The Edward Snowden Affair

by Michael Gurnow

  Snowden informed the G9 gathering he had been recognized by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, but, though a member, the United States did not accept the Commissioner’s judgment. He reported that during a private meeting in Iceland, the U.N. secretary general, South Korean diplomat Ban Ki-moon, disagreed with Snowden’s actions and was “biasing” the Federation’s opinion of him. When questioned how he received the information, Snowden reported that Birgitta Jónsdóttir, a sympathetic member of the Icelandic party who had voted to put Snowden’s citizenship application on the government’s docket, made the report.175 It is the U.N. agency’s mandated mission to aid refugees’ repatriation to their adopted country.176 Even amid harsh criticism that its pursuit of Snowden was extreme, the U.S. government made sure its presence was known and felt. Eight minutes into the Q & A session, Lokshina told Snowden the U.S. Embassy had instructed her to relay to him it did not consider him a whistleblower and he should be “punished for breaking the law.”177 Snowden quickly countered by stating that the American populace’s will was being better represented by various foreign governments because 55 percent of U.S. citizens agreed with him. The meeting had lasted 42 minutes.

  Washington started to show signs it was catching on. The White House chastised Moscow for giving Snowden a “propaganda platform.”178 It is reasonably believed that the meeting was only possible through the Kremlin’s guidance; otherwise the successful organization of a variety of Russian officials, attorneys and human rights groups would not have been possible on such short notice, especially in a sea of over 200 reporters.179 The Kremlin is metaphorically and literally analogous to the American White House. It is both the residence and symbol of Russian politics.

  Whereas the White House viewed Snowden’s extending invitations to the human rights organizations was political innuendo that implied his innocence, its true purpose was to blur the Kremlin’s role in the American exile’s plight. Snowden needn’t have called a conference to make the announcement he was applying for Russian asylum. He could have merely filed his paperwork as he had before. Furthermore, as one attorney pointed out during the Q & A, Snowden could not accept asylum status in multiple countries.180 He had coincidentally found himself obligated to void all other refugee offers in order to reapply in Russia. He made sure to add, “I am only in a position to accept Russia’s offer because of my inability to travel.”181

  Though it was reported he never left,182 Snowden somehow managed to always evade the press, which perpetually swarmed Sheremetyevo Airport.183 It was possible for him to stalk around the Mira undetected until June 9 but now the world knew what he looked like and was conducting its own surveillance. He was so much of a ghost that during the G9 meeting he was asked for an official photograph to confirm his existence in the terminal.184 Bearing in mind the only firsthand reports that surfaced about Snowden after the conference came from Anatoly Kucherena, a Russian lawyer with Kremlin ties to whom Snowden had coincidentally extended a personal G9 invitation, unofficial sources claim he was staying in a safe house under the protection of the Federal Security Service, the successor to the KBG.185 Kucherena is a Federal Security Service board member, agreed to process Snowden’s Russian asylum paperwork pro bono and during this time held an office in the Kremlin.186

  But it was unlikely the Kremlin would chance Snowden being seen outside the airport. It would give away Russia’s position and violate him being permitted on Russian soil without a passport. In all likelihood, either WikiLeaks or the Kremlin was paying for him to stay in Sheremetyevo’s V-Express Capsule Hotel located in the transit zone. Yet if Kucherena can be believed, he did so at great personal risk. Throughout his stay, he was supposedly without protection or additional security.187

  The U.S. government became infuriated when it could no longer ignore the obvious. The night of the G9 meeting, Obama called Putin. The conversation ended in a stalemate with respect to the American exile.188 Four days later, Snowden submitted his asylum application. When his paperwork was officially acknowledged by the Russian Federal Migration Service on July 24, thereby giving him license to leave the airport while his case was being decided, it was accompanied by his attorney’s statement that Snowden no longer sought refuge in South America.189 Kerry was back on the telephone with his Soviet equivalent, Sergey Lavrov,190 and members of the Senate Appropriations Committee started preparing speeches which would result in a unanimous vote to move toward imposing sanctions on any country aiding Snowden.191 The U.S. government and the world waited for Snowden to emerge from Sheremetyevo.

  At 6 p.m. a man much larger than Snowden emerged from the transit area. It was Kucherena. He told reporters Snowden would not be leaving the airport.192 Der Spiegel had run a follow-up to XKeyscore three days after Putin reiterated “any actions by [Snowden] connected with harming Russian-American relations are unacceptable.”193 Snowden had reapplied for Russian asylum the day before.

  * On July 1, Der Spiegel published a three-part review of NSA surveillance titled “How the NSA Targets Germany and Europe.” It includes two previously unreleased slides—a map showing the world’s fiber-optic network and a Boundless Informant graph comparing French and Italian phone traffic to German communications—but does not offer exclusive infomation aside from 35,321 people were employed by the NSA in 2006, which had a budget of $6.115 billion.

  Chapter 6

  From Russia, With Love

  “‘Where is it?’ thought Raskolnikov. ‘Where is it I’ve read that someone condemned to death says or thinks, an hour before his death, that if he had to live on some high rock, on such a narrow ledge that he’d only room to stand, and the ocean, everlasting darkness, everlasting solitude, everlasting tempest around him, if he had to remain standing on a square yard of space all his life, a thousand years, eternity, it were better to live so than to die at once!’”

  –Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment, given to Snowden by his Russian attorney, Anatoly Kucherena1

  IN A POORLY TIMED, UNCREDITED ARTICLE titled, “‘Prolific Partner’: German Intelligence Used NSA Spy Program,”2 Der Spiegel reports that the BND and Germany’s domestic intelligence agency, Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz or the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV), had been given XKeyscore by the U.S. intelligence. Its source is a 2008 classified presentation released to the German press by Poitras.

  Though hardly surprising since it was revealed a month before that the NSA had provided GCHQ with PRISM, the exposé provides greater insight into the mysterious program. Using metadata, XKeyscore can “retroactively reveal any terms the target person has typed into a search engine.” This includes “full-take” data which the recording of metadata is said to exclude. Der Spiegel relays this is of particular interest to Germans because XKeyscore was one of the primary tools used to collect the previously reported 500 million pieces of domestic information. In December 2012 alone, 180 million data captures were made. The program was first issued to the BND, which then trained the BfV to use the program. A subsequent Der Spiegel report would relay that the vice president of Germany’s domestic intelligence agency “formally requested” the program after watching it successfully wiretap a DSL connection.3

  Prior to discovering there was a breach of faith between the two nations’ intelligence divisions as America narrowed its focus upon its U.N. colleague, in January 2013 Germany was working toward “relax[ing] [the] interpretation of the [nation’s] privacy laws to provide greater opportunities of intelligence sharing” with the NSA. At the end of April, BND officials were invited to meet with NSA specialists to discuss “data acquisition” and “behavior detection.”4 The BND was already considered a “most prolific partner” to the NSA as a result of joint information gathering in Afghanistan.

  The BfV, BND and NSA offered no comment.

  Aside from the obvious implications of Germany’s domestic intelligence agency using XKeyscore, the article verifies Snowden’s previous Der Spiegel interview claims. Even though
metadata is used to determine the need for further investigation, XKeyscore’s ability to retroactively cull supposedly uncollected full-take data refutes any claims that only anonymous metadata is being gathered. The report also establishes, as with GCHQ, that the NSA sought a mutual data exchange with its German counterparts.

  To make matters worse, a Brazilian periodical new to the classified disclosure field debuted a rather incriminating article three days after Russia had recognized Snowden’s paperwork.

  Well-meaning but under present circumstances contrary to its masthead, Epoca premiered “Spies of the digital age”5 on July 27. It bears no byline by Greenwald. The exposé follows in the footsteps of The Guardian’s G20 report and tells the riveting tale of a 2010 U.S.-initiated U.N. sanction meeting. The topic was Iran’s plan to enrich uranium on native soil. Brazil’s then-president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva courageously stepped into the crossfire and accepted the role of mediator. Because the Middle Eastern country had already broken its verbal agreement not to pursue nuclear activities, Brazil and Turkey wanted an alternative to sanctions, which would only enrage Iran. Turkey bravely offered to permit Iran to continue its nuclear research within its neighbor’s borders. The logic was simple. A U.N. member could then keep an eye on Iran.

  The United States was worried. The Security Council needed nine of 15 votes to pass a resolution. Russia and China threatened to veto the vote. Other nations weren’t showing their cards. With a plan in place and carrying along Washington’s blessing, Brazil’s president traveled to Tehran to try to get then-Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s signature promising he’d play nice.

  If he refused, the argument would automatically become that there was no other choice but to instate sanctions. But the had no intention of humoring Ahmadinejad’s autograph even if Brazil somehow managed to acquire it. The South American nation had been given the green light by Washington because it wanted to prolong the proceedings. While Brazil’s leader was burning through political capital, America was leveraging the other nations. It was able to do so because the NSA had conducted espionage on eight U.N. members. diplomats therefore knew where their counterparts stood on the issue and had modified the debate accordingly.

  Exhausted, Brazil and Turkey miraculously presented Ahmadinejad’s agreement to the U.N. council. To the countries’ dismay, the U.S. suddenly announced that France, Britain, Russia and China were ready to vote. The Iranian sanction resolution passed by an overwhelming margin. Only Brazil and Turkey had dissented.

  Epoca had framed the NSA. Though primarily concerned with German surveillance, the July 20 Der Spiegel article implicated the American intelligence agency. Snowden remained ominously hidden after the reports’ publication. The Guardian relayed that his only physical contact with the outside world was through Kucherena.6 WikiLeaks claimed Harrison had remained by his side since his departure from Hong Kong.7

  When entering the transit zone to meet with Snowden on July 24, Kucherena was brandishing a brown paper bag. As he left to announce that Snowden would not be leaving the airport, the bag was nowhere to be seen. When questioned, Kucherena stated he’d brought Snowden clothes, a pair of shoes and books to pass the time and gain a better understanding of the history and culture in which he had found himself. Snowden had been given Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, the works of Anton Chekhov and Russia’s history by Nikolai Karamzin.8

  The media quickly wondered whether Kucherena was attempting to impart something to the American exile by handing him Dostoevsky’s 1866 classic. It is the tale of Rodion Raskolnikov, a lowly dropout living in squalor in St. Petersburg. He kills a pawn broker who financially and emotionally preyed upon those around her. He justifies his decision using Utilitarian reasoning: The malevolence of the murder is counterbalanced by the world no longer having to suffer the pawn broker’s existence and her money going to charity. The largest portion of the novel deals with Raskolnikov mentally contending with the consequences of his actions. Snowden’s attorney obviously saw real-life parallels in his client.

  In Kucherena’s words, he had given Snowden a copy of the Russian attorney’s favorite writer, Chekhov, for “dessert.”9 Chekhov is known for his short stories and plays. Though sometimes comical, they are by no means light reading. His characters are often morally ambiguous and frustratingly human. Chekhov’s work could only be considered dessert because the portions are smaller than Dostoevsky’s 200,000-word main course.By comparison, this text is a little over 110,000 words.

  Conservative in its interpretation and novelistic in its presentation, Karamzin’s history of Russia was the true literary compensation for Dostoevsky. Kucherena had only provided Snowden with an abridgment of the 12-volume collection. Within a few days, Snowden had devoured Dostoevsky and, after surveying Karamzin, asked for the historian’s complete oeuvre.10 Apparently Snowden expected to remain at Sheremetyevo for a long time.

  As the world awaited Snowden’s fate, former NSA director Michael Hayden presented an op-ed piece to CNN on July 24.11 In lieu of the preceding, documented reports, he audaciously claims the location of communicants is not tracked and recorded. Hayden states, “No data mining engines or complex logarithmic tools are launched to scour the data for abstract patterns.” Even though Der Spiegel had granted the world greater insight into the inner workings of XKeyscore only four days before, Snowden had indirectly spoken of the program’s ability to do just that. He had told Appelbaum, “An analyst will get a daily (or scheduled, based on exfiltration summary) report on what changed on the system, PCAPS of leftover data that wasn’t understood by the automated dissectors, and so forth.” The former NSA director then contradicts himself by announcing the data which the NSA hasn’t collected “lies fallow until the NSA can put a question to it based on a predicate related to terrorism and only terrorism.” Interestingly, though the media attempted to discredit Snowden’s credentials by labeling him a “low-level contract consultant,”12 Hayden reports that the ability to draw up this concise data is only granted to “a little more than 20 people in the NSA.” There are over 1,000 NSA employees and contractors that hold the same position Snowden did.13 Hayden tells his readers NSA surveillance is “not about targeting Americans” but “[ … ] who in America deserve[s] to be targeted.”

  Following the tradition started by his congressional counterparts, Hayden attempts to legitimize the various American surveillance programs by reminding his audience the programs were court approved. He flippantly observes, “After all, the Supreme Court had determined decades earlier (Smith v. Maryland, 1979) that metadata carried no expectations of privacy.” He goes on to quote Steve Bradbury, former head of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, “At least 14 federal judges have approved the NSA’s acquisition of this data every 90 days since 2006 under the business records provision of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA).” Hayden, like many of his political peers since June 5, assumed his audience hadn’t grown tired of the fallacy that an action’s justifiability is determined by its ability to win a majority vote, the best historic example being American slave laws.

  On July 31, the U.S. government set out to rectify some of the damage its reputation had incurred. In Washington, Clapper—20 years ahead of schedule—declassified the first half of the previously leaked FISC order demanding telecommunication providers turn over metadata records. He also disclosed two letters, dated 2009 and 2011, addressed to various intelligence committee members concerning the use of bulk surveillance.14 Clapper was trying to absolve himself of responsibility by releasing the letters and incriminating members of Congress. They ask congressional heads of intelligence to inform their peers that information pertaining to government surveillance was available for review for a limited time. There is no evidence the messages were forwarded, as witnessed on June 11 at the close of an emergency congressional briefing after the first disclosures had premiered. Leaving the meeting, Representative Bill Pascrell stated, “There was a letter that we were s
upposed to have received in 2011 but I can’t find it and most of my friends in Congress did not receive this either.”15 Clapper had declassified the documents amid a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing which established that only one terror plot, not 54 as had been previously reported, were foiled using current surveillance methods. During the proceedings, Senator Charles Grassley reprimanded General Clapper for having lied to Congress in the March 2013 hearing when he unequivocally answered “No sir” to the question “Does the NSA collect any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans?” Grassley declared, “Nothing can excuse this kind of behavior from a senior administration official of any administration, especially on matters of such grave importance.”16

  While Clapper sat before Congress, the person who famously queried, “Why can’t we collect all the signals all the time?” tried appeasing a younger crowd. NSA Director Keith Alexander was the keynote speaker at Black Hat USA 2013 in Las Vegas. Black Hat is a yearly IT security convention. Alexander assumed his techie audience wouldn’t be familiar with Freud and attempted to convince the attendees that NSA analysts play the same role as civilian IT technicians. He was met by jeers and demands for him to read the United States Constitution.17

  Somewhat surprisingly since Snowden’s fate could hang in the balance, the same day Greenwald presented “XKeyscore: NSA tool collects ‘nearly everything a user does on the internet.’”18 Greenwald does nothing short of put the first nail in the surveillance debate’s coffin.

  It begins, “A top secret National Security Agency program allows analysts to search with no prior authorization through vast databases containing emails, online chats and the browsing histories of millions of individuals.” Greenwald dubiously adds, “according to documents provided by whistleblower Edward Snowden.” The documentation includes 32 PowerPoint training slides. The NSA accomplishes this by using, in the agency’s terms, its “widest reaching” tool for surveillance, XKeyscore. Greenwald reports that the program’s capabilities are much more expansive than had been previously revealed. They include the ability to search by “name, telephone number, IP address, keywords, [ … ]” and even the type of browser used. The results of the query are staggering. XKeyscore can produce “every email address seen in a session by both username and domain,” “every phone number seen in a session (e.g., address book entries or signature block [automatic signatures placed at the bottom of a email])” and “webmail and chat activity, [ … ] username, buddylist, machine specific cookies [which house IP logs] etc.” XKeyscore’s reach is near absolute.