“What time does your clock say, exactly?” he asked.
Edward Snowden
says his ‘mission’s already accomplished’: The former NSA contractor’s leaks
have altered the U.S. government’s relationship with its citizens and the rest
of the world. Six months later, he reflects.
He checked the reply against
his watch and described a place to meet.
“I’ll see you there,” he
said.
Edward Joseph Snowden emerged at the appointed hour, alone,
blending into a light crowd of locals and tourists. He cocked his arm for a
handshake, then turned his shoulder to indicate a path. Before long he had
guided his visitor to a secure space out of public view.
During more than
14 hours of interviews, the first he has conducted in person since arriving here
in June, Snowden did not part the curtains or step outside. Russia granted him
temporary asylum on Aug. 1, but Snowden remains a target of surpassing interest
to the intelligence services whose secrets he spilled on an epic
scale.
Late this spring, Snowden supplied three journalists, including
this one, with caches of top-secret documents from the National Security Agency,
where he worked as a contractor.
Dozens of revelations followed, and then
hundreds, as news organizations around the world picked up the story. Congress
pressed for explanations, new evidence revived old lawsuits and the Obama
administration was obliged to declassify thousands of pages it had fought for
years to conceal.
Taken together, the revelations have brought to light a
global surveillance system that cast off many of its historical restraints after
the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. Secret legal authorities empowered the NSA to
sweep in the telephone, Internet and location records of whole populations. One
of the leaked presentation slides described the agency’s “collection philosophy”
as “Order one of everything off the menu.”
Six months after the first
revelations appeared in The Washington Post and Britain’s Guardian newspaper,
Snowden agreed to reflect at length on the roots and repercussions of his
choice. He was relaxed and animated over two days of nearly unbroken
conversation, fueled by burgers, pasta, ice cream and Russian
pastry.
Snowden offered vignettes from his intelligence career and from
his recent life as “an indoor cat” in Russia. But he consistently steered the
conversation back to surveillance, democracy and the meaning of the documents he
exposed.
“For me, in terms of personal satisfaction, the mission’s
already accomplished,” he said. “I already won. As soon as the journalists were
able to work, everything that I had been trying to do was validated. Because,
remember, I didn’t want to change society. I wanted to give society a chance to
determine if it should change itself.”
“All I wanted was for the public
to be able to have a say in how they are governed,” he said. “That is a
milestone we left a long time ago. Right now, all we are looking at are stretch
goals.”
‘Going in blind’
Snowden is an orderly
thinker, with an engineer’s approach to problem-solving. He had come to believe
that a dangerous machine of mass surveillance was growing unchecked. Closed-door
oversight by Congress and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court was a
“graveyard of judgment,” he said, manipulated by the agency it was supposed to
keep in check. Classification rules erected walls to prevent public
debate.
Toppling those walls would be a spectacular act of transgression
against the norms that prevailed inside them. Someone would have to bypass
security, extract the secrets, make undetected contact with journalists and
provide them with enough proof to tell the stories.
The NSA’s business is
“information dominance,” the use of other people’s secrets to shape events. At
29, Snowden upended the agency on its own turf.
“You recognize that
you’re going in blind, that there’s no model,” Snowden said, acknowledging that
he had no way to know whether the public would share his views.
“But when
you weigh that against the alternative, which is not to act,” he said, “you
realize that some analysis is better than no analysis. Because even if your
analysis proves to be wrong, the marketplace of ideas will bear that out. If you
look at it from an engineering perspective, an iterative perspective, it’s clear
that you have to try something rather than do nothing.”
By his own terms,
Snowden succeeded beyond plausible ambition. The NSA, accustomed to watching
without being watched, faces scrutiny it has not endured since the 1970s, or
perhaps ever.
The cascading effects have made themselves felt in
Congress, the courts, popular culture, Silicon Valley and world capitals. The
basic structure of the Internet itself is now in question, as Brazil and members
of the European Union consider measures to keep their data away from U.S.
territory and U.S. technology giants including Google, Microsoft and Yahoo take
extraordinary steps to block the collection of data by their
government.
For months, Obama administration officials attacked Snowden’s
motives and said the work of the NSA was distorted by selective leaks and
misinterpretations.
On Dec. 16, in a lawsuit that could not have gone
forward without the disclosures made possible by Snowden, U.S. District Judge
Richard J. Leon described the NSA’s capabilities as “almost Orwellian” and said
its bulk collection of U.S. domestic telephone records was probably
unconstitutional.
The next day, in the Roosevelt Room, an unusual
delegation of executives from old telephone companies and young Internet firms
told President Obama that the NSA’s intrusion into their networks was a threat
to the U.S. information economy. The following day, an advisory panel appointed
by Obama recommended substantial new restrictions on the NSA, including an end
to the domestic call-records program.
“This week is a turning point,”
said Jesselyn Radack, of the Government Accountability Project, who is one of
Snowden’s legal advisers. “It has been just a cascade.”
‘They
elected me’
On June 22, the Justice Department unsealed a
criminal complaint charging Snowden with espionage and felony theft of
government property. It was a dry enumeration of statutes, without a trace of
the anger pulsing through Snowden’s former precincts.
In the intelligence
and national security establishments, Snowden is widely viewed as a reckless
saboteur, and journalists abetting him little less so.
At the Aspen
Security Forum in July, a four-star military officer known for his even keel
seethed through one meeting alongside a reporter he knew to be in contact with
Snowden. Before walking away, he turned and pointed a finger.
“We didn’t
have another 9/11,” he said angrily, because intelligence enabled warfighters to
find the enemy first. “Until you’ve got to pull the trigger, until you’ve had to
bury your people, you don’t have a clue.”
It is commonly said of Snowden
that he broke an oath of secrecy, a turn of phrase that captures a sense of
betrayal. NSA Director Keith B. Alexander and Director of National Intelligence
James R. Clapper Jr., among many others, have used that formula.
In his
interview with The Post, Snowden noted matter-of-factly that Standard Form 312,
the classified-information nondisclosure agreement, is a civil contract. He
signed it, but he pledged his fealty elsewhere.
“The oath of allegiance
is not an oath of secrecy,” he said. “That is an oath to the Constitution. That
is the oath that I kept that Keith Alexander and James Clapper did
not.”
People who accuse him of disloyalty, he said, mistake his
purpose.
“I am not trying to bring down the NSA, I am working to improve
the NSA,” he said. “I am still working for the NSA right now. They are the only
ones who don’t realize it.”
What entitled Snowden, now 30, to take on
that responsibility?
“That whole question — who elected you? — inverts
the model,” he said. “They elected me. The overseers.”
He named the
chairmen of the Senate and House intelligence committees.
“Dianne
Feinstein elected me when she asked softball questions” in committee hearings,
he said. “Mike Rogers elected me when he kept these programs hidden. . . . The
FISA court elected me when they decided to legislate from the bench on things
that were far beyond the mandate of what that court was ever intended to do. The
system failed comprehensively, and each level of oversight, each level of
responsibility that should have addressed this, abdicated their
responsibility.”
“It wasn’t that they put it on me as an individual —
that I’m uniquely qualified, an angel descending from the heavens — as that they
put it on someone, somewhere,” he said. “You have the capability, and you
realize every other [person] sitting around the table has the same capability
but they don’t do it. So somebody has to be the
first.”
‘Front-page test’
Snowden grants that
NSA employees by and large believe in their mission and trust the agency to
handle the secrets it takes from ordinary people — deliberately, in the case of
bulk records collection, and “incidentally,” when the content of American phone
calls and e-mails are swept into NSA systems along with foreign
targets.
But Snowden also said acceptance of the agency’s operations was
not universal. He began to test that proposition more than a year ago, he said,
in periodic conversations with co-workers and superiors that foreshadowed his
emerging plan.
Beginning in October 2012, he said, he brought his
misgivings to two superiors in the NSA’s Technology Directorate and two more in
the NSA Threat Operations Center’s regional base in Hawaii. For each of them,
and 15 other co-workers, Snowden said he opened a data query tool called
BOUNDLESSINFORMANT, which used color-coded “heat maps” to depict the volume of
data ingested by NSA taps.
His colleagues were often “astonished to learn
we are collecting more in the United States on Americans than we are on Russians
in Russia,” he said. Many of them were troubled, he said, and several said they
did not want to know any more.
“I asked these people, ‘What do you think
the public would do if this was on the front page?’ ” he said. He noted that
critics have accused him of bypassing internal channels of dissent. “How is that
not reporting it? How is that not raising it?” he said.
By last December,
Snowden was contacting reporters, although he had not yet passed along any
classified information. He continued to give his colleagues the “front-page
test,” he said, until April.
Asked about those conversations, NSA
spokeswoman Vanee Vines sent a prepared statement to The Post: “After extensive
investigation, including interviews with his former NSA supervisors and
co-workers, we have not found any evidence to support Mr. Snowden’s contention
that he brought these matters to anyone’s attention.”
Snowden recounted
another set of conversations that he said took place three years earlier, when
he was sent by the NSA’s Technology Directorate to support operations at a
listening post in Japan. As a system administrator, he had full access to
security and auditing controls. He said he saw serious flaws with information
security.
“I actually recommended they move to two-man control for
administrative access back in 2009,” he said, first to his supervisor in Japan
and then to the directorate’s chief of operations in the Pacific. “Sure, a
whistleblower could use these things, but so could a spy.”
That
precaution, which requires a second set of credentials to perform risky
operations such as copying files onto a removable drive, has been among the
principal security responses to the Snowden affair.
Vines, the NSA
spokeswoman, said there was no record of those conversations, either.
U.S.
‘would cease to exist’
Just before releasing the documents this spring,
Snowden made a final review of the risks. He had overcome what he described at
the time as a “selfish fear” of the consequences for himself.
“I said to
you the only fear [left] is apathy — that people won’t care, that they won’t
want change,” he recalled this month.
The documents leaked by Snowden
compelled attention because they revealed to Americans a history they did not
know they had.
Internal briefing documents reveled in the “Golden Age of
Electronic Surveillance.” Brawny cover names such as MUSCULAR, TUMULT and
TURMOIL boasted of the agency’s prowess.
With assistance from private
communications firms, the NSA had learned to capture enormous flows of data at
the speed of light from fiber-optic cables that carried Internet and telephone
traffic over continents and under seas. According to one document in Snowden’s
cache, the agency’s Special Source Operations group, which as early as 2006 was
said to be ingesting “one Library of Congress every 14.4 seconds,” had an
official seal that might have been parody: an eagle with all the world’s cables
in its grasp.
Each year, NSA systems collected hundreds of millions of
e-mail address books, hundreds of billions of cellphone location records and
trillions of domestic call logs.
Most of that data, by definition and
intent, belonged to ordinary people suspected of nothing. But vast new storage
capacity and processing tools enabled the NSA to use the information to map
human relationships on a planetary scale. Only this way, its leadership
believed, could the NSA reach beyond its universe of known intelligence
targets.
In the view of the NSA, signals intelligence, or electronic
eavesdropping, was a matter of life and death, “without which America would
cease to exist as we know it,” according to an internal presentation in the
first week of October 2001 as the agency ramped up its response to the al-Qaeda
attacks on New York and Washington.
With stakes such as those, there was
no capability the NSA believed it should leave on the table. The agency followed
orders from President George W. Bush to begin domestic collection without
authority from Congress and the courts. When the NSA won those authorities
later, some of them under secret interpretations of laws passed by Congress
between 2007 and 2012, the Obama administration went further still.
Using
PRISM, the cover name for collection of user data from Google, Yahoo, Microsoft,
Apple and five other U.S.-based companies, the NSA could obtain all
communications to or from any specified target. The companies had no choice but
to comply with the government's request for data.
But the NSA could not
use PRISM, which was overseen once a year by the surveillance court, for the
collection of virtually all data handled by those companies. To widen its
access, it teamed up with its British counterpart, Government Communications
Headquarters, or GCHQ, to break into the private fiber-optic links that
connected Google and Yahoo data centers around the world.
That operation,
which used the cover name MUSCULAR, tapped into U.S. company data from outside
U.S. territory. The NSA therefore believed it did not need permission from
Congress or judicial oversight. Data from hundreds of millions of U.S. accounts
flowed over those Google and Yahoo links, but classified rules allowed the NSA
to presume that data ingested overseas belonged to
foreigners.
‘Persistent threat’
Disclosure of
the MUSCULAR project enraged and galvanized U.S. technology executives. They
believed the NSA had lawful access to their front doors — and had broken down
the back doors anyway.
Microsoft general counsel Brad Smith took to his
company’s blog and called the NSA an “advanced persistent threat” — the worst of
all fighting words in U.S. cybersecurity circles, generally reserved for Chinese
state-sponsored hackers and sophisticated criminal enterprises.
“For the
industry as a whole, it caused everyone to ask whether we knew as much as we
thought,” Smith recalled in an interview. “It underscored the fact that while
people were confident that the U.S. government was complying with U.S. laws for
activity within U.S. territory, perhaps there were things going on outside the
United States . . . that made this bigger and more complicated and more
disconcerting than we knew.”
They wondered, he said, if the NSA was
“collecting proprietary information from the companies themselves.”
Led
by Google and then Yahoo, one company after another announced expensive plans to
encrypt its data traffic over tens of thousands of miles of cable. It was a
direct — in some cases, explicit — blow to NSA collection of user data in bulk.
If the NSA wanted the information, it would have to request it or circumvent the
encryption one target at a time.
As these projects are completed, the
Internet will become a less friendly place for the NSA to work. The agency can
still collect data from virtually any one, but collecting from everyone will be
harder.
The industry’s response, Smith acknowledged, was driven by a
business threat. U.S. companies could not afford to be seen as candy stores for
U.S. intelligence. But the principle of the thing, Smith said, “is fundamentally
about ensuring that customer data is turned over to governments pursuant to
valid legal orders and in accordance with constitutional
principles.”
‘Warheads on foreheads’
Snowden has
focused on much the same point from the beginning: Individual targeting would
cure most of what he believes is wrong with the NSA.
Six months ago, a
reporter asked him by encrypted e-mail why Americans would want the NSA to give
up bulk collection if that would limit a useful intelligence tool.
“I
believe the cost of frank public debate about the powers of our government is
less than the danger posed by allowing these powers to continue growing in
secret,” he replied, calling them “a direct threat to democratic
governance.”
In the Moscow interview, Snowden said, “What the government
wants is something they never had before,” adding: “They want total awareness.
The question is, is that something we should be allowing?”
Snowden
likened the NSA’s powers to those used by British authorities in Colonial
America, when “general warrants” allowed anyone to be searched. The FISA court,
Snowden said, “is authorizing general warrants for the entire country’s
metadata.”
“The last time that happened, we fought a war over it,” he
said.
Technology, of course, has enabled a great deal of consumer
surveillance by private companies, as well. The difference with the NSA’s
possession of the data, Snowden said, is that government has the power to take
away life or freedom.
At the NSA, he said, “there are people in the
office who joke about, ‘We put warheads on foreheads.’ Twitter doesn’t put
warheads on foreheads.”
Privacy, as Snowden sees it, is a universal
right, applicable to American and foreign surveillance alike.
“I don’t
care whether you’re the pope or Osama bin Laden,” he said. “As long as there’s
an individualized, articulable, probable cause for targeting these people as
legitimate foreign intelligence, that’s fine. I don’t think it’s imposing a
ridiculous burden by asking for probable cause. Because, you have to understand,
when you have access to the tools the NSA does, probable cause falls out of
trees.”
‘Everybody knows’
On June 29, Gilles de
Kerchove, the European Union’s counterterrorism coordinator, awoke to a report
in Der Spiegel that U.S. intelligence had broken into E.U. offices, including
his, to implant surveillance devices.
The 56-year-old Belgian, whose work
is often classified, did not consider himself naive. But he took the news
personally, and more so when he heard unofficial explanations from
Washington.
“ ‘Everybody knows. Everybody does’ — Keith Alexander said
that,” de Kerchove said in an interview. “I don’t like the idea that the NSA
will put bugs in my office. No. I don’t like it. No. Between allies? No. I’m
surprised that people find that noble.”
Comparable reactions, expressed
less politely in private, accompanied revelations that the NSA had tapped the
cellphones of German Chancellor Angela Merkel and President Dilma Rousseff of
Brazil. The blowback roiled relations with both allies, among others. Rousseff
canceled a state dinner with Obama in September.
When it comes to spying
on allies, by Snowden’s lights, the news is not always about the
target.
“It’s the deception of the government that’s revealed,” Snowden
said, noting that the Obama administration offered false public assurances
following the initial reports about NSA surveillance in Germany “The U.S.
government said: ‘We follow German laws in Germany. We never target German
citizens.’ And then the story comes out and it’s: ‘What are you talking about?
You’re spying on the chancellor.’ You just lied to the entire country, in front
of Congress.”
In private, U.S. intelligence officials still maintain that
spying among friends is routine for all concerned, but they are giving greater
weight to the risk of getting caught.
“There are many things we do in
intelligence that, if revealed, would have the potential for all kinds of
blowback,” Clapper told a House panel in October.
‘They will make
mistakes’
U.S. officials say it is obvious that Snowden’s
disclosures will do grave harm to intelligence gathering, exposing methods that
adversaries will learn to avoid.
“We’re seeing al-Qaeda and related
groups start to look for ways to adjust how they communicate,” said Matthew
Olsen, director of the National Counterterrorism Center and a former general
counsel at the NSA.
Other officials, who declined to speak on the record
about particulars, said they had watched some of their surveillance targets, in
effect, changing channels. That evidence can be read another way, they
acknowledged, given that the NSA managed to monitor the shift.
Clapper
has said repeatedly in public that the leaks did great damage, but in private he
has taken a more nuanced stance. A review of early damage assessments in
previous espionage cases, he said in one closed-door briefing this fall, found
that dire forecasts of harm were seldom borne out.
“People must
communicate,” he said, according to one participant who described the
confidential meeting on the condition of anonymity. “They will make mistakes and
we will exploit them.”
According to senior intelligence officials, two
uncertainties feed their greatest concerns. One is whether Russia or China
managed to take the Snowden archive from his computer, a worst-case assumption
for which three officials acknowledged there is no evidence.
In a
previous assignment, Snowden taught U.S. intelligence personnel how to operate
securely in a “high-threat digital environment,” using a training scenario in
which China was the designated threat. He declined to discuss the whereabouts
the files now, but he said he is confident he did not expose them to Chinese
intelligence in Hong Kong and did not bring them to Russia at
all.
“There’s nothing on it,” he said, turning his laptop screen toward
his visitor. “My hard drive is completely blank.”
The other big question
is how many documents Snowden took. The NSA’s incoming deputy director, Rick
Ledgett, said on CBS’s “60 Minutes” recently that the number may approach 1.7
million, a huge and unexplained spike over previous estimates. Ledgett said he
would favor trying to negotiate an amnesty with Snowden in exchange for
“assurances that the remainder of the data could be secured.”
Obama's
national security adviser, Susan E. Rice, later dismissed the
possibility.
“The government knows where to find us if they want to have
a productive conversation about resolutions that don’t involve Edward Snowden
behind bars,” said Ben Wizner of the American Civil Liberties Union, the central
figure on Snowden’s legal team.
Some news accounts have quoted U.S.
government officials as saying Snowden has arranged for the automated release of
sensitive documents if he is arrested or harmed.
There are strong reasons to
doubt that, beginning with Snowden’s insistence, to this reporter and others,
that he does not want the documents published in bulk.
If Snowden were
fool enough to rig a “dead man’s switch,” confidants said, he would be inviting
anyone who wants the documents to kill him.
Asked about such a mechanism
in the Moscow interview, Snowden made a face and declined to reply. Later, he
sent an encrypted message. “That sounds more like a suicide switch,” he wrote.
“It wouldn’t make sense.”
‘Let them say what they want’
By temperament and circumstance, Snowden is a reticent man,
reluctant to discuss details about his personal life.
Over two days his
guard never dropped, but he allowed a few fragments to emerge. He is an
“ascetic,” he said. He lives off ramen noodles and chips. He has visitors, and
many of them bring books. The books pile up, unread. The Internet is an endless
library and a window on the progress of his cause.
“It has always been
really difficult to get me to leave the house,” he said. “I just don’t have a
lot of needs. . . . Occasionally there’s things to go do, things to go see,
people to meet, tasks to accomplish. But it’s really got to be goal-oriented,
you know. Otherwise, as long as I can sit down and think and write and talk to
somebody, that’s more meaningful to me than going out and looking at
landmarks.”
In hope of keeping focus on the NSA, Snowden has ignored
attacks on himself.
“Let them say what they want,” he said. “It’s not
about me.”
Former NSA and CIA director Michael V. Hayden predicted that
Snowden will waste away in Moscow as an alcoholic, like other “defectors.” To
this, Snowden shrugged. He does not drink at all. Never has.
But Snowden
knows his presence here is easy ammunition for critics. He did not choose refuge
in Moscow as a final destination. He said that once the U.S. government voided
his passport as he tried to change planes en route to Latin America, he had no
other choice.
It would be odd if Russian authorities did not keep an eye
on him, but no retinue accompanied Snowden and his visitor saw no one else
nearby. Snowden neither tried to communicate furtively nor asked that a visitor
do so. He has had continuous Internet access and talked to his lawyers and
journalists daily, from his first day in the transit lounge at Sheremetyevo
airport.
“There is no evidence at all for the claim that I have loyalties
to Russia or China or any country other than the United States,” he said. “I
have no relationship with the Russian government. I have not entered into any
agreements with them.”
“If I defected at all,” Snowden said, “I defected
from the government to the public.” ++
Julie Tate contributed to this
report.
“I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the
final word in reality. That is why right, temporarily defeated, is stronger than
evil triumphant.”
~ The Reverend Martin Luther King
In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is
distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in
receiving the included information for research and educational
purposes.