No Place to Hide

by Greenwald, Glenn

  It is but a short step to full identification with the needs of political officials. Hence, transparency is bad; adversarial journalism is malignant, possibly even criminal. Political leaders must be permitted to exercise power in the dark.

  In September 2013, these points were powerfully made by Seymour Hersh, the Pulitzer Prize–winning reporter who uncovered both the My Lai massacre and the Abu Ghraib scandal. In an interview with the Guardian, Hersh railed against what he called “the timidity of journalists in America, their failure to challenge the White House and be an unpopular messenger of truth.” He said the New York Times spends so much time “carrying water for Obama.” The administration lies systematically, he argued, “yet none of the leviathans of American media, the TV networks or big print titles” pose a challenge.

  Hersh’s proposal “on how to fix journalism” was to “close down the news bureaus of NBC and ABC, sack 90 percent of editors in publishing and get back to the fundamental job of journalists,” which is to be an outsider. “Start promoting editors that you can’t control,” Hersh advocated. “The troublemakers don’t get promoted,” he said. Instead, “chickenshit editors” and journalists are ruining the profession because the overarching mentality is not to dare to be an outsider.

  * * *

  Once reporters are branded as activists, once their work is tainted by the accusation of criminal activity and they are cast out of the circle of protections for journalists, they are vulnerable to criminal treatment. This was made clear to me very quickly after the NSA story broke.

  Within minutes of my return home to Rio after my stay in Hong Kong, David told me that his laptop had vanished. Suspecting that its disappearance was connected to a conversation we had while I was away, he reminded me that I had called him on Skype to talk about a large encrypted file of documents I intended to send electronically. Once it arrived, I’d said, he should put the file somewhere safe. Snowden had considered it vital that someone I trusted without question should have a complete set of the documents, in case my own archive was lost, damaged, or stolen.

  “I may not be available for much longer,” he said. “And you never know how your working relationship with Laura will proceed. Someone should have a set so that you’ll always have access, no matter what happens.”

  The obvious choice was David. But I never did send the file. It was one of the things I lacked the time to do while in Hong Kong.

  “Less than forty-eight hours after you told me that,” David said, “my laptop was stolen from the house.”

  I resisted the idea that the theft of the laptop was connected to our Skype conversation. I told David I was determined that we not become those paranoid people who attribute every unexplained event in their lives to the CIA. Maybe the laptop was lost or someone visiting the house had taken it, or maybe it had been stolen in an unconnected robbery.

  David shot down my theories one by one: he never took that laptop out of the house; he had turned the place upside down and it was nowhere to be found; nothing else had been taken or disturbed. I was being irrational, he felt, by refusing to entertain what seemed like the only explanation.

  By this point, a number of reporters had noted that the NSA had virtually no idea what Snowden had taken or given me, not just the specific documents but also the quantity. It made sense that the US government (or perhaps even other governments) would be desperate to learn what I had. If taking David’s computer would give up the information, why wouldn’t they steal it?

  By then, I also knew that a conversation with David via Skype was anything but secure, as vulnerable to NSA monitoring as any other form of communication. So the government had the ability to hear that I planned to send the documents to David, which gave them a strong motive to get hold of his laptop.

  I learned from David Schultz, the Guardian’s media lawyer, that there was reason to believe David’s theory of the theft. Contacts in the US intelligence community had let him know that the CIA’s presence was more robust in Rio than almost anywhere else in the world and that the Rio station chief was “notoriously aggressive.” Based on that, Schultz told me, “You should pretty much assume that everything you say, everything you do, and everywhere you go are being closely monitored.”

  I accepted that my ability to communicate would now be severely restricted. I refrained from using the telephone for anything but the vaguest and most trivial conversations. I sent and received emails only through cumbersome encryption systems. I confined my discussions with Laura, Snowden, and various sources to encrypted online chat programs. I was able to work on articles with Guardian editors and other journalists only by having them travel to Rio to meet face-to-face. I even exercised caution speaking to David in our home or car. The theft of the laptop had made clear the possibility that even those most intimate spaces might be under surveillance.

  If I needed more evidence of the threatening climate in which I was now working, it came in the form of a report about a conversation overheard by Steve Clemons, a well-connected and regarded DC policy analyst and editor at large for the Atlantic.

  On June 8, Clemons had been in Dulles airport in the United Airlines lounge and recounted that he overheard four US intelligence officials saying loudly that the leaker and reporter on the NSA stuff should be “disappeared.” He said that he recorded a bit of the conversation on his phone. Clemons thought the talk seemed like just “bravado” but decided to publish the conversation nonetheless.

  I didn’t take the report too seriously, although Clemons is quite credible. But just the fact of such idle public chitchat among establishment types about “disappearing” Snowden—and the journalists with whom he was working—was alarming.

  In the months that followed, the possible criminalization of the NSA reporting shifted from an abstract idea to reality. This drastic change was driven by the British government.

  I first heard from Janine Gibson, via encrypted chat, about a remarkable event that had taken place at the Guardian’s London office in mid-July. She described what she called a “radical change” in the tenor of the conversations between the Guardian and the GCHQ that had occurred in the past few weeks. What had originally been “very civilized conversations” about the paper’s reporting had degenerated into a series of increasingly bellicose demands and then outright threats from the British spying agency.

  Then, more or less suddenly, Gibson told me, the GCHQ announced that it would no longer “permit” the paper to keep publishing stories based on top secret documents. They demanded that the Guardian in London hand over all copies of the files received from Snowden. If the Guardian refused, a court order would prohibit any further reporting.

  That threat was not idle. The UK has no constitutional guarantee of press freedoms. British courts are so deferential to government demands of “prior restraint” that the media can be barred in advance from reporting anything claimed to threaten national security.

  Indeed, in the 1970s, the reporter who first uncovered and then reported on the existence of the GCHQ, Duncan Campbell, was arrested and prosecuted. In the UK the courts could shut the Guardian down at any point and seize all its material and equipment. “No judge would say no if they were asked,” Janine said. “We know that and they know we know it.”

  The documents the Guardian possessed were a fraction of the full archive Snowden had passed on in Hong Kong. He had felt strongly that reporting relating specifically to the GCHQ should be done by British journalists, and on one of the last days in Hong Kong, he gave a copy of those documents to Ewen MacAskill.

  On our call, Janine told me that she and editor Alan Rusbridger, along with other staffers, had been on a retreat the previous weekend in a remote area outside of London. They suddenly heard that GCHQ officials were on their way to the Guardian newsroom in London where they intended to seize the hard drives on which the documents were stored. “You’ve had your fun,” they told Rusbridger, as he later recounted, “now we want the stuff back.” The group had been in t
he country for only two and a half hours before they heard from the GCHQ. “We had to drive straight back to London to defend the building. It was very hairy,” Janine said.

  The GCHQ demanded that the Guardian turn over all copies of the archive. Had the paper complied, the government would have learned what Snowden had passed on and his legal standing could have been further jeopardized. Instead, the Guardian agreed to destroy all the relevant hard drives with GCHQ officials overseeing the process to make sure that the destruction was done to their satisfaction. What occurred was, in Janine’s words, “a very elaborate dance of stalling, diplomacy, smuggling, and then cooperative ‘demonstrable destruction.’”

  The term “demonstrable destruction” was newly invented by the GCHQ to describe what took place. The officials accompanied Guardian staff, including the editor in chief, to the basement of the newsroom and watched as they smashed the hard drives to pieces, even demanding that they break particular parts further “just to be sure there was nothing in the mangled bits of metal that could possibly be of any interest to passing Chinese agents,” Rusbridger recounted. “We can call off the black helicopters,” he recalled a security expert joking, as Guardian staff “swept up the remains of a MacBook Pro.”

  The image of a government sending agents into a newspaper to force destruction of its computers is inherently shocking, the sort of thing Westerners are told to believe happens only in places like China, Iran, and Russia. But it is also stunning that a revered newspaper would voluntarily, meekly, submit to such orders.

  If the government was threatening to shut down the paper, why not call its bluff and force the threat out into the daylight? As Snowden said when he heard the about the threat, “the only right answer is, go ahead, shut us down!” Voluntarily complying in secret is to enable the government to conceal its true character from the world: a state that thuggishly stops journalists from reporting on one of the most significant stories in the public interest.

  Worse, the act of destroying the materials that a source had risked his liberty and even life to reveal was utterly antithetical to the purpose of journalism.

  Aside from the need to expose such despotic behavior, it is unquestionably newsworthy when a government marches into a newsroom and forces a paper to destroy its information. But the Guardian apparently intended to remain silent, powerfully underscoring how precarious any freedom of the press is in the UK.

  In any case, Gibson assured me that the Guardian still had a copy of the archive in its New York office. Then she told me some startling news: another set of those documents was now with the New York Times, given by Alan Rusbridger to executive editor Jill Abramson, to ensure that the paper would still have access to the files even if a British court tried to force the Guardian US to destroy its copy.

  This, too, was not good news. Not only had the Guardian agreed, in secret, to destroy its own documents but, without consulting or even advising Snowden or me, it had given them to the very newspaper Snowden had excluded because he did not trust its close and subservient relationship to the US government.

  From the Guardian’s perspective, it could not afford to be cavalier in the face of UK government threats, given the absence of constitutional protection and hundreds of employees and a century-old paper to protect. And destroying the computers was better than handing GCHQ the archive. But I was nonetheless disturbed by their compliance with the government’s demands and, more so, their evident decision not to report it.

  Still, both before the destruction of its hard drives and after, the Guardian remained aggressive and intrepid in how it published Snowden’s revelations—more, I believe, than any other paper comparable in size and stature would have been. Despite the authorities’ intimidation tactics, which only intensified, the editors continued to publish one NSA and GCHQ story after the next, and they deserve much credit for doing so.

  But Laura and Snowden were both quite angry—that the Guardian would submit to such government bullying and that they would then keep quiet about what had happened. Snowden was particularly furious that the GCHQ archive had ended up with the New York Times. He felt that this was a breach of his agreement with the Guardian and of his wish that only British journalists would work on the British documents, and especially that the New York Times would not be given documents. As it turned out, Laura’s reaction eventually led to dramatic consequences.

  * * *

  From the beginning of our reporting, Laura’s relationship with the Guardian was uneasy and now the tension broke out into the open. While working together for a week in Rio, Laura and I discovered that part of one of the NSA archives Snowden had given me on the day he went into hiding in Hong Kong (but hadn’t had the chance to give to Laura) was corrupted. Laura was unable to fix it in Rio but thought she might be able to do so when back in Berlin.

  A week later, after she returned to Berlin, Laura let me know that the archive was ready to return to me. We arranged for a Guardian employee to fly to Berlin, pick up the archive, and then bring it to me in Rio. But clearly in a state of fear after the GCHQ drama, the Guardian employee then told Laura that instead of giving the archive to him personally, she should FedEx it to me.

  This made Laura as agitated and furious as I had ever seen her. “Don’t you see what they’re doing?” she asked me. “They want to be able to say, ‘We had nothing to do with transporting these documents, it was Glenn and Laura who passed them back and forth.’” She added that using FedEx to send top secret documents across the world—and to send them from her in Berlin to me in Rio, a neon sign to interested parties—was as severe a breach of operational security as she could imagine.

  “I will never trust them again,” she declared.

  But I still needed that archive. It contained vital documents related to stories I was working on, as well as many others still to be published.

  Janine insisted that the problem was a misunderstanding, that the staffer had misinterpreted comments by his supervisor, that some managers in London were now skittish about carrying documents between Laura and me. There was no problem, she said. Someone from the Guardian would fly to Berlin to pick up the archive that same day.

  It was too late. “I will never, ever give these documents to the Guardian,” Laura said. “I just don’t trust them now.”

  The size and sensitivity of the archive made Laura unwilling to send it electronically. It had to be delivered personally, by someone she trusted. That someone was David, who, when he heard about the problem, immediately volunteered to go to Berlin. We both saw that this was the perfect solution. David understood every part of the story, Laura knew and trusted him, and he had been planning to visit her anyway to talk about potential new projects. Janine happily signed on to the idea and agreed that the Guardian would cover the cost of David’s trip.

  The Guardian’s travel office booked David’s flights on British Airways and then emailed him the itinerary. The notion that he would have any problem traveling never occurred to us. Guardian journalists who had written stories about the Snowden archives, as well as staffers who had couriered documents back and forth, had flown in and out of Heathrow Airport multiple times without incident. Laura herself had flown to London only a few weeks earlier. Why would anyone think that David—a far more peripheral figure—would be at risk?

  David left for Berlin on Sunday, August 11, due to return a week later with the archive from Laura. But on the morning of his expected arrival, I was woken up early by a call. The voice on the line, speaking with a thick British accent, identified himself as a “security agent at Heathrow Airport” and asked whether I knew David Miranda. “We’re calling to inform you,” he went on, “that we’ve detained Mr. Miranda under the Terrorism Act of 2000, Schedule 7.”

  The word “terrorism” did not sink in right away—I was more confused than anything else. The first question I asked was how long he had been detained at that point, and when I heard that it had been three hours already, I knew that this was no standard imm
igration screening. The man explained that the UK had the “legal right” to hold him for a total of nine hours, at which point a court could extend the time. Or they could arrest him. “We don’t yet know what we intend to do,” the security agent said.

  Both the United States and the United Kingdom have made clear that there are no limits—ethical, legal, or political—that they will observe when they claim to be acting in the name of “terrorism.” Now David was in custody, being held under a terrorism law. He hadn’t even tried to enter the UK: he was passing through the airport in transit. The UK authorities had reached out into what is technically not even British territory and nabbed him, and had invoked the most chilling and murky grounds to do so.

  Guardian lawyers and Brazilian diplomats got to work, immediately attempting to secure David’s release. I wasn’t worried about how David would handle the detention. An unimaginably difficult life growing up orphaned in one of the poorest favelas in Rio de Janeiro had made him extremely strong, willful, and street smart. I knew he would understand exactly what was happening and why, and I had no doubt that he was giving his interrogators at least as hard a time as they were giving him. Still, the Guardian lawyers noted how rare it was for anyone to be held this long.

  Researching the Terrorism Act, I learned that only three out of every thousand people are stopped and most interrogations, over 97 percent, last under an hour. Only 0.06 percent are held for more than six hours. There seemed to be a substantial chance that David would be arrested once the nine-hour mark arrived.

  The stated purpose of the Terrorism Act, as the name suggests, is to question people about ties to terrorism. The detention power, the UK government claims, is used “to determine whether that person is or has been involved in the commission, preparation or instigation of acts of terrorism.” There was no remote justification for detaining David under such a law, unless my reporting was now being equated with terrorism, which appeared to be the case.