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

by Luke Harding

  In the meantime Merkel was keen to get answers – something the Obama administration had been frugal about. In particular she wanted to know the scope of the NSA’s surveillance operations against Germans. There were also lingering questions about her personal situation. Just who had signed off on this? What was the justification?

  Documents suggested that the US and its British GCHQ partner were using their embassies abroad as rooftop listening stations to spy on host governments. In Berlin this was especially brazen: the US embassy in Pariser Platz is only a few hundred metres away from the parliament building and Merkel’s office. From here, the NSA and CIA can spy on the entire government quarter. Spiegel branded the antennae bristling from the top of the embassy ‘Das Nest’.

  It was the same story elsewhere. In 2010 the NSA operated 80 embassy spy stations worldwide. Nineteen of them were in European cities, including Paris, Madrid, Rome, Prague and Geneva – where Snowden worked for the CIA. The Americans also had a station in Frankfurt.

  Other Five Eyes partners were doing snooping of their own. A Snowden document, published jointly by Guardian Australia and the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, revealed that Australia’s spy agency had eavesdropped on Indonesia’s president Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, plus his wife, Ani, senior minsters and confidants. The top-secret slide presentation is from Australia’s Department of Defence and the Defence Signals Directorate. It dates from November 2009. Another leak, meanwhile, shows that the NSA spied on 25 heads of state attending a 2010 G20 summit in Toronto. The covert operation was carried out from the US embassy in Ottawa. Canada’s own spy agency, the Communications Security Establishment Canada (CSEC), was closely involved.

  Like his German, Mexican and Brazilian counterparts, Indonesia’s president was furious at Australia’s un-neighbourly behaviour. He downgraded diplomatic relations with Canberra, and stopped co-operation on issues such as people-smuggling and boat-people. Australia’s prime minister Tony Abbott refused to apologise. Nor would he confirm if the snooping had taken place. Instead, the debate in Australia was a depressing echo of the one in Britain, with some politicians and Murdoch-owned newspapers attacking the media that broke the story.

  In Europe, displeased politicians were trying to formulate a response to the Snowden revelations. The topic dominated an EU summit in Brussels. Merkel told fellow European leaders the issue at stake wasn’t her mobile but what it represented – ‘the phones of millions of European citizens’. German politicians called for talks on a trade agreement with the US to be suspended until the White House responded fully. There were calls to take witness evidence from Snowden in Moscow. And to offer him asylum, something Merkel had declined.

  The summit put Britain in a tricky position. David Cameron found himself the target of veiled criticism. He declined to say whether GCHQ had been involved in top-level bugging, or if he had seen a readout from Chancellor Merkel’s mobile. It is highly likely that any information gleaned by the NSA would have been shared with GCHQ. It’s even possible that the eavesdropping was conducted through Menwith Hill, the NSA’s European hub in North Yorkshire. Cameron merely defended Britain’s ‘brave spies’.

  European parliamentarians voted for tough new rules on data privacy. Their aim was to stop EU data collected by firms like Google, Yahoo or Microsoft from ending up in the NSA’s servers. The proposal, an explicit push-back against PRISM, envisaged restricting the sharing of EU information with non-EU countries. It also proposed the right of EU citizens to erase their digital records from the internet, as well as big fines for firms that broke the rules.

  The measure had dropped out of the original proposal made by the European Commission in 2012, following US lobbying. The US argued these new regulations were bad for business. Silicon Valley agreed. But the accusations of NSA spying hardened the mood in the European camp, giving impetus to those who wanted reform. (In the end Britain came to the US’s rescue, with Cameron persuading EU allies to postpone any new rules until 2015.)

  The EU’s response was part of a wider post-Snowden trend to ‘de-Americanise’ the internet. Already, in 2012, countries including Russia, China and several Middle Eastern states had made moves to bring cyberspace under greater domestic control. Now, the Europeans and Latin Americans were going in the same direction. Brazil and Germany began work on a resolution in the UN’s general assembly to place boundaries on NSA spying.

  The new buzzword was ‘cyber-sovereignty’. The shared goal among the US’s disgruntled allies was to make it harder for the NSA to get access to national data. For authoritarian countries such as Russia, there was an added bonus. Greater state control of the internet made it easier to snoop on their own citizens and keep a lid on dissent.

  The most vociferous reaction came from Brazil. In October, Rousseff announced plans to build a new undersea cable linking South America with Europe. This would, in theory, shut out the US and make it harder for the NSA to siphon off Brazilian information. The president also mulled over legislation that would force Google and other US tech giants to store the data for Brazilian users on local servers. Thousands of federal workers, meanwhile, were ordered to adopt a form of highly encrypted email. The policy was accelerated after Snowden’s disclosures.

  Some experts doubted the effectiveness of Brazil’s fight-back. They pointed out that, unless Brazil came up with a rival to Google, the NSA would still be able to get hold of its data – if necessary by court order. Either way, Snowden’s disclosures seemed to have triggered what Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt dubbed the ‘Balkanization’ of the internet. What was supposed to be a universal tool was in danger of becoming fragmented and ‘country-specific’, he warned.

  In Germany, state-backed Deutsche Telekom floated plans for a new national internet network. Its slogan, ‘Email made in Germany’, suggested consumers could have the same confidence in their email as they would expect to have in a German dishwasher. Emails between German users would no longer go via US servers. Traffic, mostly, would be kept within the EU’s Schengen area (which, helpfully, excluded Britain). The aspiration was to keep out the nosy Anglophone spies.

  Perhaps the most unexpected corollary of the Snowden affair was the return of the typewriter. After discovering that the NSA bugged its diplomats, the Indian government turned to old technology. From the summer of 2013 the Indian High Commission in London began using typewriters again. Nothing top secret was stored in electronic form, high commissioner Jaimini Bhagwati told the Times of India. Diplomats had taken to strolling outside: ‘No highly classified information is discussed inside the embassy building. And it’s very tedious to step out into the garden every time something sensitive has to be discussed.’

  The Russians had reached the same conclusion. The Kremlin’s super-secret Federal Protection Service (FSO) – a branch of the FSB, that some believe is guarding Snowden – put in a large order for typewriters.

  The personal computer revolution that transformed communications had crashed to a halt. Those who cared about privacy were reverting to the pre-internet age. Typewriters, handwritten notes and the surreptitious rendezvous were back in fashion. Surely it was only a matter of time before the return of the carrier pigeon.

  The NSA’s clumsy international spying operation generated much heat and light. One document revealed the agency was even spying on the pornographic viewing habits of six Muslim ‘radicalisers’, in an attempt to discredit them. None of the radicalisers were actually terrorists. The snooping – on individuals’ private browsing activities – was redolent of the kind of unjustified surveillance that led to the original Church committee.

  There was a distinct sense of history repeating itself. Some old hands suggested that the US had been engaged in similar activities for decades.

  Claus Arndt, a former German deputy responsible for overseeing Germany’s security services, saw echoes of previous scandals in the current Snowden one. Arndt told Der Spiegel that up until 1968 the US had behaved in West Germany like the occupying power th
ey once had been – bugging whomever they wanted. After that, the Americans had to ask permission from German officials to conduct surveillance. In West Berlin, however, the US behaved ‘as if it had just marched in’ up until 1990, Arndt said. He recalled how one US major had a row with his girlfriend and gave an order for her phone to be tapped and her letters read. Arndt said he had had no choice but to agree the request.

  What about the US’s modern methods? Arndt said indiscriminate collection was ineffective, and that evaluating a vast ‘data-heap’ was virtually impossible. Nevertheless, the Americans had always been ‘crazy about information’, he said, and were still ‘hegemons’ in his own country.

  He summed up the impact of the Snowden revelations in a single phrase: ‘Theoretically we are sovereign. In practice we are not.’

  13

  THE BROOM CUPBOARD

  New York Times office,

  Eighth Avenue, New York

  Summer to Winter 2013

  ‘You come here often. #nsapickuplines’

  JOKE ON TWITTER

  The room is a glorified broom cupboard. A few paintings belonging to the late Arthur Sulzberger, Snr, are stacked against a wall. One print shows a newspaper man puffing on a cigar; above him are the words: ‘Big Brother is watching you’. (A note says Arthur will review the paintings ‘when he returns’. He died in 2012.) There are strip lights, a small table, a couple of chairs. No windows. On a metal shelf, boxes of cream-coloured envelopes. They belong to Arthur Sulzberger, Jr, – Arthur senior’s heir – and the current publisher of the New York Times. On the corridor outside are photos of the Times’s Pulitzer Prize winners. They are a distinguished bunch. From the staff cafeteria comes the hum of intelligent chatter.

  The offices of the New York Times are on Eighth Avenue, in midtown New York. The paper’s executive stationery cupboard was to play an unlikely role in the Snowden story. It was from here that the Guardian carried on its reporting of the NSA files, in partnership with the Times, after its London operation was shut down. The cupboard was pokey. It was also extremely secure. Access was highly restricted; there were guards, video cameras and other measures. Its location on US soil meant that the journalists who worked there felt they enjoyed something they didn’t have in London: the protection of the US constitution.

  In the US, the Obama administration distanced itself from the destruction of the Guardian’s hard drives – an act widely condemned by EU organisations, the rest of the world, and the UN’s special rapporteur on freedom of expression. Evidently, the White House wasn’t delighted by the Snowden revelations. But it understood the first amendment guaranteed press freedom. No such smashing up could happen in America, White House officials said.

  Two days after the GCHQ hobbits supervised the destruction, the British government followed up Rusbridger’s offer. It asked the Guardian to identify the paper’s US media partners. The editor told them it was working with the New York Times and the non-profit ProPublica.

  But it was another three and a half weeks before the UK’s foreign office did anything about the intelligence. On 15 August, Philip Barton, Britain’s deputy ambassador in the US, finally put in a call to Jill Abramson, the Times’s executive editor. He requested a meeting. Abramson had been planning to travel to DC anyway. She had arranged to see James Clapper, the embattled director of national intelligence. Not about Snowden but about the alarming frequency with which the administration was exerting pressure on the Times’s reporters, particularly those covering intelligence matters.

  ‘We have decades of experience publishing sensitive stories dealing with national security,’ Abramson says. In 1972 the Times published the Pentagon Papers, during the Arthur Sulzberger era. ‘We’re never cavalier. We take them [senior administration officials] seriously. But if a war is being waged against terrorism, people need to know the dimensions of that war.’

  The deputy ambassador invited Abramson to drop into the British embassy. Rusbridger advised against doing so, on grounds of spycraft. So Abramson eventually agreed to meet at the ambassador’s residence, rather than at the embassy itself, which was technically on UK soil: who knew what British spooks might get up to there? At the meeting, Barton requested the return of the Snowden documents or their destruction. The UK-related leaks made his government uneasy, he said. Abramson neither confirmed nor denied that the Times possessed Snowden material. She promised to go away and think about it.

  Two days later she called Barton back to say that the Times was declining his request. According to Abramson, ‘The meeting was a non-event. I never heard from them again.’ The British foreign office, it seemed, was merely going through the formal motions. Rusbridger had made clear that the material existed in many jurisdictions. ProPublica in New York had also been working with the Guardian for several months, as Number 10 knew. The British made no attempt to approach them.

  That summer and autumn, Guardian US published several notable scoops. It revealed that the NSA was snooping on 35 world leaders, had subverted encryption, and was working with GCHQ to spy on British citizens – an apparent farewell present to the US from Tony Blair during his final days in office. The NSA also drafted procedures to spy on the British behind GCHQ’s back, if they felt US interests required it. This was most ungentlemanly: under the Five Eyes agreement, it was understood that the Brits and the Americans were not supposed to spy on each other. It was unclear whether the NSA had, accidentally or otherwise, eavesdropped on Cameron himself. He wasn’t on the list of 35, but some of his interlocutors were.

  All these disclosures crossed the planet. Greenwald’s video talk had already set viewing records for the Guardian’s website. Snowden then performed a live question and answer session on the site, while still in hiding in Hong Kong. Gabriel Dance, the paper’s interactive editor in the US, produced a novel interactive guide to mass surveillance, ‘The NSA Decoded’, which combined conventional text and graphics with video inserts. The Snowden saga demonstrated that modern technology could generate global traction for such a story at a very high speed.

  Not least in the US, of course, because there it was having a transforming effect on the political landscape. When the first revelations were published, reaction on Capitol Hill was negative. There was condemnation of both the leaks and Snowden himself. Members of Congress instinctively sided with the security services.

  Some independent-minded individuals, though, supported Snowden from the outset. One was Snowden’s hero Ron Paul. Paul said the US should be grateful to the young whistleblower for the service he had done in speaking out about the ‘injustice’ carried out by the government. Paul’s son Rand, the Republican senator from Kentucky, echoed this. He described NSA surveillance of Americans as an ‘all-out assault on the constitution’.

  Figures as diverse as the right-wing commentator Glenn Beck and the liberal Michael Moore praised Snowden, as did the New Yorker’s John Cassidy. Al Gore sent a supportive tweet. Elsewhere in the mainstream media there was striking hostility, usually expressed in ad hominem terms. For example, Jeffrey Toobin, also at the New Yorker, described Snowden as ‘a grandiose narcissist who deserves to be in prison’.

  In public, most members of Congress delivered a similar anti-Snowden message. But not so much in private. The members of the House and the Senate may not have liked the leaks or even Snowden personally, holed up as he was in Russia. But among some of them there was a niggling concern about the scale of surveillance he had revealed. As the disclosures mounted, so too did unease in Congress.

  Just how much disquiet there was on Capitol Hill became apparent in late July, almost two months after the first Snowden stories had appeared. A young and relatively new congressman, Justin Amash, tabled an amendment to the annual Defense Department authorisation bill. His goal seemed extravagant: to put an end to the NSA’s bulk collection of Americans’ phone records. As Amash put it, he wanted to ‘defend the fourth amendment … and the privacy of each and every American’.

  Amash didn’
t stem from the liberal wing of the Democrats, as one might expect. He was a Republican. A second-generation Arab-American of Palestinian Christian and Syrian Greek Orthodox descent, Amash came from the libertarian wing of the party. He, too, was a supporter of Ron Paul. Paul was the leading advocate of small government and deference to the constitution. He was an opponent of military adventurism and a fierce critic of government intrusion into privacy. Amash donated to Paul’s presidential run in 2008 – as did Snowden in 2012.

  Nobody had expected Amash’s amendment to get very far. However, it made it past the House rules committee. The Obama administration, the intelligence agencies and their allies in Congress then waged an all-out effort to crush it. In a marathon series of closed-door meetings in the Capitol basement General Alexander warned of dire consequences for national security; Clapper said the NSA might lose a vital intelligence tool. The White House took the unusual step of publicly objecting to a proposed amendment to a bill.

  On the evening of Wednesday 24 July 2013, the Guardian’s Spencer Ackerman was one of only a few reporters who bothered to turn up to watch the vote in the House of Representatives. Suddenly, something was in the air. Since 9/11, the US security state had moved in one direction only: it had got bigger. Now, for the first time, there was a push-back. ‘It was electric, the outcome uncertain until the end,’ Ackerman says.

  In a Congress normally wracked by deep partisan division, two wings of the Republican and Democratic party were coming together. Since the early days of Obama’s presidency the feuding parties had been unable to agree on pretty much anything. From outside, Washington looked tribal and dysfunctional; the only topic on which there was bipartisan consensus was Iran. On domestic issues the politicians were fractious and unreconciled.

  On this occasion a Democrat, John Conyers, co-sponsored Amash’s amendment. The Republican and Democratic leaderships in the House, as well as the White House, bitterly rejected it. Civil liberties Democrats and libertarian Republicans formed a pro-Amash alliance. The divisions in Congress weren’t the usual ones. Rather, the divide was Washington insiders versus libertarians. Institutionally, it was between intelligence committees, which oversee secret operations, and the judiciary committees, which oversee fidelity to the law and constitution.