Surveillance Valley

by Yasha Levine

  43. “Tomgram: Glenn Greenwald, How I Met Edward Snowden,” Tom Dispatch, May 13, 2014, http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175843/tomgram %3A_glenn_greenwald,_how_i_met_edward_snowden/.

  44. Glenn Greenwald, Ewen MacAskill, and Laura Poitras, “Edward Snowden: The Whistleblower behind the NSA Surveillance Revelations,” Guardian, June 11, 2013.

  45. Luke Harding, “How Edward Snowden Went from Loyal NSA Contractor to Whistleblower,” Guardian, February 1, 2014.

  46. James Bamford, “Edward Snowden: The Untold Story of the Most Wanted Man in the World,” Wired, August 13, 2014.

  47. Lana Lam, “Snowden Sought Booz Allen Job to Gather Evidence on NSA Surveillance,” South China Morning Post, June 24, 2013.

  48. “Courage finally. Real. Steady. Thoughtful. Transparent. Willing to accept the consequences,” the right-wing talk show personality (@glennbeck) tweeted on June 9, 2013, https://twitter.com/glennbeck/status/343816977929867265.

  49. Bamford, “Edward Snowden: The Untold Story.”

  50. Barton Gellman, “Edward Snowden, After Months of NSA Revelations, Says His Mission’s Accomplished,” Washington Post, December 23, 2013.

  51. Scott Shane, “Documents on 2012 Drone Strike Detail How Terrorists Are Targeted,” New York Times, June 24, 2015.

  52. Dave Cole, “We Kill People Based on Metadata,” New York Review of Books, May 10, 2014, http://www.nybooks.com/daily/2014/05/10/we-kill-people-based-metadata/.

  53. Micah Lee, “Edward Snowden Explains How to Reclaim Your Privacy,” The Intercept, November 12, 2015, https://theintercept.com/2015/11/12 /edward-snowden-explains-how-to-reclaim-your-privacy/.

  54. Adrian Chen, “The Underground Website Where You Can Buy Any Drug Imaginable,” Gawker, June 1, 2011, http://gawker.com/the-underground-website-where-you-can-buy-any-drug-imag-30818160.

  55. “5 Things to Know About the Silk Road Trial,” Wall Street Journal, January 13, 2015.

  56. David Golumbia, The Politics of Bitcoin: Software as Right-Wing Extremism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016); Andy Greenberg, This Machine Kills Secrets: How WikiLeakers, Cypherpunks, and Hacktivists Aim to Free the World’s Information (New York: Dutton, 2012).

  57. Timothy C. May, Crypto Anarchy and Virtual Communities (December 1994), https://invisiblemolotov.files.wordpress.com/2008/06/crypto_anarchist.pdf.

  58. Dread Pirate Roberts, message on the Silk Road Forum, March 20, 2012 (United States of America v. Ross Ulbricht, Exhibit 4, filed April 16, 2015).

  59. Aaron Sankin, “Searching for a Hitman in the Deep Web,” Daily Dot, October 10, 2013, https://www.dailydot.com/crime/deep-web-murder-assassination-contract-killer/.

  60. Gary Brecher and Mark Ames, “Interview with Gunnar Hrafn Jonsson,” Radio War Nerd, episode 28, April 7, 2016, https://www.patreon.com/posts /radio-war-nerd-7–5106280.

  61. To communicate with Sandvik, Snowden used the same anonymous email address—cincinnatus@lavabit.com—that he used a couple of weeks later to unsuccessfully attempt to contact Greenwald. He also provided Sandvik with his full real name and his full real address.

  62. Kevin Poulsen, “Snowden’s First Move against the NSA Was a Party in Hawaii,” Wired, May 21, 2014.

  63. Michael Isikoff and Michael B. Kelley, “In Exile, Edward Snowden Rakes in Speaking Fees While Hoping for a Pardon,” Yahoo! News, August 11, 2016, https://www.yahoo.com/news/edward-snowden-making-most-digital-000000490.html.

  64. “Because it’s not about the United States, it’s not about the NSA, it’s not about the Russians, it’s not about the Chinese, it’s not about the British, it’s not about any national government. It’s about the world we have, the world we want to live in and the internet, the connections that we want to build between people, between worlds, between every point of presence, in every home, on every phone around the world,” he told an auditorium filled with the world’s foremost computer and network engineers at a 2015 meeting of the Internet Engineering Task Force in Prague. The audience was filled with the very people who would design the future features of the Internet—academics as well as employees of the most powerful tech companies in the world. “Edward Snowden at IETF93,” YouTube video, 56:01, posted by Dev Random, July 28, 2015, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v =0NvsUXBCeVA&feature=youtu.be.

  65. Glenn Greenwald, No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the U.S. Surveillance State (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2014), 24.

  66. They posed for a photo at the thirtieth TED event, held in Vancouver, Canada. Chris Anderson (@TEDchris), Twitter post, March 18, 2014, 12:25 pm, http://web.archive.org/web/20170522131119/https:/twitter.com/TEDchris /status/446004368844652545.

  67. The Electronic Frontier Foundation described Tor as the digital equivalent of the First Amendment—a tool that was “essential to freedom of expression” on the Internet—and added it to its “Surveillance Self-Defense” privacy toolkit. Fight for the Future, the hip, young Silicon Valley activist group, declared Tor to be “NSA-proof” and recommended that people use it every day. Laura Poitras, director of Citizen Four, the Academy Award–winning documentary on Edward Snowden, endorsed Tor as well. “When I was communicating with Snowden for several months before I met him in Hong Kong, we talked often about the Tor Network and it is something that actually he feels is vital for online privacy and defeating surveillance. It is our only tool to be able to do that,” she told an auditorium full of people at a hacker conference in Germany, a giant picture of Edward Snowden projected behind her on stage (Katina, “This Is What a Tor Supporter Looks Like: Laura Poitras,” Tor Project [blog], November 23, 2015, https://blog.torproject.org/blog/what-tor-supporter-looks-laura-poitras).

  68. Every year Google funds university students to work at Tor during the summer with a stipend of roughly $2,000 a month as part of its “Summer of Code.” “Tor: Google Summer of Code 2017,” Tor, accessed July 6, 2017, https://www.torproject.org/about/gsoc.html.en; “Student Stipends,” Google Summer of Code, updated May 5, 2017, https://developers.google.com/open-source/gsoc/help/student-stipends.

  69. Alec Muffett, “1 Million People Use Facebook over Tor,” Facebook, April 22, 2016, https://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook-over-tor/1-million-people-use-facebook-over-tor/865624066877648/.

  70. nickm, “This Is What a Tor Supporter Looks Like: Daniel Ellsberg,” Tor Project (blog), December 26, 2015, https://blog.torproject.org/blog/what-tor-supporter-looks-daniel-ellsberg.

  71. “Q&A Marathon with Jacob Appelbaum and Roger Dingledine,” YouTube video, 3:59:35, filmed July 24, 2013, at Technical University of Munich, posted by zerwas2ky, July 31, 2013, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c6ja_0X9gyg.

  72. “Crypto Party Craze: Australians Learning Encryption to Hide Data from Criminals and Governments as Digital Arms Race Heats Up” blared a 2015 headline on Australia’s ABC news. “Crypto parties, where people gather to learn online encryption, are attracting everyone from politicians, to business people, to activists.” Margot O’Neill and Brigid Andersen, “Crypto Party Craze: Australians Learning Encryption to Hide Data from Criminals and Governments as Digital Arms Race Heats Up,” ABC, updated June 5, 2015, http://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-06-04 /crypto-party-craze:-push-for-privacy-in-the-post-snowden-era/6521408.

  73. Jenna Wortham, “Finding Inspiration for Art in the Betrayal of Privacy,” New York Times, December 27, 2016.

  74. Andy Greenberg, “The Artist Using Museums to Amplify Tor’s Anonymity Network,” Wired, April 1, 2016.

  75. Paul Carr, “Tor Boss Launches Internal Investigation over Claims Senior Staffer Tried to Smear Pando Reporter,” Pando Daily, February 7, 2015, https://pando.com/2015/02/07/tor-exec-director-launches-internal-investigation-over-claims-senior-staffer-tried-to-smear-pando-reporter/.

  76. Anonymous (@YourAnonNews), Twitter post, November 24, 2014, 11:19 am, https://surveillancevalley.com/content/citations/youranonnews-twitter-24-november-2014.png.

  77. After Edward Snowden appeared on the scene in 2013, Fight for the Future launched seve
ral antisurveillance campaigns, including helping organize a big anti-NSA rally in Washington, DC, on October 5, 2013. In the summer of 2014, it launched Reset the Net, which promised to be a global protest campaign to end online surveillance (“Reset the Net: June 5, 2014,” Fight for the Future, accessed July 6, 2017, https://www.resetthenet.org/). One of the main tools Reset the Net offered participants as part of its “NSA-proof Privacy Pack”: the Tor Project (“June 5th, 2014: Reset the Net,” YouTube video, 1:45, posted by Fight for the Future, March 8, 2014, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gaH3thsKv2o). Fight for the Future is funded by Silicon Valley (Chris Ruen, Freeloading: How Our Insatiable Appetite for Free Content Starves Creativity [New York: OR Books, 2012]).

  78. “Tor: Google Summer of Code 2017,” https://www.torproject.org/about/gsoc.html.en; “Student Stipends,” https://developers.google.com/open-source/gsoc /help/student-stipends.

  79. Roger Dingledine, curriculum vitae, accessed December 31, 2016, https://www.freehaven.net/~arma/cv.html.

  80. Roger Dingledine, “Free Privacy Enhancing Technologies” (presentation given at Wizards of OS conference, Germany, June 11, 2004).

  81. “If you’ve been able to ignore Pando Daily’s 100% non-technical smear campaign against the Tor Project and its developers and supporters, you’re lucky,” he wrote on his personal blog. “They also borrow tactics from GamerGate, including making puppet Twitter accounts to harrass [sic] women.” Micah Lee, “Fact-Checking Pando’s Smears against Tor,” Micah Lee’s Blog (blog), December 11, 2014, https://micahflee.com/2014/12/fact-checking-pandos-smears-against-tor/.

  82. “There are only a few places where funding can’t influence the contents of the outcome—maybe fundamental physics, and math, and not much else,” wrote Quinn Norton, an influential American journalist who specializes in Internet culture, attempting to explain to me why my thinking about Tor was wrong. Her argument closely echoed that of Micah Lee’s. “The math, well known and widely standardized, will work for everyone, or it will not, whoever pays the bills.” Quinn Norton, “Clearing the Air around Tor,” Pando Daily, December 9, 2014, https://pando.com/2014/12/09/clearing-the-air-around-tor/.

  83. Here are a few examples of influential privacy personalities telling people to ignore my reporting: “I don’t have time for jerks who use that nonsense to service their other agenda. Boring waste of time,” Tor developer Jacob Appelbaum tweeted (@ioerror, Twitter post, October 26, 2014, 8:21 am, http://web.archive.org/web/20150623005502/https:/twitter.com/ioerror/status/526393121630740480). Jillian York, director for International Freedom of Expression at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, also counseled her forty-five thousand Twitter followers to ignore my story: “yeah I just don’t see the news here,” she tweeted. “it seems like only 15 or so people have bothered to tweet the article, so…” (@jilliancyork, Twitter post, July 17, 2014, 14:49 am, http://web.archive.org/web/20150623005501/https:/twitter.com/jilliancyork/status/489678221185536000). “I wish all the @torproject conspiracy theorists would just read the damn website,” tweeted Morgan Marquis-Boire, former Google security developer and now technologist at The Intercept (@headhntr, Twitter post, July 28, 2014, 5:51 am, http://web.archive.org/web/20150623005513/https:/twitter.com/headhntr/status/493740639927156737).

  84. “Meet the Fellows: Chris Soghoian,” TechCongress, March 21, 2017, http://web.archive.org/web/20170518163030/https:/www.techcongress.io/blog/2017/3/21 /meet-the-fellows-chris-soghoian; Christopher Soghoian (@csoghoian), Twitter post, August 5, 2014, 11:43 pm, http://web.archive.org/web/20150623005501/https: /twitter.com/csoghoian/status/496909507390631936.

  85. Yasha Levine, “How Leading Tor Developers and Advocates Tried to Smear Me After I Reported Their US Government Ties,” Pando Daily, November 14, 2014, https://pando.com/2014/11/14/tor-smear/.

  86. The Twitter feed of Tor employee Andrea Shepard was awash in insults and homophobic slurs. Here’s one as an example, where she says I gagged while performing oral sex on a male colleague: “I presume he gagged while trying to help Mark Ames uncoil his dick.” Andre (@puellavulnerata), Twitter post, September 16, 2014, 3:14 pm, http://wayback.archive.org/web/20150623005511/https://mobile.twitter.com/puellavulnerata/status/511956365078589440; Carr, “Tor Boss Launches Internal Investigation over Claims Senior Staffer Tried to Smear Pando Reporter.”

  87. “I sincerely wonder how high of an activist body count Mark Ames & Yasha Levine will rack up from telling people Tor is a CIA/Koch bros trap,” tweeted someone named William Gillis. William Gillis (@rechelon), Twitter post, November 14, 2014, 8:06 pm, http://web.archive.org/web/20170518171930/https: /twitter.com/rechelon/status/533471143194152961.

  88. The harassment campaign drew condemnation from some quarters of the privacy movement, but this was a distinct minority. “Given the evidence Levine assembled, his conclusion is unremarkable. But the Tor community has reacted with anger,” wrote privacy technology reporter Stilgherrian on ZDNet. “But I note that instead of deconstructing Levine’s argument, Tor’s supporters have merely attacked him and his motives—at least one even accusing him of working for the CIA.” Stilgherrian, “Tor’s Feral Fans Are Its Own Worst Enemy,” ZDNet, November 21, 2014, http://www.zdnet.com/article/tors-feral-fans-are-its-own-worst-enemy/.

  89. “This article has been amended to remove the claim that Pando journalists were directly involved in a campaign of harassment, which Pando refutes. A comment from Pando has been added.” Tom Fox-Brewster, “Privacy Advocates Unmask Twitter Troll,” Guardian, December 3, 2014.

  90. Harry Halpin, “What Is Enlightenment? Google, WikiLeaks, and the Reorganization of the World,” Los Angeles Review of Books, November 2, 2014.

  91. My editor at Pando Daily, Paul Carr, addressed the bizarre nature of these smears. “[The] smear came in early November when a freelance journalist and radical open web advocate called Harry Halpin, writing on the LA Review of Books, casually dropped into a book review the fact that Yasha’s reporting had been funded by the CIA. The only problem with that assertion: It was, and is, a total lie. It was only after I wrote to the editor of the LARB, pointing out the fact that his publication was guilty of the most egregious defamation against Yasha, and copying our attorney (the wonderful Roger Myers, who previously defended WikiLeaks), that the magazine issued a mealy-mouthed retraction and correction, claiming that the CIA line had been intended as a joke,” he wrote (Paul Carr, “It’s Time for Tor Activists to Stop Acting Like the Spies They Claim to Hate,” Pando Daily, December 10, 2014, https://pando.com/2014/12/10/its-time-for-tor-activists-to-stop-acting-like-the-spies-they-claim-to-hate/). “Shockingly, even the Guardian was briefly fooled into repeating the smears, before issuing a correction over what a senior editor described as a ‘fuck up’” (Paul Carr, “Here We Go. Anonymous Calls for Attacks against Pando Writers over Our Tor Reporting,” Pando Daily, December 11, 2014, https://pando.com/2014/12/11/here-we-go-anonymous-calls-for-attacks-against-pando-writers-over-tor-reporting/).

  Chapter 7

  1. M. P. Okultra (@okayultra), Twitter post, December 17, 2015, 12:20 p.m., http://web.archive.org/web/20170521122643/https:/twitter.com/okayultra/status /677584177638821888; Khalil Sehnaoui (@sehnaoui), Twitter post, December 18, 2015, 4:52 p.m., http://web.archive.org/web/20170521122706/https:/twitter.com/sehnaoui/status/678015081301475329.

  2. When the privacy community found out I bought tickets and planned to attend the event, they spent days insulting and making veiled threats against me on Twitter. Much of this was driven by Tor contractor Andrea Shepard, who tweeted out that she would consider my presence at 31c3 conference—a public event attended by thousands of people, including journalists like myself—to be “stalking and aggression” against her personally, and she warned that she would retaliate in “self-defense.” At some point on Twitter, she mentioned a hammer and alluded to the fact that drugging my drink would be “liquid-phase hacking.” Shepard was not just a random developer attending the conference but an employee of a contractor backed by powerful military and int
elligence interests—an organization that I had spent the past year investigating. So I took these threats seriously. I also saw them as a cynical attempt by a Pentagon contractor to escape scrutiny by framing critical investigative journalism as if it was nothing but personal harassment and stalking. Imagine if other powerful private military contractors like Blackwater or Booz Allen made similar claims against reporters? The situation worried Paul Carr, my editor at Pando, who grew concerned for my safety and reached out by email to Tor’s executive director Shari Steele. “To be clear, Yasha’s trip to 32C3 has nothing to do with Ms Shepard (except in so far that she is an employee of Tor) and is part of our continuing coverage on Tor, hacking and surveillance,” he wrote on December 19, 2015. “Yasha is entitled to go about his job safely and without threats of violence, especially from paid employees of Tor. My normal next step as Yasha’s editor would be to contact police in Berlin to put them on notice of the threat should Ms Shepard or one of her followers decide to act on it. Given the nature of the conference, that’s not an ideal way to handle this situation. I’d rather not be responsible for bringing police into a hacker conference. With that in mind, I’m hoping someone at Tor can help. I would be grateful for your prompt assurance that Tor will immediately and completely cease its threats and smears against our reporter.” My editor never received an answer from Steele. Andrea (@puellavulnerata), Twitter post, December 18, 2015, 3:43 p.m., https://surveillancevalley.com/content/citations/%40puellavulnerata-twitter-18-december.png; Andrea (@puellavulnerata), Twitter post, December 18, 2015, 4:54 p.m., https://web.archive.org/web/20170808233941/https://twitter.com/puellavulnerata /status/678015551780888580; Andrea (@puellavulnerata), Twitter post, December 19, 2015, 1:03 p.m., https://web.archive.org/web/20170808234142/https://twitter.com/puellavulnerata/status/678168846897934340.