The Snowden Files: The Inside Story of the World's Most Wanted Man

by Luke Harding

  Oliver Robbins later hinted at the government’s thinking in a witness statement, saying ‘so long as the newspaper showed cooperation, engagement was the best strategy.’ In return for the Guardian having a dialogue about a forthcoming story, the two men offered a high-level briefing. After that briefing, the Guardian published the TEMPORA story with a few modifications.

  It went live on the Guardian’s website at 5.28pm. The reaction was instant. There was a rolling wave of public indignation. One comment read: ‘Who gave them [GCHQ] permission to spy on us and hand our private information to a foreign power without our consent?’

  Nick Hopkins, the Guardian’s investigations editor, had liaison with the intelligence agencies as one of his regular tasks. After the TEMPORA disclosures, Hopkins suggested a peace meeting with a GCHQ official to clear the air. He replied: ‘I would rather gouge my eyes out than be seen with you.’ Hopkins responded: ‘If you do that you won’t be able to read our next scoop.’ Another GCHQ staffer suggested – with tongue in cheek – that he should consider emigration to Australia.

  The journalists feared that their paper’s continued reporting might come under some serious legal strain. ‘I thought at some point this story is going to get impossible for us,’ Rusbridger says. Some footwork was required.

  In 2010 the Guardian had successfully partnered with the New York Times, and other international titles including Germany’s Der Spiegel, to report on the WikiLeaks leak of classified US diplomatic cables and war-logs.

  There were similar advantages to collaboration now, particularly with US partners. The Guardian could take advantage of first-amendment protection. And, if necessary, offshore its entire reporting operation to New York where most stories were already being written under Gibson’s deft stewardship.

  Rusbridger got in touch with Paul Steiger, founder of the independent news website ProPublica. It was a good fit. The non-profit ProPublica had a reputation for rigour; its newsroom had won two Pulitzers. A small selection of edited documents was sent off to him, heavily encrypted, via FedEx. This simple low-tech method proved inconspicuous, and perfectly safe. ProPublica’s technology reporter Jeff Larson joined the bunker in London. A computer science graduate, Larson knew his stuff. Using diagrams, he could explain the NSA’s complex data-mining programs – no mean feat.

  Rusbridger had been in dialogue with Jill Abramson, the executive editor of the New York Times. Rusbriger had known her predecessor Bill Keller, and was on friendly terms with Abramson. The conversation was a strange one. In theory the Times and the Guardian were rivals. The Guardian had, in effect, just carried out a major US land-grab, raiding deep into traditional Times territory by publishing a series of high-profile national security scoops. To its credit, the Times had followed up the NSA story and produced some notable work of its own.

  Would the Times be prepared to partner with the Guardian on the Snowden files? Rusbridger told Abramson bluntly that this was extremely hot material. There were no guarantees the Times would ever be able to look at it. There would be strict conditions around their use. ‘The temperature [here in the UK] is rising,’ he said. As with the collaboration over Wikileaks, both sides could benefit from the deal: the Times got the thumb drive; the Guardian got the first amendment. Abramson agreed.

  What would Snowden make of this arrangement? It was unlikely he would be pleased. Snowden had repeatedly inveighed against the New York Times. The paper, he felt, was perfidious, too close to US power.

  The alternative, however, was worse. The Guardian was in a tight spot; at any moment police could charge up the stairs and seize Snowden’s material. Inevitably, experts would then carry out detailed forensic tests on the hard drive. The result could conceivably strengthen the ongoing US criminal investigation against Snowden, their source.

  Two weeks passed, with the Guardian continuing to publish. For those in the bunker it was a demanding and stressful period. They couldn’t talk to friends or colleagues, only to those in the circle of trust. Then on Friday 12 July, Heywood reappeared, accompanied by Craig Oliver, who was wearing a pink striped shirt. Their message was that the Guardian must hand the GCHQ files back; the mood in government seemed to be hardening, although scarcely more well-informed. ‘We are pretty aware of what you have got,’ said Sir Jeremy. ‘We believe you have about 30 to 40 documents. We are worried about their security.’

  Rusbridger said: ‘You do realise there is a copy [of the documents] in America?’ Heywood: ‘We can do this nicely or we can go to law.’ Then Rusbridger suggested an apparent compromise: that GCHQ could send technical experts to the Guardian to advise staff how the material could be handled securely. And possibly, in due course, destroyed. He made it clear that the Guardian didn’t intend to hand the files over. ‘We are still working on them,’ he said. Heywood and Oliver said they would think about this over the weekend, but they wanted Rusbridger to reconsider his refusal to hand the stuff back.

  Three evenings later, Rusbridger was having a quiet beer in the Crown, a Victorian pub in nearby Islington. A text arrived from Oliver, the premier’s press secretary. Had the editor set up a meeting with Oliver Robbins, Cameron’s deputy national security adviser?

  ‘JH [Heywood] is concerned you have not agreed the meeting he suggested.’

  Rusbridger was nonplussed. He texted back: ‘About security measures?’

  Oliver: ‘About handing the material back.’

  Rusbridger: ‘I thought he suggested meeting about security measures?’

  Oliver: ‘No. He is very clear. The meeting is about getting the material back.’

  It appeared that over the weekend something had changed. Rusbridger told the press secretary there hadn’t been a deal to return the Snowden files.

  Oliver was blunt: ‘You’ve had your fun. Now it’s time to hand the files back.’

  Rusbridger replied: ‘We are obviously talking about different meetings. That’s not what we agreed. If you’ve changed your mind that’s fine.’

  Oliver then went for the big stick: ‘If you won’t return it we will have to talk to “other people” this evening …’

  The conversation left Rusbridger amazed. Since the first Snowden story six weeks earlier Downing Street had treated the leak non-urgently – often taking days to respond. It was bureaucratic delay verging on sloth. Now it wanted a resolution within hours. ‘We just sat up and thought “Oh my God”,’ one insider said. It was possible the security services had detected an imminent threat from an enemy power. Or the securocrats had grown exasperated. Or Cameron had given a languid order to deal with it.

  The next morning, Robbins called. Aged 38, Robbins had enjoyed a sharp vertical rise – Oxford, the Treasury, principal private secretary to Tony Blair, director of intelligence in the Cabinet Office. Robbins announced it ‘was all over’. Ministers needed urgent assurances Snowden’s files had been ‘destroyed’. He said GCHQ technicians also wanted to inspect the files to ascertain their ‘journey’: to see if a third party had intercepted them.

  Rusbridger repeated: ‘This doesn’t make sense. It’s in US hands. We will go on reporting from the US. You are going to lose any sense of control over the conditions. You’re not going to have this chat with US news organisations.’

  Rusbridger then asked, ‘Are you saying explicitly, if we don’t do this you will close us down?’

  ‘I’m saying this,’ Robbins agreed.

  That afternoon, Jill Abramson of the New York Times and her managing editor, Dean Baquet, slipped into the Guardian’s London office.

  The Guardian had 14 conditions, set out on a sheet of A4, for the collaboration.

  They stipulated that both papers would work together on the material. Rusbridger knew the Times newsroom included reporters with deep expert knowledge of national security matters. ‘This guy is our source. I think you should treat him as your source,’ Rusbridger said. He added that neither Snowden nor Greenwald were exactly fans of the Times. British journalists would move in and work
alongside their Times colleagues.

  Abramson gave him a wry smile. She agreed to the conditions.

  Later Abramson and Baquet arrived at Heathrow airport to fly home. Security officers pulled them to one side. Was this a random stop? Or were they looking for the GCHQ files? They didn’t find them. The documents had already been spirited across the Atlantic.

  Rusbridger himself was due to go off to his regular summer ‘piano camp’ in the Lot Valley in central France. He had recently published a book entitled Play it Again, an account of how he had combined demanding editing duties and the WikiLeaks story with learning Chopin’s most exacting work, ‘Ballade No. 1’. After consulting with Johnson, Rusbridger decided he might as well still go, despite all the dramas. He boarded the Eurostar train bound for Bordeaux. At first it was hard to concentrate on music. Soon, however, he immersed himself completely in Debussy.

  As he worked on his piano technique, events in London now moved towards what Rusbridger would later describe as one of the strangest episodes in the Guardian’s long history. Robbins reappeared. ‘He was punctiliously polite, very well-mannered. There was no obvious aggression,’ Johnson says. But the official said the government wanted to seize the Guardian’s computers and subject them to forensic analysis. Johnson refused. He cited a duty to Snowden and to Guardian journalists. The deputy editor offered another way forward: to avoid being closed down, the Guardian would bash up its own ‘war room’ computers under GCHQ’s tutelage. Robbins agreed.

  It was a parody of Luddism: men were sent in to smash the machines.

  On Friday 19 July two men from GCHQ paid a visit to the Guardian. Their names were ‘Ian’ and ‘Chris’. They met with Guardian executive Sheila Fitzsimons. The Kremlin was apparently capable of techniques straight from the pages of James Bond, Ian told her: ‘You have got plastic cups on your table. Plastic cups can be turned into microphones. The Russians can send a laser beam through your window and turn them into a listening device.’ The Guardian nicknamed the pair the hobbits.

  Two days later the hobbits came back, this time with Robbins and a formidable civil servant called Kata. Ian, the senior of the two, was short, bubbly and dressed in shirt and chinos. His accent hinted at south Wales. Chris was taller and more taciturn. They carried a large and mysterious rucksack. Neither had previously spent any time with journalists; this was a new experience for them. In normal circumstances fraternising with the media was forbidden.

  Ian explained how he would have broken into the Guardian’s secret war room: ‘I would have given the guard £5k and got him to install a dummy keyboard. Black ops would have got it back. We would have seen everything you did.’ (The plan made several wildly optimistic assumptions.) At this Kata shook her head: apparently Ian’s Boy’s Own contribution was unwelcome.

  Ian then asked: ‘Can we have a look at the documents?’ Johnson said he couldn’t.

  Next, the GCHQ team opened up their rucksack. Inside was what looked like a large microwave oven. This strange object was a degausser. Its purpose is to destroy magnetic fields, thereby erasing hard drives and data. The electronics company Thales made it. (Degaussers were named after Carl Friedrich Gauss, who gave his name to the Gauss unit of magnetism.)

  The pair were not so much good cop/bad cop – more bad cop/silent cop.

  Ian: ‘You’ll need one of these.’

  Johnson: ‘We’ll buy our own degausser, thanks.’

  Ian: ‘No you won’t. It costs £30,000.’

  Johnson: ‘OK, we probably won’t then.’

  The Guardian did agree to purchase everything else the government spy agency recommended: angle-grinders, Dremels – a drill with a revolving bit, masks. ‘There will be a lot of smoke and fire,’ Ian warned, adding, with grim relish: ‘We can call off the black helicopters now …’

  At midday the next day, Saturday 20 July, the hobbits came back again. They joined Johnson, Blishen and Fitzsimons in a windowless concrete basement three floors down. The room was unoccupied, but crowded with relics from a bygone newspaper age: linotype machines used for setting pages in the 1970s, and giant letters spelling ‘The Guardian’ which had once adorned the paper’s old office in the Farringdon Road.

  Dressed in jeans and T-shirts and directed by Ian, the three Guardian staff took it in turns to smash up bits of computer: black squares, circuit boards, chips. It was sweaty work. Soon there were sparks and flames. And a lot of dust.

  Ian lamented that because of the GCHQ revelations he would no longer be able to tell his favourite joke. Ian used to go to graduate recruitment fairs looking to attract bright candidates to a career in government spying. He wrapped up his speech by saying: ‘If you want to take it further, telephone your mum and tell her. We will do the rest!’ Now, he complained, the spy agency’s press office had forbidden the gag.

  As the bashing and deconstruction continued, Ian revealed he was a mathematician – and a pretty exceptional one. He said that 700 people had applied the year he joined GCHQ, 100 had been interviewed, and just three hired. ‘You must be quite clever,’ Fitzsimons observed. ‘Some people say so,’ Ian answered. Chris rolled his eyes. The two GCHQ men took photos with their iPhones. When the smashing was finally completed, the journalists fed the pieces into the degausser, like small children posting shapes into a box. Everyone stood back. Ian bent forward and watched. Nothing happened. And still nothing. Then finally a loud pop.

  It had taken three hours. The data was destroyed, beyond the reach of Russian spies with trigonometric lasers. The hobbits were pleased. Blishen felt wistful. ‘There was this thing we had been protecting. It had been completely trashed,’ he says. The spooks and the Guardian team shook hands; Ian dashed off. (He said he was in a bit of a rush, because he had a wedding the next day.) The hobbits obviously didn’t come down to London often. They left carrying bags of shopping: presents for their families.

  ‘It was an extremely bizarre situation,’ Johnson says. The British government had compelled a major newspaper to smash up its own computers. This extraordinary moment was half pantomime, half-Stasi. But it was not yet the high tide of British official heavy-handedness. That was still to come.

  10

  DON’T BE EVIL

  Silicon Valley, California

  Summer 2013

  ‘Until they become conscious, they will never rebel.’

  GEORGE ORWELL,

  1984

  It was an iconic commercial. To accompany the launch of the Macintosh in 1984, Steve Jobs created an advert that would captivate the world. It would take the theme of George Orwell’s celebrated dystopian novel and recast it – with Apple as Winston Smith. His plucky company would fight the tyranny of Big Brother.

  As Walter Isaacson recounts in his biography of Jobs, the Apple founder was a child of the counterculture. He practised Zen Buddhism, smoked pot, walked around barefoot and pursued faddish vegetarian diets. He embodied the ‘fusion of flower power and processor power’. Even as Apple grew into a multi-billion dollar corporation, Jobs continued to identify with computing’s early subversives and long-haired pioneers – the hackers, pirates, geeks and freaks that made the future possible.

  Ridley Scott of Blade Runner fame directed the commercial. It shows Big Brother projected on a screen, addressing lines of workers. These skinhead drones wear identical uniforms. Into the grey nightmare bursts an attractive young woman. She wears orange shorts and a white tank top. She is carrying a hammer! Police in riot gear run after her. As Big Brother announces ‘We shall prevail’, the heroine hurls the hammer at him. The screen explodes in a blaze of light; the workers are open-mouthed. A voice announces smoothly: ‘On January 24th, Apple Computer will introduce Macintosh. And you’ll see why 1984 won’t be like 1984.’

  The 60-second advert was screened to nearly 100 million Americans during the Super Bowl, and was subsequently hailed as one of the best ever. Isaacson writes: ‘Initially the technologists and hippies didn’t interface well. Many in the counterculture saw computers
as ominous and Orwellian, the province of the Pentagon and the power culture.’

  The commercial asserted the opposite – that computers were cool, revolutionary and empowering, instruments of self-expression. The Macintosh was a way of asserting freedom against an all-seeing state.

  Almost 30 years later, following Jobs’s death in 2011, an NSA analyst came up with a smirking rejoinder. He prepared a top-secret presentation and, to illustrate the opening slide, he pulled up a couple of stills from Jobs’s commercial – one of Big Brother, the other of the blonde heroine with the hammer and the orange shorts.

  Under the heading ‘iPhone Location Services’ he typed:

  ‘Who knew in 1984 …’

  The next slide showed the late Jobs, holding up an iPhone.

  ‘… that this would be Big Brother …’

  A third slide showed crowds of whooping customers celebrating after buying the iPhone 4; one fan had inked the name on his cheek. The analyst’s pay-off line read:

  ‘… and the zombies would be paying customers.’

  The zombies were the public, unaware that the iPhone offered the spy agency new snooping capabilities beyond the imagination of the original Big Brother. The ‘paying customers’ had become Orwell’s mindless drones.

  For anyone who thought the digital age was about creative expression and flower power, the presentation was a shocker, and an insult to Steve Jobs’s vision. It threw dirt on the hippy kaftan and trampled on the tambourine. The identity of the NSA’s analyst is unknown. But the view appeared to reflect the thinking of an agency that in the aftermath of 9/11 grew arrogant and unaccountable. Snowden called the NSA ‘self-certifying’. In the debate over who ruled the internet, the NSA provided a dismaying answer: ‘We do.’

  The slides, given to Poitras and published by Der Spiegel magazine, show that the NSA had developed techniques to hack into iPhones. The agency assigned specialised teams to work on other smartphones too, such as Android. It targeted BlackBerry, previously regarded as the impregnable device of choice for White House aides. The NSA can hoover up photos and voicemail. It can hack Facebook, Google Earth and Yahoo Messenger. Particularly useful is geo-data, which locates where a target has been and when. The agency collects billions of records a day showing the location of mobile phone users across the world. It sifts them – using powerful analytics – to discover ‘co-travellers’. These are previously unknown associates of a target.