The Edward Snowden Affair

by Michael Gurnow

  “U.S. expands the surveillance apparatus continuously” serves as a teaser rather than a comprehensive exposé. Greenwald begins by reviewing the director of national intelligence’s contradictory claims regarding American surveillance then makes passing reference to Boundless Informant before revealing XKeyscore.

  Greenwald’s treatment of XKeyscore is peculiar. It is cursory and not immediately seconded by another publication’s reporting. In almost all previous instances in which he issues an exclusive about a particular top secret surveillance program, he explores it at length. But Greenwald teases his audience by merely relaying that XKeyscore is software that uses over 700 servers worldwide to spy on a surplus of 150 countries. The program has the ability to log onto and track a target in real-time as the individual moves across the Internet. He does not go into greater detail about how the program functions or provide any data showing its effectiveness. However, an included XKeyscore training slide asks, “My target uses Google Maps to scope target locations—can I use this information to determine his email address? What about the web searches—do any stand out and look suspicious?” The tutorial outlines, “XKEYSCORE extracts and databases these events including all web-based searches which can be retrospectively queried.” It emphasizes that the NSA retains data because “retrospectively” appears in red.136

  Greenwald was not content to let the Brazilian populace merely read about American surveillance. He had also gone to the Brazilian television network Rede Globo with a handful of previously unseen classified slides tucked under his arm. After America’s ABC network, Rede Globo has the largest annual revenue of any broadcast company in the world.137 Hot on the heels of the twin O Globo articles, an eight-minute exposé aired the next day,138 Sunday, July 7. Audiences learned that “Brazil became a strategic focus of the U.S. ‘Big Brother’ because the data that transits through here is less protected than the same data in other countries.” The additional slides deal with the NSA programs Fairview and Boundless Informant. They show the South American country was surveilled in 2012 because of the amount of Internet traffic which was being directed to Pakistan and North Korea.139

  There is an incongruity in reports that follow Greenwald’s articles. Brazil’s television program Fantastico announced140 that the purported 2.3 Brazilian and three million American pieces of retrieved data were cumulative totals amassed over a 10year period.141 This contradicts Greenwald’s initial Guardian statement that the Boundless Informant slides were displaying monthly accumulations.142 Considering the advanced technology and the fact Greenwald was consulting with Snowden in Hong Kong while drafting his June exposé, it is more likely the original statistic is correct. This is reinforced by the proportional figures found in Poitras’ examination of the NSA’s German surveillance.

  Predictably, Greenwald’s Fairview exposé automatically brought into question the nature of U.S. communication providers’ relationships with their foreign associates, but it was Brazil’s response that made headlines. The nation’s president, Dilma Rousseff, called an emergency cabinet meeting as soon as the reports were made public. On Monday she issued a statement through her foreign affairs minister, Antonio Patriota: “The Brazilian government has asked for clarifications through the US embassy in Brasília and the Brazilian embassy in Washington.” Brazil was politically astute. It refused to wait for Washington to address the grievance. Though a member, Brazil did not bother asking the U.N. to investigate. Instead it demanded regulations be put in place “to impede abuses and protect the privacy” of people worldwide. In the meantime, the South American nation instigated a full internal investigation of its own. Federal police and the national Brazilian Telecommunication Agency looked into exactly how the data was being accessed. They suspected that satellites signals were being intercepted but also examined the transatlantic cables connecting the country to the outside world. Brazil questioned domestic communication providers in their possible role in the matter.143 The U.S. stated it would not publicly comment on the reports, and its responses to Brazil would be limited.144

  Poitras left Berlin the day after she revealed that the NSA was spying on Germany. She met Greenwald and MacAskill in Rio de Janeiro on July 1 and continued working on her interview footage.145 As Greenwald had a few days prior, she was about to present her own doubleheader of classified disclosures.

  Shortly before Snowden left Hawaii, Poitras was still unsure about the authenticity of the person she was having anonymous discussions with over the Internet. She wanted to confirm Snowden was who he said he was. She enlisted the aid of Jacob Appelbaum. Though neither party was aware of who they were speaking to at the time, Snowden undoubtedly knew of Appelbaum’s work.

  Appelbaum is probably one of Snowden’s few IT peers. He is a Internet security innovator and famed hacker. A proponent of online privacy, Appelbaum has traveled the world engaging audiences in talks about the latest advances in Internet safety. He is a consultant for the online anonymity venture the Tor Project and has worked for Greenpeace and the radical environmental group Rainforest Action Network. In 2005 he snuck past the National Guard and set up wireless Internet so victims of Hurricane Katrina could register for FEMA housing. Like Poitras, he has been repeatedly detained at airports and had his personal possessions confiscated. After Appelbaum spoke on behalf of Assange and WikiLeaks at the 2010 HOPE Conference,146 the Justice Department requisitioned the contents of his Twitter accounts. Cleverly the social network petitioned the court system to unseal the request. This allowed the company to place the order’s contents and demands online.147 Because of consistent American security harassment, Appelbaum resides in Berlin, which is perhaps where he met Poitras (or through her interaction with Assange).148 He had provided one of the questions during Snowden’s June 17 online Q & A session.149

  After Appelbaum had revealed his identity to Snowden, the whistleblower gave him and Poitras permission to publish the contents of the interview when they felt it appropriate. The media had saturated the public with basic IT and intelligence jargon since June 5, and the average reader could now follow the otherwise technical conversation. On July 8 using Der Spiegel as the venue, Poitras allowed Snowden to vicariously and retroactively address the current state of world affairs.150

  Shortly into the interview and due in part to geographical self-interest, Appelbaum bluntly inquires whether the German government or authorities were privy to the NSA’s domestic spying. “Yes, of course,” Snowden responds. “We’re in bed together with the Germans the same as with most other Western countries. For example, we tip them off when someone we want is flying through their airports (that we for example, have learned from the cell phone of a suspected hacker’s girlfriend in a totally unrelated third country) and they hand them over to us. They don’t ask to justify how we know something, and vice versa, to insulate their political leaders from the backlash of knowing how grievously they’re violating global privacy.” Snowden makes it retrospectively clear the European Union was colluding with the U.S. when Morales’ airplane was forced down in Vienna. Obviously France, Spain, Portugal and Austria’s actions were the product of American pressure, U.N. obligation and—as Snowden mentions—the desire to not question how Washington “knew” Snowden was onboard the Bolivian aircraft.

  Appelbaum quickly follows with, “Does the NSA partner with other nations, like Israel?” Snowden replies it does but undoubtedly knew it was a leaning question. Appelbaum then asks if the NSA aided in the creation of Stuxnet. Stuxnet was a fabled state-of-the-art computer virus which infected Iran’s nuclear facilities. Its origin was long believed to have been a joint effort between Israel and the United States. Stuxnet was discovered because of poor programming. It inadvertently spread beyond its intended target and extended globally, infecting Iran, Indonesia, India, Azerbaijan, America and Pakistan.151 It was later duplicated and sold on the black market.152 Snowden simply replies, “NSA and Israel co-wrote it.”

  Able to finally get answers to lingering personal questi
ons, Appelbaum continues down the same geopolitical vein. As Snowden responds, he mentions in passing the existence of the “Five Eye Partners” before divulging the true lifespan of recorded data. Referring to Tempora he states, “Right now the buffer [information storage unit] can hold three days of traffic, but that’s being improved. Three days may not sound like much, but remember that that’s not metadata. ‘Full-take’ means it doesn’t miss anything, and ingests the entirety of each circuit’s capacity.” His disclosure counters both America and Britain’s reassurances that all retrieved data is first filtered and subsequently anonymized prior to being recorded. Reinforcing the contents of the revealed XKeyscore training slide two days prior, Snowden adds that if an analyst requests data, because it has been highlighted, it is stored “forever and ever, regardless of policy.” He reports that the NSA’s objective is to store all metadata permanently because live data’s “content isn’t as valuable as metadata because you can either re-fetch content based on the metadata or, if not, simply task all future communications of interest for permanent collection since the metadata tells you what out of their data stream you actually want.” In the event someone’s is targeted, Snowden states the person is “just owned.” He adds, “An analyst will get a daily (or scheduled based on exfiltration summary) report on what changed on the system, PCAPS [“packets of capture” or units of collected data] of leftover data that wasn’t understood by the automated dissectors, and so forth. It’s up to the analyst to do whatever they want at that point—the target’s machine doesn’t belong to them anymore, it belongs to the US government.” Given Snowden’s description, this is probably akin to EvilOlive’s real-time tip alerting capabilities.

  Toward the end of the interview, Snowden presents what he views as the only viable solution to the privacy problem because, in his words, those who are accountable will never be made to answer. He tells Appelbaum, “Laws are meant for you, not for them.” Snowden states that civil liberty groups should push the corroborating companies to include privacy clauses in their contracts. For those that refuse, they are free to be “punished by consumers in the market.”

  The interview’s publication served several purposes. It implicated Germany in the previously reported domestic surveillance. The discussion outlined how America could have possibly pulled the European Union’s puppet strings to bring down Morales’ flight. As always, it exposed new confidential information. Yet this is the first time Snowden offers solutions to the problem. Seibert, the German representative who a little over a week prior proclaimed that the NSA’s German spying was reminiscent of the Cold War, did not deny or even seek rhetorical neutrality regarding Snowden’s claims. Instead he blatantly confessed and admitted government compliance: “The BND [Bundesnachrichtendienst or German foreign intelligence agency] has been co-operating for decades with partner agencies, including the NSA. We can only protect our citizens if we cooperate. This cooperation is following rules and laws very strictly and is subject to parliamentary control.”153 The German populace did not approve. An opinion poll conducted a few weeks before showed half of Germany considered Snowden a hero, and 35 percent of the country’s population said it would be willing to hide him in their homes.154 The latter is a telling historical metaphor revealing how a large minority of Germans viewed America’s hunt for the NSA whistleblower.

  The same day, Poitras released seven more minutes of interview footage.155

  The audience is met by a black screen before “SNOWDEN” appears in the center of the frame; immediately below it, “Interview Part 2.” The letters fade out as viewers are greeted by the familiar sounds of waves lapping upon the banks of Victoria Harbor. In the lower, left corner of the screen, “Excerpts of interview with Edward Snowden” fades in and is followed by “HONG KONG June 6, 2013” before a return and then “GLENN GREENWALD, interviewer” rests upon “LAURA POITRAS, filmmaker.”

  Snowden’s face suddenly appears, and the camera aggressively closes in on it. He looks the same as before. It is obvious this is a continuation of the same interview the world flocked to see almost a month before. Poitras is a masterful filmmaker. The documentary plays a similar role as the Appelbaum interview because Poitras chose footage that reflects what the world and Snowden had experienced the preceding month.

  The interview begins with Greenwald asking Snowden what he believes the U.S. government’s response to his actions will be. He correctly estimates Washington would proclaim he’s “violated the Espionage Act. They’re going to say, I’ve aided our enemies [ … ].” Greenwald then puts to Snowden whether he entered the intelligence community with the intention of becoming a mole or to undermine the U.S. government. Snowden laughs before pausing to recollect. He reminds his audience that after the invasion of Iraq, he enlisted in the Army because he “believed in the goodness of what we [the U.S.] were doing. I believed in the nobility of our intentions to free oppressed people overseas.” He relays that his perspective changed after having been exposed to “true information,” information that “had not been propagandized in the media.” Snowden announces, “We [the U.S. government] were actually involved in misleading the public and misleading all publics, not just the American public, in order to create a certain mindset in the global consciousness, and I was actually a victim of that. America is a fundamentally a good country. We have good people with good values who want to do the right thing, but the structures of power that exist are working to their own ends to extend their capability at the expense of the freedom of all publics.”

  Whereas the initial whistleblowing reports where meant to catch the American public’s attention, more recent revelations panned back to include “all publics.” It is clear Snowden meant what he typed during the June 17 online chat: “This country is worth dying for,” but due to his experiences in U.S. intelligence, his concern became more cosmopolitan. Though some could argue that his American disclosures were aimed at harming America, he chose to also extract foreign data to show non-U.S. citizens their governments were also engaging in similar practices. At worst, he could be labeled a misanthrope, but with each theft, he made himself more vulnerable to being caught.

  Though audiences were hard-pressed to believe the claim in June, Poitras lets Snowden repeat, “There are literally no ingress or egress points anywhere in the continental United States where communications can enter or exit without being monitored and collected and analyzed.” He lists the most important excised files as being, “The Verizon document,” because “it literally lays out they’re [members of the intelligence community] using an authority that was intended to be used to seek warrants against individuals and they’re applying it to the whole of society by basically subverting a corporate partnership through major telecommunications providers and they’re getting everyone’s calls, everyone’s call records and everyone’s internet traffic as well.” He then lists Boundless Informant. He pauses before labeling it “a global auditing system for the NSA’s intercept and collection system that lets us track how much we’re collecting, where we’re collecting, by which authorities and so forth. The NSA lied about the existence of this tool to Congress and to specific congressmen in response to previous inquiries about their surveillance activities.” He then adds PRISM, “which is a demonstration of how the U.S. government co-opts U.S. corporate power to its own ends. Companies like Google, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft, they all get together with the NSA and provide the NSA direct access to the back ends of all of the systems you use to communicate, to store data, to put things in the cloud [online storage sites], and even to just send birthday wishes and keep a record of your life. And they give NSA direct access that they don’t need to oversee so they can’t be held liable for it. I think that’s a dangerous capability for anybody to have but particularly an organization that’s demonstrated time and time again that they’ll work to shield themselves from oversight.”

  Poitras has Snowden reiterate his motives for action before closing the interview: “I don’t want to live in a
world where everything that I say, everything I do, everyone I talk to, every expression of creativity or love or friendship is recorded. And that’s not something I’m willing to support, it’s not something I’m willing to build, and it’s not something I’m willing to live under. So I think anyone who opposes that sort of world has an obligation to act in the way they can. Now I’ve watched and waited and tried to do my job in the most policy-driven way I could, which is to wait and allow [ … ] our leadership, our figures, to sort of correct the excesses of government when we go too far. But as I’ve watched, I’ve seen that’s not occurring. In fact, we’re compounding the excesses of prior governments and making it worse and more invasive, and no one is really standing to stop it.”

  The declaration that his motive was to take a personal stand and to set an example is one which the world had yet to hear. Snowden reveals that his initial goal was to clear his conscience and avoid hypocrisy by no longer supporting what he believed was unjustifiable. Snowden ceased being complicit in the mechanisms which he deemed were responsible for exploiting personal freedoms and removed himself from the advantages which that society offered.

  The same day, the O Globo team was left by Greenwald to report, “NSA and CIA have maintained staff in Brasilia to collect satellite data.”156 Guided by a document dated 2002 which was leaked by Snowden, the Brazilian newspaper relays that 75 “monitoring stations” are jointly controlled throughout the world by both the CIA and NSA. Sixty-five are in various world capitals, some on military outposts, and five are located in Central and Latin America: Colombia, Venezuela, Panama, Mexico and Brazil. Two are specifically cited as residing in New Delhi and Misawa, Japan. (A subsequent report would reveal two more reside in Vienna and Frankfurt.)157 The code name for such operations is “Stateroom.”158 Like Snowden, the “Special Collection Service” agents assigned to these outposts are given diplomatic covers by their American embassies. The agents’ mission is to collect foreign satellite collection information or “FORNSAT.” This is to be done using established “alliances with private companies, owners, or operators.”