Dark Mirror

by Barton Gellman

  “They are saying, damage, damage, damage. But this is largely—if not specious, it’s overblown. My last position at the NSA, I was actually targeting people with these systems. . . . I’ve read actual terrorist emails. I’ve read hackers’ emails. I know how these guys operate. I know how the systems function. I know what the sources and methods are. I know what’s important to us, because I had to rely on them. And I did what I could to maximize what was in the public interest and minimize what would cause harm.”

  Snowden’s disclosures, he said, were news to ordinary people but not to terrorists and foreign leaders. They already knew they could be overheard. “[They] are not going to be surprised that Western intelligence agencies control the internet and the telecommunications sphere. That’s our home turf. That’s seen as our domain. They know they’re in adversary territory when they’re operating like that.”

  Danes cut in. It’s one thing “to tacitly have it understood that this surveillance has been going on, but it’s another for it to be formally confirmed to the world—that’s another point that they made,” she said.

  As the conversation progressed, Snowden raised doubts periodically about the value of “bad guy” language in world affairs. “We get so caught up in these political conflicts around the world that we take sides,” he said at one point. “In a fight between monsters, some people are saying, ‘Godzilla, I want him to win.’ Other people are saying, ‘Mothra, I want him to win.’ And we totally forget that when monsters fight it’s the city that suffers. This is really the crux of it. There are no good guys; there are no bad guys.”

  Snowden reached for common ground, invoking Carrie Matheson, the CIA character that Danes plays on Homeland. “For CIA, for case officers, for people like Carrie I guess, the CIA makes commitments to agents when they’re recruited, to their assets,” he said. “It’s a common trope where [a case officer is] anguished because the agency says, ‘Cut this person loose.’” Sometimes, he said, a real-life Carrie is forced by headquarters to sacrifice someone she had recruited. Keeping promises to the recruit “is going to blow an operation or cause simple embarrassment for a powerful company,” and Langley makes brutal choices. “They go, ‘Protecting from this embarrassment is more important than the life of this asset.’ This stuff really does happen. I can’t get into detail here, but this is not only fiction.”

  This was Snowden at his most extravagant, implying inside knowledge of life-and-death events. I did not see how he could know such things from his experience as a CIA technical officer in Geneva. Team Homeland did not seem convinced. Snowden doubled down, telling his audience about an early conversation between the two of us. Laura Poitras and I had received the first of his leaks but had not yet begun to publish. Snowden had warned me to hurry.

  “When I was talking to Bart, he thought I was being incredibly dramatic,” Snowden said now. “It was still very likely that I would be interdicted. I told him, ‘If the U.S. government thinks that you are the single point of failure, if they can stop this from happening by killing you, they will do that.’ And he didn’t believe me. He probably still has some reservations on that.”

  No, I did not believe the government would assassinate a reporter. Back then, before I even knew his name, I hoped that Verax did not mean it literally. Maybe, I thought, he had let fear run away with him. It bothered me that Snowden reprised the story now—as if it lent him authority as the real spy in a room full of pretenders. When we talked about it later, he called me naïve. “We wouldn’t kill a journalist? Dude, we bombed Al Jazeera.”

  Danes, shoes off, curled up in a cashmere wrap, tucked her feet under her hips in a leather armchair. She had been scowling for some time.

  “You’re obviously really cynical about how the CIA works,” she said. “Do you think that there’s any value in a clandestine service? Do you think that it serves us as a country?”

  “I do actually,” Snowden replied. “And I want to be clear, that I think they’re super valuable. I think they’re good. I don’t want to tear down the NSA or the CIA. I think the work they do is by and large very valuable. The things I take issue with are specific programs used in specific ways. Particularly the mass surveillance authorities, particularly the deception of the public, as opposed to the deception of our adversaries.”

  “Why did you go to China first? Did you know that you would end up in Russia?” Danes asked.

  “The thing with China was that any extradition request was going to take time, and that time would allow me to communicate with the reporters everything they needed to basically report the stories, regardless of what happened to me,” Snowden said. “I never thought I would end up in Russia. When I was en route to Russia, the U.S. government canceled my passport while I was up in the air, which is what froze me in place. I actually had a flight booked at the time to Ecuador.”

  That was correct. Snowden planned two intermediate stops that day, in Havana and Caracas. Sarah Harrison, his travel companion from Hong Kong, had furnished me copies of the confirmed reservations.

  If you had stayed at home, Gansa said, “there was no way that you were ever going to get a day in court.”

  Snowden agreed, citing Ellsberg. “People forget that the only reason that Daniel Ellsberg is not still in prison, the only reason that he walked, was that Nixon was involved in so much completely outrageous behavior that the judge had no choice but to throw the case out,” he said, alluding to a break-in by Nixon’s agents at the office of Ellsberg’s psychiatrist. “If you are charged under the Espionage Act, there is no successful defense.”

  Danes was trying to picture Snowden’s life in Russia. “Have you made friends? What’s your community? Do you have dinner parties? What’s life like?”

  “You’re asking questions that I can guarantee the FBI is like, ‘Oh please, please ask more of these.’”

  Danes made a sour face. “Okay, well, don’t answer, then.”

  Some of us, Gansa said, tacking gently, have “feared for your safety” in Russia.

  “I’ve got to say, I appreciate that,” Snowden said. “But really, my work is done. I feel that in a large way, my life’s work is completed. . . . If something terrible happens to me and I disappear, don’t shed a tear for me.”

  Mandy Patinkin, who played a top CIA official in the series, shook his head sadly and said in a low voice, for the room, “‘My life’s work is over.’ It’s a boy. I have a child that’s thirty-two. That’s a boy.” Louder, for Snowden, Patinkin asked, “Do you have bad dreams or do you sleep well at night?”

  “This is actually something I’ve never been asked, except by my girlfriend,” Snowden replied.

  “Mandy gives good girlfriend,” Danes cracked.

  “I actually couldn’t hear you, but if you said, Lindsay is a good girlfriend—”

  “No, it’s fine,” Danes said, grinning. “It was hilarious.”

  Patinkin persisted: “Tell me about your dreams. And if you sleep good at night.”

  “I don’t dream,” Snowden said. “Or if I do dream, I don’t remember them.”

  * * *

  —

  The National Security Agency, established under that name on November 4, 1952, grew up in the age of radio waves and electric current traveling on copper wires. Decades of investment built a global apparatus of antennas and switches and satellites, all assembled with the singular purpose of harvesting electronic signals of specified kinds. The age of the photon, which commenced in earnest near the end of the twentieth century, rendered a great deal of that apparatus obsolete. By the year 2000, most of the world’s communications traveled as pulses of light over strands of spun glass the width of a human hair, arranged in ribbons and then twisted into braids. Fiber optic cables revolutionized data in transit. Digital storage revolutionized data at rest. The NSA had to remake itself from the ground up. When it learned to master its new domains, it attained a span of
control over information that no human endeavor had ever aspired to reach.

  “We were moving to active SIGINT, commuting to the target and extracting information from it, rather than hoping for a transmission we could intercept in traditional passive SIGINT,” wrote Michael V. Hayden in his 2016 memoir, Playing to the Edge, the first by a former director of the NSA. “We also knew that if we did this even half well, it would be the golden age of signals intelligence, since mankind was storing and moving more and more data in digital form with each passing day.

  “With little debate,” Hayden added, “we went from a world of letting radio waves serendipitously hit our antennas to what became a digital form of breaking and entering.”

  You could take away the wrong impression from that summary. The NSA was plenty active in the analog years. Project BLARNEY, which co-opted telephone companies, dated back to the 1970s. But by late 2001, impelled by technological opportunity and the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the NSA began wholesale collection from major switching points of global communications networks.

  Mark Klein, a technician for AT&T in San Francisco, learned in the summer of 2002 that an NSA representative had come to visit and consulted with company officers on classified business. A new secret room, Room 641A, sprang up at AT&T’s facility at 611 Folsom Street, a crossroads for the whole internet on the West Coast. A crypto keypad, unusual at the facility, locked the door against entry by union construction and maintenance crews and technicians without Top Secret clearances. Documents and other hints convinced Klein that something fishy was happening there.

  The building hosted peering links for the biggest internet providers in the western United States—physical connections at the intersection of information superhighways. AT&T developed a “splitter cut-in and test procedure,” according to documents Klein shared with me, that showed how to make a copy of the whole data flow.

  One night in 2003, Klein found himself alone on an overnight shift on the seventh floor, just above the secret room. “That gave me a chance to investigate without people wondering what I was doing,” he told me later at his Alameda home, where he lived with his wife and two terriers. The floor of his cable room was the ceiling of Room 641A, with two-foot-square tiles covering the access space. He got down on one knee and began to remove the tiles, using a Fireberd test kit to trace the connections. “I’d pull up the floor, pull up one tile at a time, and you can see the cabling under there,” he said. “You can just trace it, see where the cable is going.” Four tiles from his starting point, he found the spot where the cables plunged down to a splitter cabinet in Room 641A. On the floor below, the sixth floor, Klein found a ladder and “poked my head up there to see—the ceiling tile was open.” He confirmed that one cable went into the splitter cabinet from the seventh floor. Two came out, the second a perfect copy of the first. They were yellow cables, easy to spot. At the time they each carried gigabytes of data per second.

  The NSA had many installations like that “to gain access to high-capacity international fiber-optic cables, switches and/or routers throughout the world,” according to an overview briefing for members of Congress on the intelligence committees. Some were the NSA’s own handiwork and some, like the MUSCULAR project against Google and Yahoo, relied on one of the Five Eyes intelligence allies. A few were “unilateral”—clandestine, and maintained in stealth. More were known to “corporate partners,” including AT&T, Verizon, Motorola, and Cisco, their identities obscured in NSA paperwork by cover names such as FAIRVIEW and OAKSTAR. It did not take many such access points, strategically placed, to provide the NSA with a commanding view of communications across the globe. According to a 2011 presentation for an intelligence conference with the NSA’s counterparts in the United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand, the “New Collection Posture” of the Five Eyes was to “Sniff it All,” “Know it All,” “Collect it All,” “Process it All,” “Exploit it All,” “Partner it All.” This was overstated as a description of reality, then and now, but it rang true as an aspirational goal.

  The ambitions of the golden age of surveillance led to parallel anxieties in the intelligence establishment. If “collect it all” was nearly within grasp, then any missing piece felt like a culpable failure. David C. Gompert, who served as deputy director of national intelligence between 2009 and 2011, including a stint as acting director, once told me over breakfast at PJ’s Pancake House in Princeton that he had testified many times in closed congressional hearings. No member of Congress ever asked him whether he thought U.S. intelligence went too far, collected too much information, put too much privacy at risk. “The only thing they ever asked was how we failed to anticipate something, how we failed to stop it, why we did not know enough,” he said. Nicholas Rasmussen, who directed the National Counterterrorism Center until 2017, told me, similarly, “If there weren’t zero tolerance for any attack, any one casualty, they wouldn’t be so obsessed with knowing everything. But there’s no power they’re willing to give up when they’re being held to a standard that nothing can ever happen that you didn’t know about.”

  In November 2014, early in his second year as FBI director, James Comey gave a fascinating illustration of that frame of mind in a keynote speech at a conference at Fordham University’s Center on National Security. He warned, as his predecessor had, that the spread of encryption in consumer technology—attributable, in significant part, to the Snowden revelations—was hobbling the FBI. More and more often, investigators came across evidence that was locked out of their reach: photos on an iPhone or messages sent with WhatsApp, for example. The FBI had access to exotic cracking tools, and sometimes there were alternative paths to the evidence, but Comey said the bureau was “going dark” too often against terrorists and criminal suspects. Apple, Google, and other technology companies made a point of engineering their products in such a way that only the customer could unlock them. They refused to create back doors for government use. Comey preferred the term “lawful access.” Absent such help, he said, encryption risked creating a warrant-free zone where the rule of law did not apply.

  I put up my hand for a question. Comey made a wry show of reluctance, then called on me by name. We had grown to be friends several years before in the course of my work on Angler, when Comey was between big jobs in government. He had been to my home for dinner. Now I was a potential witness and, in some eyes, an accomplice, to crimes under his jurisdiction. I thought we might resume our friendship when professional positions allowed, but circumstances now kept us at arm’s length. A public encounter like this one was the only prudent kind.

  I wanted to try out an idea I had been playing with. A search warrant entitled the government to seek, not to find. There was no guarantee of success. Encryption posed a challenge in practice, but that did not repudiate rule of law. Society did not have to configure itself for transparency. The founders themselves had used codes and ciphers in their personal correspondence long after the Revolution was won. We all had a right to conceal things we did not want others to see or hear. We could whisper out of earshot, leaving no record. We could bury a letter or burn it. The law was full of obstacles: the right to remain silent, exclusion of tainted evidence, the unanimous jury requirement. America was not built for maximum police efficiency.

  “Do you see any possibility, in your respect for civil liberties, that inefficiency in terms of law enforcement and intelligence gathering at some level is a feature, not a bug?” I asked.

  “I think that’s actually, Bart, at the heart of the conversation we need to have: given the way we’re going, will it go beyond mere inefficiency to a total darkness on the law enforcement front,” he said. “I can picture a future where that information is utterly inaccessible to us, and so is that mere inefficiency? Maybe in the view of some. My view is that it would be, maybe, the mother of all inefficiencies.”

  If you insist that Apple create a special encryption key for the FBI, I asked, “how is this differen
t from saying that you shouldn’t be able to buy a lock without telling the lock company what combination you’re setting, or you can’t buy a shovel without telling the manufacturer where you’re digging a hole? Why is it that you should demand perfect knowledge of what they do with their devices?”

  The difference, Comey said, was that “there’s no lock, there’s no safe in the world that can’t be opened.”

  A telling answer, I thought, more so than I had expected. With the right authorization, Comey could already break down any domestic physical barrier. He had the power of perfect knowledge of the inside of any vault. He wanted the same reach within the virtual realm. It sounded like much the same thing, perhaps, but it was not. Governments had not had a power like it before. Communications had never been comprehensively open to intelligence agencies. Most human interactions, even in the age of the written word, had gone unmemorialized.

  It would have been inconceivable at any other time to gather a record of any conversation at will, still less all of them. Today the ambition was plausible, and some of Comey’s peers in the intelligence community believed that achieving it was essential. Not to know everything, but to be capable of knowing anything. Any refuge against surveillance, any zone of effective privacy, had to be neutralized. That is why encryption, anonymity, and antivirus software were all categorized as “threats” in the NSA’s internal literature. In an ideal world, NSA deputy director Chris Inglis told me, the agency would have “a universal capability” to penetrate those defenses and adversaries would not know it could do so.

  I did not blame law enforcement and intelligence officials for wanting unrestricted access. The job was father to the wish. That did not mean a well-tuned republic should grant it.

  * * *

  —

  Like Google and Yahoo, Microsoft had reason to believe the links between its overseas data centers had been compromised. Brad Smith, the Microsoft general counsel who would go on to become the company’s president, wrote, in a blog post about our story, that “[g]overnment snooping potentially now constitutes an ‘advanced persistent threat, alongside sophisticated malware and cyber attacks.” Those were fighting words. Smith was comparing the NSA to a foreign adversary or a criminal syndicate. I imagined that Microsoft must have confronted the U.S. government about MUSCULAR, demanded an explanation. Two weeks later, I asked Smith how the NSA had responded. “I haven’t asked, because I don’t want to know,” Smith told me. “Because if I’m told, then I’m going to be told the information is classified. And it may restrict my ability to speak.”