This would have been even more apparent if the “context” inserted by WikiLeaks had made any attempt to portray the military perspective. At no point does the “Collateral Murder” video indicate that the AH-64 Apaches were providing cover ahead of the troops in Humvees and on foot who are shown at the end of the video—soldiers who, just before the video begins, had been attacked by insurgents with AK-47s and RPGs just a few miles down the road. And what the video revealed, at least to my ears, is the shift in tone in the final lines of dialogue between the pilots. When the pilot manning the guns blames the children’s injuries on the men who’d driven the kids into a firefight, I hear, as I’ve heard in many similar circumstances, a service member taking his first steps toward trying to live with the reality of an action carried out in battle—something he already regrets.
The video quickly became a sensation in the media and online. Along with continued publication of the documents provided by Manning, it and the April 5 release event put WikiLeaks on the map and brought the idea of activism through massive leaks into the public consciousness as a means of ostensibly making political statements. Assange was elevated in the press to celebrity status, and he traveled the world, promoting himself and his organization, as Manning remained anonymous. Six weeks later, in an online chat on May 20, Manning revealed to semifamous former hacker Adrian Lamo that she was WikiLeaks’ source. Lamo contacted the FBI, and on May 27, 2010, the Army Criminal Investigation Command arrested Manning.
Before Manning’s apprehension, WikiLeaks had been releasing small caches of classified and sensitive US documents onto the internet, appearing at least not to intend to put lives in danger, although not taking sufficient care to actually accomplish that goal. After Manning’s arrest, Assange seemed intent on dumping as many classified documents onto the internet as he could, as quickly as he could. In my last few months as USD(I) and my first few months as DNI, on top of dealing with the confirmation process and starting work as the fourth DNI in five years, my time and attention were also taken up by the efforts at DOD and CIA to deal with these document dumps. Teams were on standby in both places to sort quickly through whatever was exposed in an effort to find names and identifying details for people in Iraq and Afghanistan who were helping the US war effort, and then to try to rescue them before the Taliban or Iraqi insurgents could find and kill them. In the midst of this, some young action officer with a sense of humor snuck an in-joke past CIA leaders, calling the CIA team the “WikiLeaks Task Force,” abbreviated as “WTF.”
Then Julian Assange made a personal mistake. In August, two women in Sweden alleged to police that, in separate incidents, what had started as consensual sex became nonconsensual, and in both instances, Assange didn’t stop. Sweden issued an arrest warrant, and in December, Assange turned himself in to British police. His attorneys fought extradition for the next year and a half, but in May 2012 the British Supreme Court ruled that the Swedish extradition order was valid. In disguise as a deliveryman, Assange snuck into the Ecuadorian embassy in London, claiming that he was the victim of a US-led conspiracy to get him to Sweden, where the CIA could whisk him away to stand trial for political crimes in the United States. (In fact, the US justice system doesn’t work that way, and the United Kingdom, where Assange was living, was our closest partner for both military and intelligence operations, while Sweden was more likely to resist if the United States asked for Assange.) The Ecuadorian embassy granted him asylum, and he took up permanent residence there, fearful that leaving it would lead to his immediate arrest. The result of this bizarre series of events is that the director of WikiLeaks hasn’t set foot outside the Ecuadorian embassy since May 2012. Grotesquely to me, much of the international media glamorized him, establishing a new archetype of “long-suffering leaker-activist under self-imposed house arrest” for others to follow. I’m in agreement with CIA director Mike Pompeo’s 2017 characterization of WikiLeaks as a “non-state hostile intelligence service.”
In December 2012—at the very time I was trying to explain to lawmakers on Capitol Hill why intelligence collection under Section 702 of FISA was so important to security—Edward Snowden sent encrypted emails to Glenn Greenwald, a reporter for the UK daily newspaper the Guardian, holding out the offer of classified documents that he claimed revealed NSA spying on US citizens. According to Greenwald, Snowden’s first approach to him was so wrapped in code names and backdoor communications channels that he initially didn’t take the offer seriously. Snowden then contacted Laura Poitras, a documentary filmmaker who had been the subject of a feature Greenwald had written in April 2012, and asked her to help him recruit Greenwald. Once she convinced Greenwald to give Snowden an opportunity, they began exchanging encrypted communications and Snowden transmitted some of the documents he’d stolen. By the time Snowden fled to Hong Kong in May 2013, Julian Assange had been ensconced in the London Ecuadorian embassy for only eleven months.
Poitras, Greenwald, and a second reporter for the Guardian, Ewen MacAskill, flew to Hong Kong to meet Edward Snowden. In a piece for the New York Times, Peter Maas somewhat famously captured the cloak-and-dagger feel of that first meeting:
Snowden had instructed them that once they were in Hong Kong, they were to go at an appointed time to the Kowloon district and stand outside a restaurant that was in a mall connected to the Mira Hotel. There, they were to wait until they saw a man carrying a Rubik’s Cube, then ask him when the restaurant would open. The man would answer their question, but then warn that the food was bad. When the man with the Rubik’s Cube arrived, it was Edward Snowden.
Over the next several days, blocking cracks around doors with blankets and pillows and covering his laptop, Snowden spilled the US government secrets he’d stolen to the two reporters, as Poitras recorded the sessions. By each of their accounts, Snowden eventually gave them the massive files of highly classified documents he’d smuggled out of Hawaii. On Wednesday, June 5, the Guardian published Glenn Greenwald’s first story from the Snowden leaks. The article 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.
The order, a copy of which has been obtained by the Guardian, requires Verizon on an “ongoing, daily basis” to give the NSA information on all telephone calls in its systems, both within the US and between the US and other countries.
The document shows for the first time that under the Obama administration the communication records of millions of US citizens are being collected indiscriminately and in bulk—regardless of whether they are suspected of any wrongdoing.
I’ve said many times in private, and even a few times publicly, that what transpired next would have played out very differently if, in September 2001, someone—Secretary Rumsfeld, DCI Tenet, or even President Bush—had come out and publicly stated, “We need to be able to track whom the terrorists overseas are talking to here in the United States. So we’re going to save call records, and we’re going to treat them like the FBI treats its fingerprint files: We’ll hold them in reserve, and if we discover a plot to conduct a terrorist attack, we’ll get a warrant to see who the terrorist is communicating with.” If someone in authority had announced that, I believe both Congress and most Americans likely would have judged such actions to be reasonable, and we could have had an open discussion about how to execute them while protecting civil liberties. Instead, seven years after the phrase “enhanced interrogation techniques” had become part of the public lexicon, and many Americans had begun questioning what their Intelligence Community was doing in their name, a UK daily paper published a report that we were collecting intelligence, “indiscriminately and in bulk,” on millions of Americans. We appeared as if we’d been caught doing something terribly wrong.
Greenwald’s story also implicated me personally. Near the end of that first article, he wrote, “The court order
appears to explain the numerous cryptic public warnings by two US senators, Ron Wyden and Mark Udall, about the scope of the Obama administration’s surveillance activities.” Very quickly, the internet dredged up video of the March hearing in which Senator Wyden and I had our exchange, and cable networks began to air it. Leaving off Senator Wyden’s long and confusing preface about “dossiers,” which complicated the narrative and didn’t fit into a sound bite, the clip merely showed the final back-and-forth.
“Does the NSA collect any type of data at all on millions, or hundreds of millions, of Americans?”
“No, sir.”
“It does not?”
“Not wittingly.”
The media narrative immediately solidified into the simple assertion that the DNI had lied to Congress under oath to cover up NSA wrongdoing. Missing from the ensuing discussion were two honestly inconsequential facts: I wasn’t under oath at the worldwide threat hearing, and the Guardian story concerned a court order from April, after my testimony. I describe these details as “inconsequential” because at the time I testified, there were other programs collecting metadata under Section 215 authorities, and because I always have an obligation to tell the truth to Congress, whether I’m under oath or not.
However, the accusation also left out three very consequential details that put my answer into context. First, Senator Wyden had asked me about “dossiers” on Americans, using that word twice in his question, and dossiers are impossible to build from telephone metadata. Second, my answer “not wittingly” only makes sense in the context of intercepting the communications content of bona fide foreign targets without knowing Americans were on the other end of the line. We absolutely knew we were collecting metadata. We were “witting,” very aware of that, as was the committee. Third, and foremost in my mind, the accusation held that I had lied to the Senate committee dedicated to oversight of the IC, a committee whose members had access to and already knew the facts about each of the programs in question. My reputation on Capitol Hill was that I consistently spoke truth, often at the expense of politics and propriety. I’d stated, for example, that China and Russia were the greatest threats to US national security, when the State Department and White House really would have preferred I not. I had testified dozens of times over the two and a half decades since my DIA confirmation in 1991, and I’d never lied and never been accused of lying, but the accusation was that—just this once, for a change of pace—I’d chosen to lie, and I’d done it on live television before the Senate committee who had both the authority and ability to check my answer immediately, and that I’d done it ten minutes before a closed, classified hearing at which we could lay out all the details of the programs in question and discuss them freely. Really?
I recognize, of course, that this explanation may sound defensive and as if these accusations bother me a great deal. If I’m going to continue speaking truth, I have to acknowledge that it is and they do. I’m bothered, because, as an intelligence officer, I depend on my customers, which in 2013 included the president and Congress, to take it as a given that I will always speak truth to power. The media members who pressed this narrative that I’d lied sought to undermine that trust. I’m also angered because the narrative was purposefully blind. Later that summer, ODNI public affairs director Shawn Turner invited journalists from two national publications, separately, to discuss the March hearing, and why I’d answered the way I did. Both journalists, again separately, gave Shawn the same answer: The explanation he gave to them sounded plausible—even believable—but reporting that the DNI lied under oath sold newspaper copies and drove internet clicks, and their editors would never let them change that narrative. So in writing that I’d lied, at least some journalistic publications were shirking their own obligation to the truth.
In June 2013, however, we had much bigger concerns than my personal reputation. While we couldn’t publicly confirm or deny the existence of a top secret court order forcing Verizon to turn over its call records, after June 5, our adversaries certainly knew to stop using Verizon for their communications. Then, on June 6, the Guardian published another article that began:
The National Security Agency has obtained direct access to the systems of Google, Facebook, Apple and other US internet giants, according to a top secret document obtained by the Guardian.
The NSA access is part of a previously undisclosed program called Prism, which allows officials to collect material including search history, the content of emails, file transfers and live chats, the document says.
The Guardian has verified the authenticity of the document, a 41-slide PowerPoint presentation—classified as top secret with no distribution to foreign allies—which was apparently used to train intelligence operatives on the capabilities of the program. The document claims “collection directly from the servers” of major US service providers.
Although the presentation claims the program is run with the assistance of the companies, all those who responded to a Guardian request for comment on Thursday denied knowledge of any such program.
Revealing the existence of PRISM was no longer merely exposing a program that aggregates metadata. PRISM was how we collected content from terrorists, adversarial governments, and hostile intelligence services. This and subsequent articles said PRISM gave us access to “email, video and voice chat, videos, photos, voice-over-IP (Skype, for example) chats, file transfers, social networking details, and more.” Included in the Guardian’s feature were images purported to be PowerPoint slides from NSA marked as top secret and compartmented, which would give our adversaries not only an overview of a powerful US intelligence tool, but also clues as to how to avoid surveillance. Worse, the level of specificity in the article, combined with the fact that the Guardian had published details of disparate classified programs two days in a row, and that the Washington Post published its own PRISM story, left no doubt that NSA wasn’t just leaking, but had its own version of PFC Manning, one who was disclosing secrets far more dangerous to national security. This riveted the attention of the entire national security enterprise, and galvanized our counterintelligence and security apparatus to identify and locate the traitor. (The Washington Post, at least, ran an acknowledgment a few days after its PRISM article retracting the allegation that NSA had “direct access” to the company servers. The retraction received almost no notice.)
On Friday the Guardian published an article alleging that President Obama had asked the IC to draw up a “target list” for overseas cyberattacks, and included a copy of a purported presidential memo issuing the order. That day the Washington Post also featured two new pieces from leaked documents.
On Saturday the Guardian published their fourth article:
The National Security Agency has developed a powerful tool for recording and analysing where its intelligence comes from, raising questions about its repeated assurances to Congress that it cannot keep track of all the surveillance it performs on American communications.
The Guardian has acquired top-secret documents about the NSA datamining tool, called Boundless Informant, that details and even maps by country the voluminous amount of information it collects from computer and telephone networks.
The focus of the internal NSA tool is on counting and categorizing the records of communications, known as metadata, rather than the content of an email or instant message.
The Boundless Informant documents show the agency collecting almost 3 billion pieces of intelligence from US computer networks over a 30-day period ending in March 2013. One document says it is designed to give NSA officials answers to questions like, “What type of coverage do we have on country X” in “near real-time by asking the SIGINT . . . infrastructure.”
Images attached to the article, marked as top secret and compartmented, revealed, not surprisingly, that much of our signals intelligence collection was taking place in active combat zones, but it also indicated that signals intelligence was a global
enterprise. However, while the reporters framed this as a revelation that the US Intelligence Community was spying on poor and irrelevant nations of the world, our more astute adversaries could use the leaked information to discern how we were spying on them, using back doors around the globe.
We were hemorrhaging capabilities, and because we didn’t know the source of the leaks, we couldn’t stop them. Then, on Sunday, the Guardian posted a video filmed by Laura Poitras. After an establishing shot of marine traffic moving about Hong Kong harbor, the camera cuts to the face of a young man, wearing an open-collared shirt and glasses, with mussed hair and a slight, uneven stubble. His head and shoulders fill the right side of the frame, and a mirror reflects the back of his head, out of focus. A still frame from this video became the iconic image of Snowden, his “Che Guevara T-shirt” shot, featured on his Wikipedia page and whenever a story about him runs on TV. He glances at the camera and then away again as he says, “My name’s Ed Snowden. I’m twenty-nine years old. I work for Booz Allen Hamilton as an infrastructure analyst for NSA.”
Over the next twelve minutes, as edited by Poitras, Glenn Greenwald interviews Snowden on camera, describing how Snowden had moved from working at CIA to Dell to Booz Allen Hamilton in a series of information technology–related jobs. Greenwald asks what led Snowden from “thinking about being a whistleblower to making the choice to actually become a whistleblower.” Snowden answers:
When you’re in positions of privileged access, like a systems administrator for these, sort of, Intelligence Community agencies, you’re exposed to a lot more information on a broader scale than the average employee, and because of that, you see things that may be disturbing, but over the course of a normal person’s career, you’d only see one or two of these instances. When you see everything, you see them on a more frequent basis, and you recognize that some of these things are actually abuses.
When you talk to people about them in a place like this, where this is the normal state of business, people tend not to take them very seriously and, you know, move on from them, but over time, that awareness of wrongdoing sort of builds up, and you feel compelled to talk about it, and the more you talk about it, the more you’re ignored, the more you’re told it’s not a problem, until eventually you realize that these things need to be determined by the public, not by somebody who was simply hired by the government.
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