Try a thought experiment. Return to the science-fictional technology of mind reading that I described in chapter 7. The writer Conor Friedersdorf proposed a version of that scenario in the Atlantic. Suppose the government really could read human thoughts. Should “surveillance professionals shy away from breaking into everyone’s minds, thereby ‘going deaf’ to threats against the United States?” he asked. For my purposes here, let’s add a few details. Suppose the National Mind Reading Agency collected thoughts in bulk from passengers at transportation hubs around the world. By law it was allowed to presume that those thoughts belonged to foreigners, because the passengers were, after all, located overseas. Millions of Americans incidentally passed through the thought-reading sensors as well. Leave aside the dystopian flavor of the operation as a whole. Focus for the moment only on the protection of American privacy. Would we be satisfied by procedural rules that said the thought-readers did not target American minds, would not read American thoughts except for lawful foreign intelligence purposes, and would (usually) remove the names of Americans from thought-reading reports? Would we be content with the intentional collection of all thoughts, for that matter, so long as the results were “minimized”?
Ledgett was nothing but cordial at our long lunch, which stretched past the three-hour mark, but he found it hard to take some of my questions seriously. He believed that people who worried about bulk surveillance and minimization loopholes, who did fantastical thought experiments, fundamentally misapprehended the world in which he had worked.
“What I struggle with is to convince people that the government really doesn’t care about them, in that sense. You’re just not that interesting. People wearing tinfoil hats in the hinterlands with a basement of food and do their own ammunition making, I get that they are concerned that the government is listening to their communications, but the government just doesn’t care. Things they’re doing are not interesting enough from a national security point of view.”
Speaking directly to me, he added, “The National Security Agency doesn’t care about you.”
* * *
—
What the government cares and does not care about is fluid over time. The national security point of view had once cared a great deal about the loyalty of German and Japanese Americans, black civil rights leaders, Vietnam War protesters, and the designated enemies of Richard Nixon and J. Edgar Hoover. It still cared about worshippers at mosques to a degree that some judges found untoward. Not all of this history was the NSA’s, and there had been reforms, but the contingent nature of government interest was one of Snowden’s strongest points. Many advances we take for granted now in civil rights and social justice—women’s suffrage, desegregation, the right to form unions, gay marriage—relied on organized resistance against the law of their times. The Underground Railroad could not have run in a time of pervasive surveillance. The same could be said of the American Revolution. “They wouldn’t have been able to coordinate,” Snowden said of the founders. “They would have been individually popped off the street and thrown in King George’s jail.” Comprehensive transparency in service of comprehensive law enforcement, he said, would mean “freezing in place the status quo of that society forever.”
In the early twenty-first century, the NSA had amassed a degree of latent power that Snowden believed to be an inherent threat. The machinery of electronic surveillance, and in particular of bulk collection, spanned so broad a reach that its mere potential for misuse was cause for alarm. “The only things that restrict the activities of the surveillance state are policy,” he said. Policy could change, he told Poitras and Greenwald in his first taped interview. “And there will be nothing the people can do at that point to oppose it. It will be turnkey tyranny.”
Senator Frank Church, back in the Nixon era, famously preceded Snowden in that observation. He chaired an eponymous congressional committee that investigated intelligence abuses after Watergate. On August 17, 1975, he appeared on NBC’s Meet the Press. At a time when NSA capabilities were far less advanced, and the name of the agency was seldom mentioned, he offered a warning.
We have a very extensive capability of intercepting messages wherever they may be in the airwaves. Now, that is necessary and important to the United States as we look abroad at enemies or potential enemies. We must know, at the same time, that capability at any time could be turned around on the American people, and no American would have any privacy left, such is the capability to monitor everything—telephone conversations, telegrams, it doesn’t matter. There would be no place to hide.
If this government ever became a tyranny, if a dictator ever took charge in this country, the technological capacity that the intelligence community has given the government could enable it to impose total tyranny, and there would be no way to fight back because the most careful effort to combine together in resistance to the government, no matter how privately it was done, is within the reach of the government to know. Such is the capability of this technology.
The Church Committee inspired many reforms and a culture of respect for rules inside the NSA, among other agencies. But by the time I sat down with Ledgett, the United States had elected a president who showed flagrant indifference to legal niceties and governing norms.
“Does Donald Trump make you reconsider in any way the powers and practices that seemed okay to you because you trusted the people who held them?” I asked.
“I didn’t trust the system because of the president or his minions, whether in the White House or cabinet. I trust the system because of the people that operate it, because of the decades of culture and experience and training and ethos that NSA has and the respect they all have for the Fourth Amendment.”
And if the president tried to direct surveillance against his political enemies, as he tried to direct investigations in the Justice Department?
“As convinced as I am of the gravity of that, if there were attempts to do something improper like that, people would refuse, and it would become known pretty quickly to Congress, to the DNI and the attorney general,” Ledgett said.
I thought he overestimated the resilience of those institutions against presidential influence, but that was a bigger question, one of the central questions of the Trump years. I asked instead about a force in Trump’s favor: the reverential respect, in the NSA as in all Defense Department components, for the chain of command.
“You were never in the military,” Ledgett replied. “You don’t swear an oath to the president. You swear an oath to the Constitution that is bigger and lasts longer than any president—and that’s [also] true of civilians. The idea that just because the president says it, people are going to jump and do it, is a little bit of a falsehood, especially when it’s something that is so clearly out of bounds.”
Trump’s genius, I said, was suborning people who thought they knew their limits. He led them into transgression one unexpected step at a time. Was Ledgett really confident that people in the NSA or anywhere else would recognize exactly when they began to cross a line? In the end, he conceded, the president might have his way.
“Could he decide to drop in a B-52 and drop a nuclear bomb on anyone he wants to? Sure. Am I losing sleep over that?”
Ledgett shook his head. That was an old fallacy, a hand-waving exercise. Yes, it seemed paradoxical to worry about lesser contingencies when the president could lay waste to the world in a nuclear war. Ledgett was too smart to think that answered my question.
I had had a similar conversation long before with Raj De back in 2013. Maybe, I proposed, the government had granted itself too much power over information. Maybe an apparatus of pervasive surveillance, capable of seeing anything, anywhere, was too dangerous to build. Maybe we should want to defer that decision. The NSA could not “collect it all” yet, but it was headed there. Did he not fear the results if the wherewithal should fall into malignant hands?
De had worked in Barack Obama
’s White House. He trusted the president, trusted the presidency, trusted the norms of the institutions he knew. To him the dark turn I hypothesized was beyond unlikely, and shackling the NSA to prevent its misuse made no sense.
“The idea of having some categorical ability to prevent tyranny is just a fool’s errand,” he said. “Shit, Hitler was elected in a democratic society at the time. You can’t categorically prevent that. And I don’t think that should be the driving force to set what we should be doing to protect ourselves” with foreign intelligence. “If you really want to prevent a surveillance state that could be abused by a tyrant, the only thing is to not have surveillance.”
James Clapper, then the DNI, might have said about the same thing at the time. Five years later and recently retired, he had begun to rethink. Trump had accused the Deep State of spying on him. When we met at the McLean Family Restaurant two mornings after Trump lashed out at Clapper and threatened to revoke his security clearance, I asked Clapper if he thought Trump was projecting his own intent.
“There’s all kinds of things he could do, I guess,” he said. “I can think up scenarios. I don’t think he’d bother to rewrite Twelve Triple Three. It doesn’t strike me that he’s all that hung up on what executive orders say. He’d just do it.”
“You’re probably not going to like this, but this is one of the first points that Snowden made,” I told Clapper. “He called it turnkey tyranny. The idea that there are so many latent powers in the system—that despite all the safeguards now, they can be switched off.”
A sour look crossed Clapper’s face. He took a swipe at Snowden, doubting his motives, but he surprised me by agreeing with the main point.
“If you view that in the context of pre-Trump, well, that’s kind of unthinkable,” he said. “In the absence of congressional oversight, well, yeah, he can do a lot. When you have an unprecedented situation like that, all the previous rules, norms and standards are O.B.E.”—overcome by events. “So, sure. The system is not ironclad. It’s fragile. It’s based on people behaving in a certain way, in conformity with the principles of this country and the Constitution and long-standing practice, procedure. And all that is really, you know, out the window because of Trump. Anything people thought pre-Trump is very different. It’s almost the innocent age.”
There must be people in the intelligence world, I said, who believed reform had gone too far in the 1970s and 1980s. I wondered: Would Trump have willing allies inside the system, ready to scale back privacy rules? People who would help him reinterpret standards or find room between the lines? Clapper nodded.
“Well, I suppose people make individual judgments about their frustrations with either rules that are in place or rules that they wish we had, so yeah, sure. That’s human nature. I can’t argue with it.”
“So here’s where it leads me,” I said. “And I don’t know for sure the answer but I have an instinct that worries me—that once you come to that conclusion, that it really is true that someone could do the wrong things with all that latent power, does it change your views on the creation of machinery that offers that much power? Does it make you think that maybe the machinery, its very existence, goes too far? Maybe that it’s not a great thing that the apparatus can do all that it can do?”
“Well, now we find ourselves asking those questions. The reason all that machinery was built was ostensibly to keep the nation safe and secure. In that spirit, I guess, yeah, there’s potentially room for abuse.”
“To put a fine point on it, is it possible that what Trump teaches us is that maybe you want to scale back capabilities?”
“The problem when you say ‘scale back capabilities,’ you put a governor on the technical capacity that you have. The technical capacity is always going to be there. You can’t unring the technology bell. The only way you can put a governor on that is to make a decision to do that. But the technology is still there. The problem is, Bart, if you set your mind to it, you can reinstitute, you can recapture capacity or capability that’s lost or forsworn. Because as long as the tech is there, mankind devised that technology, so mankind can turn around and exploit it or de-exploit. And no amount of rule making or law passing can undo that.”
Clapper had no cure to propose. De thought a cure was not possible. Ledgett believed rules and culture would win out.
Snowden, who had sounded the alarm, put his own faith in technology to ward off overreach by the NSA. “Let us speak no more of faith in man, but bind him down from mischief by the chains of cryptography,” he said in his first signed communication, rewriting Thomas Jefferson’s ode to the Constitution. “Our future depends on the efforts of the open source community.” In an interview later, he told me, “The people who are going to change this and change it lastingly are grad students today. They’re kids in college. . . . People are writing dissertations and proposing new models that are robust against surveillance systems.”
From Moscow, Snowden spent much of his time in virtual meetings with tech executives and engineers, advocating for greater security in commercial products. He worked with developers on exotic tools, including one project to turn a smartphone into a tamper-detection device and another to automate “secret sharing” for cryptographic keys—the concept behind his abandoned dead man’s switch. Periodically he would say things to me like, “I’m doing some really fulfilling stuff with nested virtualization now.”
In history, as Snowden told it, “communications were always private, simply because of access. You couldn’t plant a government spy in everybody’s house in the 1800s. We start to get electronic communications, everything suddenly gets more open, until we reach the point of about ten years ago, where everything can be monitored. Encryption was very rare. Basically you could find some information about anybody anywhere. So the entire communications space [was] observable. That dynamic is beginning to change now. We’re shifting it. We’re basically reclaiming spots and making parts of it more private again. And these actually aren’t unsolvable problems. If you can make security work in the most common settings, you can shift the focus of surveillance resource spending from watching everybody to watching the people who are actually suspicious.”
The Snowden effect shifted popular culture. It brought about legal, diplomatic, political, and legislative challenges to the prevailing model at the NSA. Alongside all that, and perhaps most significant, came demand for greater resistance in the private sector against NSA bulk surveillance techniques. Security and privacy became marketing points for the internet giants. Google accelerated plans to encrypt all its services for consumer and business customers, and it tightened up security inside its cloud, too. “I am willing to help [the U.S. government] on the purely defensive side of things,” Eric Grosse, Google’s chief security engineer, said in a published interview, referring to cyber security. “But signals intercept is totally off the table.” Google would not cooperate with government there, he said, adding, “No hard feelings, but my job is to make their job hard.”
The year after our Google cloud exploitation story, Grosse’s team released the source code for a new software library called End-to-End. It was a free tool that other software developers could use for encryption of email. Google security engineers left a blunt fuck-you for the NSA in a comment embedded in the source code, harking back to the smiley face in the cloud cartoon:
--ssl-added-and-removed-here-;-)
Snowden and the U.S. government made occasional, inconclusive efforts to reach a negotiated agreement for his return to the United States. The efforts were most intensive in late 2013 and early 2014, when the stakes were highest for U.S. intelligence. The secrets Snowden had stolen were still fresh. The government did not know how many might yet be exposed. Ledgett believed that Snowden could resolve expensive uncertainties.
“He’s already said, ‘If I got amnesty I would come back,’” CBS News correspondent John Miller said to Ledgett in a December 15, 2013, interview.
“Given the potential damage to national security, what would your thought on making a deal be?”
“So, my personal view is, yes, it’s worth having a conversation about,” Ledgett replied. “I would need assurances that the remainder of the data could be secured and my bar for those assurances would be very high. It would be more than just an assertion on his part.”
The more time passed, the more the government mitigated its losses. Forensic detective work gave greater clarity about what Snowden took. There was always strong opposition to a negotiated arrangement with Snowden, and gradually the case for compromise diminished. Snowden, meanwhile, made a new life in Moscow. His girlfriend, Lindsay, joined him there. They married in 2017. He built an online community among English-speaking activists. As this book was completed, both sides had settled into a long-term waiting game.
“Neither of us,” Snowden told me, “have a driving need to see any kind of resolution.”
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
My first thanks belong to Edward Snowden, who took me into his confidence and gave life to a vital public debate about the boundaries of secret intelligence in a free society. For introducing us, and for our early collaboration, I thank Laura Poitras. For helping us navigate a complex relationship, I owe Ben Wizner, Snowden’s lawyer at the ACLU, the world’s tallest beer.
Hundreds of people in the U.S. and foreign governments, military and intelligence services, private industry, NGOs, think tanks, and universities have enriched my understanding of the worlds I describe in this book. There are far too many to thank by name, and some cannot be named. I am grateful to all of them. Any errors of fact or interpretation, as always, are my own.
Ashkan Soltani was outfitting his van for a long road trip when I recruited him to help research this book. By then we had closed down our partnership at the Washington Post, where we pieced together hard puzzles from the Snowden archive. Ashkan had been glad to shed the burden, relinquishing his encryption keys and relaxing the precautions he took to protect our work. He almost said no when I asked him to suit back up. “Imagine being completely free of this, never leaving your machine unwatched and all that, and [then] being pulled back down into it,” he wrote to me. Happily, he gave in. His insights and expertise were invaluable, especially to chapters 6 and 8.
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