by Luke Harding
The White House team indicated they might escalate the issue. Gibson replied that the editor-in-chief – half way across the Atlantic – was unavailable. She said: ‘I’m the final decision maker.’ A deflated group wrapped up the conference call: ‘We seem to have reached an impasse we can’t get past.’
Gibson had resisted the administration’s attempts to cajole her, keeping her cool while sticking to the legal playbook. Ackerman says: ‘She didn’t budge. She was ramrod.’ He adds: ‘It took the Obama administration a long time to acclimate to the fact that they were not the ones in control, that she was … How often do they interact with people who are not part of their club?’
The encounter demonstrated the difference between newspaper cultures on either side of the pond. In the US, three big newspapers enjoy a virtual monopoly. With little competition, they are free to pursue leads at a leisurely, even gentlemanly, pace. The political culture is different too, with the press generally deferential towards the president. If anyone asked Obama a tough or embarrassing question, this was itself news.
In what used to be Fleet Street, by contrast, the media landscape was very different. In London, there were 12 UK national titles locked in a permanent, exhausting battle for survival, a Darwinian struggle to the death. The rivalry had grown more intense as print newspaper circulations declined. If you had a scoop, you published. If you didn’t, someone else would. It was dog-eat-dog, then grind up its bones.
The US authorities now tried to exert pressure in the UK. The British security service MI5 called Nick Hopkins, the paper’s security editor at the Guardian’s London headquarters; the FBI’s people similarly called the paper’s no. 2, the deputy editor Paul Johnson. (Deputy director Joyce began: ‘Hello Paul, are you having a good day? We’ve been talking to Ms Gibson. We don’t feel we’ve been making progress …’) Attempts to reach Rusbridger personally were unsuccessful. The editor-in-chief was still on a plane. He had made it clear this was Gibson’s call.
The federal officials now acted sad rather than angry. But in DC, Ackerman was getting nervous. He was wondering whether guys with guns and wraparound shades might be standing outside his apartment in Dupont Circle, ready to whisk him away and interrogate him in a dark cell. He reasoned: ‘We had got off the phone with three extremely powerful and extremely displeased men, one of whom was the deputy head of the FBI.’
Over in Hong Kong, Snowden and Greenwald were restless; they were sceptical that the Guardian would have the sheer finger-in-your-eye chutzpah to publish. Greenwald signalled that he was ready and willing to self-publish or take the scoop elsewhere if the Guardian hesitated. Time was running out. And Snowden could be uncovered at any minute.
Just after 7pm, Guardian US went ahead and ran the story. It was, by any standards, an extraordinary scoop, but it was to be just the first one of many.
The article, with Greenwald’s byline on it, began: ‘The National Security Agency is currently collecting the telephone records of millions of US customers of Verizon, one of America’s largest telecoms providers, under a top-secret court order issued in April.’
Despite the failure of their conference call, the White House must never have really believed that the Guardian would have the audacity to publish the secret order. A few minutes after the story went live, Hayden sent a note to Ackerman, asking: ‘Are you guys going ahead?’
Being behind the curve in this way was to characterise the White House’s interactions in the days ahead. Senior officials were incredulous at the breakneck speed of publication. The NSA must have been chasing down the leak but was unaware the Guardian didn’t just have one top-secret document, but thousands. Gibson says: ‘We were absolutely moving at speed. We knew we had a really limited window to get stories out before it became a manhunt.’
Snowden had maintained the Verizon revelations would set off a public storm. Gibson and Millar were less persuaded; it was a good story, for sure, but how big would it go? The day’s tasks finished, Ackerman met his wife Mandy for dinner, sat down in a Korean restaurant, and ordered a large, calming beer. He pulled up the newly published Verizon piece on his iPhone. He showed Mandy. ‘Holy shit,’ she exclaimed. Ackerman looked at Twitter: the Guardian revelation was suddenly everywhere. ‘It was rapidly becoming a thunderclap,’ he says. He looked around. Could the two men sitting at the next table be FBI?
The paranoia was understandable. From now on the Guardian found itself the target of intense NSA scrutiny. Suddenly the world felt different. Jitteriness set in. It was unclear on what legal basis the NSA was spying on journalists going about their job and protected by the first amendment. But it was evident that whatever electronic privacy they had once enjoyed had now vanished. At 7.50pm Millar ran out of the office, got on the subway and returned to his home in Brooklyn; his twins were celebrating their fifth birthday, and he wanted to see them before they went to bed. (Millar told his daughter: ‘I didn’t want to miss you on your birthday, darling.’ She replied: ‘You’ve already missed my birthday, Daddy.’)
Millar headed off back to work a mere 20 minutes later, to discover that diggers had mysteriously arrived at 536 Broadway. They were tearing up the pavement immediately in front of the Guardian’s office, a strange activity for a Wednesday evening. With smooth efficiency, they replaced it. More diggers arrived outside Gibson’s home in Brooklyn. Construction crews also began very loud work outside the Guardian’s Washington bureau. Soon, every member of the Snowden team was able to recount similar unusual moments – ‘taxi drivers’ who didn’t know the way and forgot to ask for money, ‘window cleaners’ who lingered and re-lingered next to the editor’s office.
In the coming days the Guardian’s laptops repeatedly stopped working. Gibson was especially unlucky. Her mere presence had a disastrous effect on technology. Often her encrypted chats with Greenwald and others would collapse, raising fears of possible hacking. She stuck a Post-it note on one compromised machine. It read: ‘Middlemanned! Do not use.’ Having glimpsed Snowden’s documents, it was clear the NSA could ‘middleman’ practically anything, in other words insert itself in the middle of a conversation between two parties and siphon off private data. All the players involved in the Snowden story went from being encryption novices to encryption mavens. ‘Very quickly, we had to get better at spycraft,’ Gibson says.
That evening, the bleary-eyed journalists began pulling into shape the next exclusive on PRISM. At midnight Rusbridger and Borger walked in; on the plane over, Rusbridger had been mugging up on US law and the Espionage Act. The following morning on the subway to Spring Street station, the nearest to the New York office, the pair had overshot their stop. They ran up the stairs, and dived into a train heading in the opposite direction. ‘That will shake them off,’ Rusbridger joked. The mood was jubilant as Rusbridger read through the draft of the next story, about PRISM.
That story, too, was remarkable. The NSA was claiming it had secret direct access to the systems of Google, Facebook, Apple and other US internet giants. Under the program, previously undisclosed, analysts were able to collect email content, search histories, live chats and file transfers. The Guardian had a 41-slide PowerPoint presentation, classified as top secret and not to be shown to foreign allies. It was apparently used to train analysts. The document claimed ‘collection directly from the servers’ of major US service providers. Silicon Valley would vehemently deny this.
As the team reassembled the next morning there were still difficult editorial decisions to make. How many of the slides, if any, should the Guardian publish? Several gave details of previously undisclosed intelligence operations abroad. There was no public interest in betraying them. It was also important – legally, and in the interests of fairness – to approach the US tech companies for reaction. Dominic Rushe, the Guardian’s US business reporter, was assigned the task. And then there was the White House. PRISM was an even bigger secret than Verizon. How much warning should the White House get ahead of publication?
Gibson picked up
the phone for another difficult conversation. On the other end of the line was Bob Litt and the director of national intelligence’s press spokesman Shawn Turner; other security agencies were patched in. Gibson explained this was another opportunity for the White House to raise specific national security concerns. She was asked, in tones of friendly banter: ‘Could you send us a copy of your story and we’ll take a look at it for you?’ It was maybe worth a shot. Gibson replied: ‘We’re not going to do that.’
There were issues with many of the slides. The problem was that the White House’s and the Guardian’s slide-decks didn’t quite match up; the colours were different. At one point Gibson said: ‘I’m really sorry. It’s just inherently comedic when you say the words purple box.’ From the Guardian side laughter, from the White House bemusement. It was another moment of cross-cultural confusion.
The NSA, not surprisingly, was against publication of any of the slides; the agency’s bad week was morphing into full-blown disaster. Gibson, however, was insistent the Guardian should disclose the dates when Microsoft, Yahoo and other tech giants had apparently signed up to the aggressive PRISM program; it was a key slide. ‘We need to publish this. That’s my bottom line,’ she said, stressing: ‘We’ve taken out anything operational.’
The Obama team had apparently still not entirely grasped that they had lost control irrevocably of a large cache of top-secret NSA material. As Gibson put it, reflecting on the non-existent leverage available to the US authorities: ‘I could not understand what the “or else” in this was.’ The Guardian decided it would publish only three out of the 41 slides, a conservative approach. The White House had been told the story would go live at 6pm. A few minutes earlier, the Washington Post, which had been sitting on some similar material, published its own version of the PRISM story. The immediate suspicion was that someone inside the administration had tipped off the Post. The Post article, however, lacked one crucial element: howling denials from Facebook and others that they were complicit in NSA surveillance.
In mid-afternoon, Gibson, Rusbridger and the others gathered in the large meeting room at the end of the office. The area had been jokingly dubbed the ‘Cronut’. The reference was to GCHQ’s doughnut-shaped headquarters in England, and to the latest SoHo craze for ‘cronuts’, a cross between a croissant and a doughnut. Several young interns had been liquidising cronuts at a nearby desk; they were writing a feature. Cronut was, perhaps, not the funniest pun in the world. But in these febrile times it stuck.
The mood was lightening – two massive stories, Snowden still in play, an engagement process of sorts with the White House. After a succession of long days merging into muggy nights, the working environment resembled an unkempt student dormitory. Cardboard rectangles of grubby pizza boxes littered the tables; there were take-away cups and other detritus. Someone knocked over a cappuccino. This was Rusbridger’s cue. He reached down for the nearest newspaper, began theatrically mopping up the coffee, and declared: ‘We are literally wiping the floor with the New York Times.’
The Snowden revelations were becoming a deluge. On Friday morning the Guardian published an 18-page presidential policy directive, dated October 2012 – the document Snowden had revealed to Poitras. It showed that Obama had ordered officials to draw up a list of potential overseas targets for offensive US cyber-attacks. Like other top-secret programs, the policy had its own acronym – OCEO – or Offensive Cyber Effects Operations. The directive promised ‘unique and unconventional capabilities to advance US national objectives around the world with little or no warning to the adversary or target.’ The potential effects, it boasted, ranged ‘from subtle to severely damaging’.
The story was a double embarrassment for the White House. First, the US had complained persistently about invasive and damaging cyber-attacks from Beijing, directed against American military infrastructure, the Pentagon and other targets. These complaints now looked distinctly hypocritical; the US was doing exactly the same. Second, and more piquantly, Obama was due later that day to meet his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping at a summit in California. Beijing had already hit back at US criticism. Senior officials claimed to have ‘mountains’ of evidence of US cyber-attacks, every bit as serious as the ones allegedly carried out by rampant Chinese hackers.
As the day unfolded it became clear that the leaks had got the president’s attention. The NSA programs helped defend America against terrorist attacks, Obama said. He added that it was impossible to have 100 per cent security and 100 per cent privacy: ‘We have struck the right balance.’
Rusbridger and Gibson watched Obama on the TV monitor: the immensity of what the Guardian had initiated was sinking in. Gibson says: ‘Suddenly he was talking about us. We felt: “Oh shit. There’s no going back.” ’
Gibson called Hayden again to warn her that another story was coming down the runway, this time on BOUNDLESS INFORMANT. The top-secret program allows the NSA to map country by country the voluminous amount of information it collects from computer and telephone networks. Using the NSA’s own metadata, the tool gives a portrait of where the agency’s ubiquitous spying activities are concentrated – chiefly, Iran, Pakistan and Jordan. This came from a ‘global heat map’ slide leaked by Snowden. It revealed that in March 2013 the agency collected a staggering 97 billion intelligence data points from computer networks worldwide.
Gibson launched into her legalistic script, inviting the White House to air its latest concerns. ‘I’m just going to say my thing,’ she told Hayden brightly. Hayden replied: ‘Please don’t.’ From the NSC, there was, perhaps, a grudging acceptance that the Guardian had behaved responsibly. The tone was cordial. That evening, Inglis himself rang. The subject was BOUNDLESS INFORMANT. The NSA deputy chief’s response to Gibson was a half-hour lecture on how the internet worked – a patronising tutorial. Still, Gibson notes: ‘They had moved into a place where they were trying to engage with us.’
Like most of the Snowden files, the BOUNDLESS INFORMANT documents were highly specialised, and not easy to parse. The plan had been to publish later on Friday. With journalists gathered round, Rusbridger read the draft story out aloud, line by line.
He stopped several times. ‘I don’t quite get that,’ Millar said.
Very quickly it emerged that more work was needed. In Hong Kong, Greenwald went off to search for more documents that might help. He found several, and the story was then re-written and posted the following morning. Gibson told her non-Snowden staff that they were free to take the weekend off. But practically all journalists came in. They wanted to witness the extraordinary denouement to an extraordinary week.
For Snowden himself now declared his intention to go public. He proposed, he said, to reveal his own identity to the world.
7
THE PLANET’S MOST WANTED MAN
Mira Hotel, Nathan Road, Hong Kong
Wednesday 5 June 2013
‘If I were a Chinese spy, why wouldn’t I have flown directly into Beijing? I could be living in a palace, petting a phoenix, by now.’
EDWARD SNOWDEN
It had been around 3am local time when the Guardian broke the first of Snowden’s NSA stories. Returning to his Hong Kong hotel room early the next morning, the three reporters found the whistleblower ecstatic.
His revelation was there, running on CNN at the top of the news. Snowden turned the sound up on his hotel TV. Wolf Blitzer, CNN’s anchor, was sitting with a panel of three pundits: they were discussing the possible identity of the Guardian’s mysterious source. Who was the leaker? Someone in the White House, perhaps? A disaffected general? A KGB super-mole? It was a moment of some irony. ‘It was funny watching them speculate who might have leaked it when you are sitting beside that person,’ MacAskill said.
The public response surprised even Snowden. Posts on the internet were massively supportive; already a grassroots movement, Restore the Fourth Amendment, was springing up. The rapid publication was good for his relations with the Guardian: it demonstrated to Snowden t
hat the paper was acting in good faith. All along his goal had been to spark a debate; he felt that the Verizon story was achieving that, making a big splash.
MacAskill wondered if the leaker was going to be smug, thrilled or proprietary to find himself at the centre of world events. Remarkably, he was totally impassive; he listened to CNN intently. He seemed to understand the enormity of what had happened. From this moment there was no way back. If he flew home to Hawaii now, arrest and incarceration would follow. Snowden’s life was never going to be the same again.
So what next specifically? The most likely scenario for him, as Snowden sketched it, was that the Chinese police would arrest him in Hong Kong. There would be a legal tussle. Possibly for a few months. Maybe even a year. At the end of this he would be sent back to the US. And then … well, decades and decades in jail.
Snowden had turned over an enormous quantity of material on portable drives. This included not only the NSA’s internal files, but also British material emanating from GCHQ and apparently trustingly handed over by the Brits to their US colleagues.
‘How many British documents are on these?’ MacAskill asked.
Snowden said, ‘About 50,000 to 60,000.’
He had given months of thought to his planned dealings with the media. He was fastidious. He wanted a series of strict conditions for handling secret material. He was insistent that NSA/GCHQ documents disclosing spying should go to the respective subjects of surveillance. He felt Hong Kong media should have information relating to spying on Hong Kong, the Brazilian material to Brazilian media and so on. He was categorical on this point. If, on the other hand, the material fell into the hands of third-party adversaries such as the Russians or the Chinese, this would lay him open to the damaging charge that he was little more than a defector or foreign agent – which he wasn’t.