms, the source was talking about his personal philosophy, and the cataclysmic no-way-back journey he was taking. With hindsight, Snowden’s tone was understandable: he was, after all, about to become the world’s most wanted man.
But for the Guardian’s editorial staff there was a realisation that they could be in for a difficult ride – about to incur the wrath of the NSA, the FBI, the CIA, the White House, the State Department, and probably many other government departments so secret they didn’t officially exist.
Gibson and Millar agreed that the only way to establish the source’s credentials was to meet him in person. Greenwald would take the 16-hour flight to Hong Kong the next day. Independently, Poitras was coming along, too. But Gibson ordered a third member on to the team, the Guardian’s veteran Washington correspondent Ewen MacAskill. MacAskill, a 61-year-old Scot and political reporter, was experienced and professional. He was calm. He was unfailingly modest. Everybody liked him.
Except Poitras. She was exceedingly upset. As Poitras saw it, an extra person might freak out the source, who was already on edge. MacAskill’s presence might alienate him and even blow up the entire operation. ‘She was insistent that this would not happen,’ Greenwald says. ‘She completely flipped out.’ Greenwald tried to mediate, without success. On the eve of the trip, Poitras and Greenwald rowed for the first time ever. Tensions were high. At this point Greenwald was thinking of MacAskill as the Guardian’s corporate representative – as the cautious, dull guy. Later he discovered the Scot was the most radical of the three, prepared to publish much that was in the public interest.
At JFK airport, the ill-matched trio boarded a Cathay Pacific flight. Poitras sat at the back of the plane. She was funding her own trip. Greenwald and MacAskill, their bills picked up by the Guardian, were further up in Premium Economy. ‘I hate coach!’ Greenwald says, pointing out that he had slept little since arriving from Brazil 48 hours earlier.
As flight CX831 gained speed down the runway and took off, there was a feeling of liberation. Up in the air there is no internet – or at least there was not in June 2013. It was a space that, at that date, even the omnipotent NSA didn’t penetrate. Once the seatbelt signs were off, Poitras joined Greenwald in Premium Economy: there was room in front of his seat. She brought a present they were both eager to open: a USB stick. Snowden had securely delivered to her a second cache of secret NSA documents. This latest data-set was far bigger than the initial ‘welcome pack’. It contained 3–4,000 items.
For the rest of the journey Greenwald read the latest cache. Sleep was impossible. He was mesmerised: ‘I didn’t take my eyes off the screen for a second. The adrenaline was so extreme.’ From time to time, while the other passengers slumbered, Poitras would come up from her seat in the rear and grin at Greenwald. ‘We would just cackle and giggle like we were schoolchildren. We were screaming, and hugging and dancing with each other up and down,’ he says. ‘I was encouraging her loudness.’ Their celebrations woke some of their neighbours up; they didn’t care.
It had started as a gamble. But now the material was becoming a scoop to end all scoops. What Snowden revealed was looking more and more like a curtain dramatically pulled away to reveal the true nature of things. As the plane came in to land, the crowded lights of Hong Kong twinkling below, there was for the first time a sense of certainty. Greenwald had no more doubts. Snowden was real. His information was real. Everything was real.
4
PUZZLE PALACE
National Security Agency,
Fort Meade, Maryland
2001–2010
‘That capability at any time could be turned around on the American people, and no American would have a
ny privacy left, such is the capability to monitor everything: telephone conversations, telegrams, it doesn’t matter. There would be no place to hide.’
SENATOR FRANK CHURCH
The origins of the dragnet surveillance of the world’s internet users can be clearly pinpointed. It started on 9/11, the day of the terrorist atrocities that so frightened and enraged the US. Over the ensuing decade, both in America and Britain, there came a new political willingness to invade individual privacy. At the same time, mushrooming technical developments started to make mass eavesdropping much more feasible.
The intricate web of the internet secretly became what Julian Assange of WikiLeaks was to call, with only some exaggeration, ‘the greatest spying machine the world has ever seen’. But before the appearance of Edward Snowden, very little of the truth about that had reached the surface.
The NSA – the biggest and most secretive of the US intelligence agencies – failed on 9/11 to give advance warning of al-Qaida’s surprise attack against the Twin Towers in New York. Michael Hayden, an obscure air force general, was running the agency at the time.
George Tenet, the CIA director and nominal head of all 16 intelligence agencies, therefore had a question for Hayden. It was really Vice President Dick Cheney’s question, and Tenet was merely the messenger. The query was simple: could Hayden do more? Tenet and Cheney wondered if it was possible for the general to be more aggressive with the NSA’s extraordinary powers to vacuum up vast amounts of electronic communications and telephone information, and turn them against the terrorists.
For five decades, since its founding in 1952, the NSA has accumulated almost mythical technical and mathematical expertise. So much so that in the 1970s, the reformist senator Frank Church had warned that the NSA had the power ‘to make tyranny total in America’.
Its neighbours in Maryland include a number of secret or sensitive US military sites, such as Fort Detrick, the home of the US bioweapons programme, and Edgewood Arsenal, where the US developed chemical weapons. But the NSA was the most secret of the lot. Its budget and personnel are a state secret too.
The NSA’s mission is to collect signals intelligence from around the globe. This means anything electronic: radio, microwave, satellite intercepts. And internet communications. This clandestine monitoring is done without the target finding out. The agency has intercept stations around the world – in US military bases, embassies and elsewhere.
Its capabilities are boosted by a unique intelligence-sharing arrangement dating back to just after the second world war, known as ‘Five Eyes’. Under Five Eyes, the NSA shares its intelligence product with four other Anglophone nations: the UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. In theory, these allies don’t spy on each other. In practice, they do.
Legally, the NSA cannot just do as it pleases. The fourth amendment to the US constitution prohibits unreasonable searches and seizures against American citizens. Searches, which include communications intercepts, are only legal against a specific suspect, backed by ‘probable cause’ and the issue of a judicial warrant.
These safeguards are not just irrelevant or antiquarian restrictions. In the 1970s, President Nixon demonstrated how such power could be abused, by ordering the NSA to tap the phones of several fellow Americans he didn’t like, under the notorious MINARET program. The NSA’s illegal domestic targets included some US senators themselves, plus the boxer Muhammad Ali, the writer Benjamin Spock, the actress Jane Fonda, the black activists Whitney Young and Martin Luther King, and other critics of the misbegotten Vietnam war.
The MINARET scandal brought about the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), a seminal 1978 law. Under it, the NSA was supposed to steer clear of communications inside the US or involving Americans, unless it had a warrant.
Life was easier for the NSA’s smaller UK partners at GCHQ, who faced no written constitution, and who could pressurise government ministers to give them what they wanted under a cosy British blanket of secrecy. Britain’s RIPA (the 2000 Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act) was soon to be ‘interpreted’ to give GCHQ legal carte blanche to carry out mass surveillance on British soil, and pass on the results to the NSA – provided only that one end of a communications link was foreign.
As GCHQ boasted internally, in documents later to be revealed: ‘We have a light oversight regime compared with the US.’
That was certainly true in 2001. Within 72 hours of the devastating 9/11 attacks, Hayden had already taken the agency to the outer limits of its existing legal authorities.
In the midst of the emergency, Hayden secretly allowed his agency to match known terrorist phone numbers with US communications involving international calls. ‘Mission Creep’ rapidly occurred; within two weeks, the NSA was also cleared to give the FBI any US telephone number that contacted any Afghan telephone number. An internal NSA history would later call this ‘a more aggressive use’ of Hayden’s powers than his predecessors tolerated.
And so, under questioning from Cheney and Tenet in 2001, Hayden had to provide an answer that his bosses would find unsatisfying. What more can you do? Nothing. Nothing more can be done within the NSA’s existing authorities.
Later, Tenet asked Hayden a follow-up question over the phone. What could you do if you had more authorities?
As it happened, the NSA could do a tremendous amount.
Prior to the 9/11 attacks, the NSA had already been working on one experiment, which it had had to abandon because of FISA legal constraints. The idea was to perform something called ‘contact chaining’ on the records of communications, or metadata, it received. Contact chaining is a process of establishing connections between senders and recipients and their contacts. Done rigorously, it establishes a map of connections between people that doesn’t involve actually listening to their phone calls or reading the contents of their emails. Long before Facebook ever existed, the NSA was toying with what the social network would later unveil as a ‘social graph’.
But there was a problem. The Justice Department’s intelligence policy branch determined in 1999 that metadata was covered under FISA’s definition of electronic surveillance. That meant that contact chaining was kosher for non-American communications, but if it ensnared Americans, the NSA would be breaking the law.
Adding complexity, the transmission of electronic communications even between foreigners overseas could transit through the US, since the data splits apart into digital ‘packets’ rather than travelling from point to point over a telephone line. FISA protects transits inside the US. Yet, increasingly, that was how global telecommunications occurred.
There was, however, one avenue open to Hayden, Tenet, Cheney and George W Bush in the days after 9/11. They could go to Congress, which was rabid for war, and ask for more power by amending FISA. Congress was feeling generous to executive authority while the Twin Towers and the Pentagon still smouldered. In early October, representatives overwhelmingly passed the Patriot Act, granting federal investigators more authority to conduct searches in terrorism cases. Surely they would also wave through an amendment to the FISA regulations?
But the Bush administration decided against openly asking for more power. Instead, the White House simply instructed Hayden to go ahead in secret with more surveillance. The NSA’s official history hazards a guess why. ‘Anecdotal evidence suggests that government officials feared the public debate surrounding any changes to FISA would compromise intelligence sources and methods.’
So Hayden’s NSA began preparing a new program, one that would be kept in the strictest confidence while transgressing traditional NSA boundaries. It had four aspects: telephone communications, telephone metadata, internet communications like emails and web searches, and internet metadata. The NSA would collect as much of it as it could. Contact chaining from foreigners to Americans was back on, and the NSA could scoop up foreign communications even when they traversed the USA. The program received the elegant codename STELLAR WIND, although some of the NSA’s technologists took to ca
lling it the Big Ass Graph. On 4 October 2001, STELLAR WIND began – the official covername would follow on the 31st, Halloween – thanks to an authorisation signed by President Bush and an initial outlay of $25 million.
Not many people knew about STELLAR WIND. Hayden kept Bush’s directive in a safe. The NSA’s top lawyer knew – along with approximately 90 NSA staff who implemented the program – and blessed it as legal. But there was no initial court approval: it would not be until January 2002 that the chief of the secret FISA court even heard of the effort; his colleagues, except for one, would not know about it for another four years. Even the NSA’s internal watchdog, the inspector general, would not learn about STELLAR WIND until August 2002, nearly a year into the program’s existence.
Nor would most members of Congress. Initial knowledge was limited to the top Democrat and Republican on the Senate and House intelligence committees. By January, the NSA included Democrat Ken Inouye and Republican Ted Stevens, the leaders of the Senate appropriations committee, which presides over the purse for the Senate. It would take until January 2007 for 60 people on Capitol Hill to be cleared to know the details of STELLAR WIND, out of 535 US legislators.
But from the start, STELLAR WIND appears to have had the enthusiastic support of the major telephone companies and internet service providers. This would prove to be crucial. Unlike in the old Soviet Union or modern-day China, the US government does not own and operate the internet’s fibre-optic cables and switches, even the parts that pass through and out of the US. For the NSA to have a hope of harvesting phone and email records, it needed the co-operation of those companies.
The NSA’s internal history records that unnamed ‘private-sector partners’ began providing the agency with phone and internet content from overseas in October 2001, the first month of the program, and phone and internet metadata from inside the US the following month.