{"id":46178,"date":"2014-08-18T12:00:24","date_gmt":"2014-08-18T11:00:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=46178"},"modified":"2015-05-05T21:30:43","modified_gmt":"2015-05-05T20:30:43","slug":"edward-snowden-the-most-wanted-man-in-the-world","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2014\/08\/edward-snowden-the-most-wanted-man-in-the-world\/","title":{"rendered":"Edward Snowden the Most Wanted Man in the World"},"content":{"rendered":"

13 Aug 2014<\/strong><\/p>\n

The message arrives on my \u201cclean machine,\u201d a MacBook Air loaded only with a sophisticated encryption package. \u201cChange in plans,\u201d my contact says. \u201cBe in the lobby of the Hotel ______ by 1 pm. Bring a book and wait for ES to find you.\u201d \u00b6 ES is Edward Snowden, the most wanted man in the world.<\/p>\n

For almost nine months, I have been trying to set up an interview with him\u2014traveling to Berlin, Rio de Janeiro twice, and New York multiple times to talk with the handful of his confidants who can arrange a meeting. Among other things, I want to answer a burning question: What drove Snowden to leak hundreds of thousands of top-secret documents, revelations that have laid bare the vast scope of the government\u2019s domestic surveillance programs? In May I received an email from his lawyer, ACLU attorney Ben Wizner, confirming that Snowden would meet me in Moscow and let me hang out and chat with him for what turned out to be three solid days over several weeks. It is the most time that any journalist has been allowed to spend with him since he arrived in Russia in June 2013. But the finer details of the rendezvous remain shrouded in mystery. I landed in Moscow without knowing precisely where or when Snowden and I would actually meet. Now, at last, the details are set.<\/p>\n

\"Edward<\/a>

Edward Snowden, June 13, 2014. Platon<\/p><\/div>\n

I am staying at the Hotel Metropol, a whimsical sand-colored monument to pre-revolutionary art nouveau. Built during the time of Czar Nicholas II, it later became the Second House of the Soviets after the Bolsheviks took over in 1917. In the restaurant, Lenin would harangue his followers in a greatcoat and Kirza high boots. Now his image adorns a large plaque on the exterior of the hotel, appropriately facing away from the symbols of the new Russia on the next block\u2014Bentley and Ferrari dealerships and luxury jewelers like Harry Winston and Chopard.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve had several occasions to stay at the Metropol during my three decades as an investigative journalist. I stayed here 20 years ago when I interviewed Victor Cherkashin, the senior KGB officer who oversaw American spies such as Aldrich Ames and Robert Hanssen. And I stayed here again in 1995, during the Russian war in Chechnya, when I met with Yuri Modin, the Soviet agent who ran Britain\u2019s notorious Cambridge Five spy ring. When Snowden fled to Russia after stealing the largest cache of secrets in American history, some in Washington accused him of being another link in this chain of Russian agents. But as far as I can tell, it is a charge with no valid evidence.<\/p>\n

I confess to feeling some kinship with Snowden. Like him, I was assigned to a National Security Agency unit in Hawaii\u2014in my case, as part of three years of active duty in the Navy during the Vietnam War. Then, as a reservist in law school, I blew the whistle on the NSA when I stumbled across a program that involved illegally eavesdropping on US citizens. I testified about the program in a closed hearing before the Church Committee, the congressional investigation that led to sweeping reforms of US intelligence abuses in the 1970s. Finally, after graduation, I decided to write the first book about the NSA. At several points I was threatened with prosecution under the Espionage Act, the same 1917 law under which Snowden is charged (in my case those threats had no basis and were never carried out). Since then I have written two more books about the NSA, as well as numerous magazine articles (including two previous cover stories about the NSA for WIRED), book reviews, op-eds, and documentaries.<\/p>\n

But in all my work, I\u2019ve never run across anyone quite like Snowden. He is a uniquely postmodern breed of whistle-blower. Physically, very few people have seen him since he disappeared into Moscow\u2019s airport complex last June. But he has nevertheless maintained a presence on the world stage\u2014not only as a man without a country but as a man without a body. When being interviewed at the South by Southwest conference or receiving humanitarian awards, his disembodied image smiles down from jumbotron screens. For an interview at the TED conference in March, he went a step further\u2014a small screen bearing a live image of his face was placed on two leg-like poles attached vertically to remotely controlled wheels, giving him the ability to \u201cwalk\u201d around the event, talk to people, and even pose for selfies with them. The spectacle suggests a sort of Big Brother in reverse: Orwell\u2019s Winston Smith, the low-ranking party functionary, suddenly dominating telescreens throughout Oceania with messages promoting encryption and denouncing encroachments on privacy.<\/p>\n

Of course, Snowden is still very cautious about arranging face-to-face meetings, and I am reminded why when, preparing for our interview, I read a recent Washington Post<\/em> report. The story, by Greg Miller, recounts daily meetings with senior officials from the FBI, CIA, and State Department, all desperately trying to come up with ways to capture Snowden. One official told Miller: \u201cWe were hoping he was going to be stupid enough to get on some kind of airplane, and then have an ally say: \u2018You\u2019re in our airspace. Land.\u2019 \u201d He wasn\u2019t. And since he disappeared into Russia, the US seems to have lost all trace of him.<\/p>\n

I do my best to avoid being followed as I head to the designated hotel for the interview, one that is a bit out of the way and attracts few Western visitors. I take a seat in the lobby facing the front door and open the book I was instructed to bring. Just past one, Snowden walks by, dressed in dark jeans and a brown sport coat and carrying a large black backpack over his right shoulder. He doesn\u2019t see me until I stand up and walk beside him. \u201cWhere were you?\u201d he asks. \u201cI missed you.\u201d I point to my seat. \u201cAnd you were with the CIA?\u201d I tease. He laughs.<\/p>\n

Snowden is about to say something as we enter the elevator, but at the last moment a woman jumps in so we silently listen to the bossa nova classic \u201cDesafinado\u201d as we ride to an upper floor. When we emerge, he points out a window that overlooks the modern Moscow skyline, glimmering skyscrapers that now overshadow the seven baroque and gothic towers the locals call Stalinskie Vysotki, or \u201cStalin\u2019s high-rises.\u201d He has been in Russia for more than a year now. He shops at a local grocery store where no one recognizes him, and he has picked up some of the language. He has learned to live modestly in an expensive city that is cleaner than New York and more sophisticated than Washington. In August, Snowden\u2019s temporary asylum was set to expire. (On August 7, the government announced that he\u2019d been granted a permit allowing him to stay three more years.)<\/p>\n

Entering the room he has booked for our interview, he throws his backpack on the bed alongside his baseball cap and a pair of dark sunglasses. He looks thin, almost gaunt, with a narrow face and a faint shadow of a goatee, as if he had just started growing it yesterday. He has on his trademark Burberry eyeglasses, semi-rimless with rectangular lenses. His pale blue shirt seems to be at least a size too big, his wide belt is pulled tight, and he is wearing a pair of black square-toed Calvin Klein loafers. Overall, he has the look of an earnest first-year grad student.<\/p>\n

Snowden is careful about what\u2019s known in the intelligence world as operational security. As we sit down, he removes the battery from his cell phone. I left my iPhone back at my hotel. Snowden\u2019s handlers repeatedly warned me that, even switched off, a cell phone can easily be turned into an NSA microphone. Knowledge of the agency\u2019s tricks is one of the ways that Snowden has managed to stay free. Another is by avoiding areas frequented by Americans and other Westerners. Nevertheless, when he\u2019s out in public at, say, a computer store, Russians occasionally recognize him. \u201cShh,\u201d Snowden tells them, smiling, putting a finger to his lips.<\/p>\n

\"snowden<\/a><\/p>\n

Despite being the subject of a worldwide manhunt, Snowden seems relaxed and upbeat as we drink Cokes and tear away at a giant room-service pepperoni pizza. His 31st birthday is a few days away. Snowden still holds out hope that he will someday be allowed to return to the US. \u201cI told the government I\u2019d volunteer for prison, as long as it served the right purpose,\u201d he says. \u201cI care more about the country than what happens to me. But we can\u2019t allow the law to become a political weapon or agree to scare people away from standing up for their rights, no matter how good the deal. I\u2019m not going to be part of that.\u201d<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, Snowden will continue to haunt the US, the unpredictable impact of his actions resonating at home and around the world. The documents themselves, however, are out of his control. Snowden no longer has access to them; he says he didn\u2019t bring them with him to Russia. Copies are now in the hands of three groups: First Look Media, set up by journalist Glenn Greenwald and American documentary filmmaker Laura Poitras, the two original recipients of the documents; The Guardian<\/em> newspaper, which also received copies before the British government pressured it into transferring physical custody (but not ownership) to The New York Times<\/em>; and Barton Gellman, a writer for The Washington Post<\/em>. It\u2019s highly unlikely that the current custodians will ever return the documents to the NSA.<\/p>\n

That has left US officials in something like a state of impotent expectation, waiting for the next round of revelations, the next diplomatic upheaval, a fresh dose of humiliation. Snowden tells me it doesn\u2019t have to be like this. He says that he actually intended the government to have a good idea about what exactly he stole. Before he made off with the documents, he tried to leave a trail of digital bread crumbs so investigators could determine which documents he copied and took and which he just \u201ctouched.\u201d That way, he hoped, the agency would see that his motive was whistle-blowing and not spying for a foreign government. It would also give the government time to prepare for leaks in the future, allowing it to change code words, revise operational plans, and take other steps to mitigate damage. But he believes the NSA\u2019s audit missed those clues and simply reported the total number of documents he touched\u20141.7\u00a0million. (Snowden says he actually took far fewer.) \u201cI figured they would have a hard time,\u201d he says. \u201cI didn\u2019t figure they would be completely incapable.\u201d<\/p>\n

Asked to comment on Snowden\u2019s claims, NSA spokesperson Vanee Vines would say only, \u201cIf Mr. Snowden wants to discuss his activities, that conversation should be held with the US Department of Justice. He needs to return to the United States to face the charges against him.\u201d<\/p>\n

Snowden speculates that the government fears that the documents contain material that\u2019s deeply damaging\u2014secrets the custodians have yet to find. \u201cI think they think there\u2019s a smoking gun in there that would be the death of them all politically,\u201d Snowden says. \u201cThe fact that the government\u2019s investigation failed\u2014that they don\u2019t know what was taken and that they keep throwing out these ridiculous huge numbers\u2014implies to me that somewhere in their damage assessment they must have seen something that was like, \u2018Holy shit.\u2019 And they think it\u2019s still out there.\u201d<\/p>\n

Yet it is very likely that no one knows precisely what is in the mammoth haul of documents\u2014not the NSA, not the custodians, not even Snowden himself. He would not say exactly how he gathered them, but others in the intelligence community have speculated that he simply used a web crawler, a program that can search for and copy all documents containing particular keywords or combinations of keywords. This could account for many of the documents that simply list highly technical and nearly unintelligible signal parameters and other statistics.<\/p>\n

And there\u2019s another prospect that further complicates matters: Some of the revelations attributed to Snowden may not in fact have come from him but from another leaker spilling secrets under Snowden\u2019s name. Snowden himself adamantly refuses to address this possibility on the record. But independent of my visit to Snowden, I was given unrestricted access to his cache of documents in various locations. And going through this archive using a sophisticated digital search tool, I could not find some of the documents that have made their way into public view, leading me to conclude that there must be a second leaker somewhere. I\u2019m not alone in reaching that conclusion. Both Greenwald and security expert Bruce Schneier\u2014who have had extensive access to the cache\u2014have publicly stated that they believe another whistle-blower is releasing secret documents to the media.<\/p>\n

In fact, on the first day of my Moscow interview with Snowden, the German newsmagazine Der Spiegel<\/em> comes out with a long story about the NSA\u2019s operations in Germany and its cooperation with the German intelligence agency, BND. Among the documents the magazine releases is a top-secret \u201cMemorandum of Agreement\u201d between the NSA and the BND from 2002. \u201cIt is not from Snowden\u2019s material,\u201d the magazine notes.<\/p>\n

Some have even raised doubts about whether the infamous revelation that the NSA was tapping German chancellor Angela Merkel\u2019s cell phone, long attributed to Snowden, came from his trough. At the time of that revelation, Der Spiegel<\/em> simply attributed the information to Snowden and other unnamed sources. If other leakers exist within the NSA, it would be more than another nightmare for the agency\u2014it would underscore its inability to control its own information and might indicate that Snowden\u2019s rogue protest of government overreach has inspired others within the intelligence community. \u201cThey still haven\u2019t fixed their problems,\u201d Snowden says. \u201cThey still have negligent auditing, they still have things going for a walk, and they have no idea where they\u2019re coming from and they have no idea where they\u2019re going. And if that\u2019s the case, how can we as the public trust the NSA with all of our information, with all of our private records, the permanent record of our lives?\u201d<\/p>\n

The Der Spiegel<\/em> articles were written by, among others, Poitras, the filmmaker who was one of the first journalists Snowden contacted. Her high visibility and expertise in encryption may have attracted other NSA whistle-blowers, and Snowden\u2019s cache of documents could have provided the ideal cover. Following my meetings with Snowden, I email Poitras and ask her point-blank whether there are other NSA sources out there. She answers through her attorney: \u201cWe are sorry but Laura is not going to answer your question.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"snowden<\/a><\/p>\n

The same day I share pizza with Snowden in a Moscow hotel room, the US House of Representatives moves to put the brakes on the NSA. By a lopsided 293-to-123 tally, members vote to halt the agency\u2019s practice of conducting warrantless searches of a vast database that contains millions of Americans\u2019 emails and phone calls. \u201cThere\u2019s no question Americans have become increasingly alarmed with the breadth of unwarranted government surveillance programs used to store and search their private data,\u201d the Democratic and Republican sponsors announce in a joint statement. \u201cBy adopting this amendment, Congress can take a sure step toward shutting the back door on mass surveillance.\u201d<\/p>\n

It\u2019s one of many proposed reforms that never would have happened had it not been for Snowden. Back in Moscow, Snowden recalls boarding a plane for Hong Kong, on his way to reveal himself as the leaker of a spectacular cache of secrets and wondering whether his risk would be worth it. \u201cI thought it was likely that society collectively would just shrug and move on,\u201d he says. Instead, the NSA\u2019s surveillance has become one of the most pressing issues in the national conversation. President Obama has personally addressed the issue, Congress has taken up the issue, and the Supreme Court has hinted that it may take up the issue of warrantless wiretapping. Public opinion has also shifted in favor of curtailing mass surveillance. \u201cIt depends a lot on the polling question,\u201d he says, \u201cbut if you ask simply about things like my decision to reveal Prism\u201d\u2014the program that allows government agencies to extract user data from companies like Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo\u2014\u201c55 percent of Americans agree. Which is extraordinary given the fact that for a year the government has been saying I\u2019m some kind of supervillain.\u201d<\/p>\n

That may be an overstatement, but not by much. Nearly a year after Snowden\u2019s first leaks broke, NSA director Keith Alexander claimed that Snowden was \u201cnow being manipulated by Russian intelligence\u201d and accused him of causing \u201cirreversible and significant damage.\u201d More recently, Secretary of State John Kerry said that \u201cEdward Snowden is a coward, he is a traitor, and he has betrayed his country.\u201d But in June, the government seemed to be backing away from its most apocalyptic rhetoric. In an interview with The New York Times<\/em>, the new head of the NSA, Michael Rogers, said he was \u201ctrying to be very specific and very measured in my characterizations\u201d: \u201cYou have not heard me as the director say, \u2018Oh my God, the sky is falling.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

Snowden keeps close tabs on his evolving public profile, but he has been resistant to talking about himself. In part, this is because of his natural shyness and his reluctance about \u201cdragging family into it and getting a biography.\u201d He says he worries that sharing personal details will make him look narcissistic and arrogant. But mostly he\u2019s concerned that he may inadvertently detract from the cause he has risked his life to promote. \u201cI\u2019m an engineer, not a politician,\u201d he says. \u201cI don\u2019t want the stage. I\u2019m terrified of giving these talking heads some distraction, some excuse to jeopardize, smear, and delegitimize a very important movement.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Platon\"<\/a>

Platon<\/p><\/div>\n

But when Snowden finally agrees to discuss his personal life, the portrait that emerges is not one of a wild-eyed firebrand but of a solemn, sincere idealist who\u2014step by step over a period of years\u2014grew disillusioned with his country and government.<\/p>\n

Born on June 21, 1983, Snowden grew up in the Maryland suburbs, not far from the NSA\u2019s headquarters. His father, Lon, rose through the enlisted ranks of the Coast Guard to warrant officer, a difficult path. His mother, Wendy, worked for the US District Court in Baltimore, while his older sister, Jessica, became a lawyer at the Federal Judicial Center in Washington. \u201cEverybody in my family has worked for the federal government in one way or another,\u201d Snowden says. \u201cI expected to pursue the same path.\u201d His father told me, \u201cWe always considered Ed the smartest one in the family.\u201d It didn\u2019t surprise him when his son scored above 145 on two separate IQ tests.<\/p>\n

Rather than spending hours watching television or playing sports as a kid, Snowden fell in love with books, especially Greek mythology. \u201cI remember just going into those books, and I would disappear with them for hours,\u201d he says. Snowden says reading about myths played an important role growing up, providing him with a framework for confronting challenges, including moral dilemmas. \u201cI think that\u2019s when I started thinking about how we identify problems, and that the measure of an individual is how they address and confront those problems,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

Soon after Snowden revealed himself as a leaker, there was enormous media focus on the fact that he quit school after the 10th grade, with the implication that he was simply an uneducated slacker. But rather than delinquency, it was a bout of mononucleosis that caused him to miss school for almost nine months. Instead of falling back a grade, Snowden enrolled in community college. He\u2019d loved computers since he was a child, but now that passion deepened. He started working for a classmate who ran his own tech business. Coincidentally, the company was run from a house at Fort Meade, where the NSA\u2019s headquarters are located.<\/p>\n

Snowden was on his way to the office when the 9\/11 attacks took place. \u201cI was driving in to work and I heard the first plane hit on the radio,\u201d he says. Like a lot of civic-minded Americans, Snowden was profoundly affected by the attacks. In the spring of 2004, as the ground war in Iraq was heating up with the first battle of Fallujah, he volunteered for the Army special forces. \u201cI was very open to the government\u2019s explanation\u2014almost propaganda\u2014when it came to things like Iraq, aluminum tubes, and vials of anthrax,\u201d he says. \u201cI still very strongly believed that the government wouldn\u2019t lie to us, that our government had noble intent, and that the war in Iraq was going to be what they said it was, which was a limited, targeted effort to free the oppressed. I wanted to do my part.\u201d<\/p>\n

Snowden says that he was particularly attracted to the special forces because it offered the chance to learn languages. After performing well on an aptitude test, he was admitted. But the physical requirements were more challenging. He broke both of his legs in a training accident. A few months later he was discharged.<\/p>\n

\"snowden<\/a><\/p>\n

Out of the Army, Snowden landed a job as a security guard at a top-secret facility that required him to get a high-level security clearance. He passed a polygraph exam and the stringent background check and, almost without realizing it, he found himself on his way to a career in the clandestine world of intelligence. After attending a job fair focused on intelligence agencies, he was offered a position at the CIA, where he was assigned to the global communications division, the organization that deals with computer issues, at the agency\u2019s headquarters in Langley, Virginia. It was an extension of the network and engineering work he\u2019d been doing since he was 16. \u201cAll of the covert sites\u2014cover sites and so forth\u2014they all network into the CIA headquarters,\u201d he says. \u201cIt was me and one other guy who worked the late shifts.\u201d But Snowden quickly discovered one of the CIA\u2019s biggest secrets: Despite its image as a bleeding-edge organization, its technology was woefully out-of-date. The agency was not at all what it appeared to be from the outside.<\/p>\n

As the junior man on the top computer team, Snowden distinguished himself enough to be sent to the CIA\u2019s secret school for technology specialists. He lived there, in a hotel, for some six months, studying and training full-time. After the training was complete, in March 2007, Snowden headed for Geneva, Switzerland, where the CIA was seeking information about the banking industry. He was assigned to the US Mission to the United Nations. He was given a diplomatic passport, a four-bedroom apartment near the lake, and a nice cover assignment.<\/p>\n

It was in Geneva that Snowden would see firsthand some of the moral compromises CIA agents made in the field. Because spies were promoted based on the number of human sources they recruited, they tripped over each other trying to sign up anyone they could, regardless of their value. Operatives would get targets drunk enough to land in jail and then bail them out\u2014putting the target in their debt. \u201cThey do really risky things to recruit them that have really negative, profound impacts on the person and would have profound impacts on our national reputation if we got caught,\u201d he says. \u201cBut we do it simply because we can.\u201d<\/p>\n

While in Geneva, Snowden says, he met many spies who were deeply opposed to the war in Iraq and US policies in the Middle East. \u201cThe CIA case officers were all going, what the hell are we doing?\u201d Because of his job maintaining computer systems and network operations, he had more access than ever to information about the conduct of the war. What he learned troubled him deeply. \u201cThis was the Bush period, when the war on terror had gotten really dark,\u201d he says. \u201cWe were torturing people; we had warrantless wiretapping.\u201d<\/p>\n

He began to consider becoming a whistle-blower, but with Obama about to be elected, he held off. \u201cI think even Obama\u2019s critics were impressed and optimistic about the values that he represented,\u201d he says. \u201cHe said that we\u2019re not going to sacrifice our rights. We\u2019re not going to change who we are just to catch some small percentage more terrorists.\u201d But Snowden grew disappointed as, in his view, Obama didn\u2019t follow through on his lofty rhetoric. \u201cNot only did they not fulfill those promises, but they entirely repudiated them,\u201d he says. \u201cThey went in the other direction. What does that mean for a society, for a democracy, when the people that you elect on the basis of promises can basically suborn the will of the electorate?\u201d<\/p>\n

It took a couple of years for this new level of disillusionment to set in. By that time\u20142010\u2014Snowden had shifted from the CIA to the NSA, accepting a job as a technical expert in Japan with Dell, a major contractor for the agency. Since 9\/11 and the enormous influx of intelligence money, much of the NSA\u2019s work had been outsourced to defense contractors, including Dell and Booz Allen Hamilton. For Snowden, the Japan posting was especially attractive: He had wanted to visit the country since he was a teen. Snowden worked at the NSA offices at Yokota Air Base, outside Tokyo, where he instructed top officials and military officers on how to defend their networks from Chinese hackers.<\/p>\n

\"Platon\"<\/a>

Platon<\/p><\/div>\n

But Snowden\u2019s disenchantment would only grow. It was bad enough when spies were getting bankers drunk to recruit them; now he was learning about targeted killings and mass surveillance, all piped into monitors at the NSA facilities around the world. Snowden would watch as military and CIA drones silently turned people into body parts. And he would also begin to appreciate the enormous scope of the NSA\u2019s surveillance capabilities, an ability to map the movement of everyone in a city by monitoring their MAC address, a unique identifier emitted by every cell phone, computer, and other electronic device.<\/p>\n

Even as his faith in the mission of US intelligence services continued to crumble, his upward climb as a trusted technical expert proceeded. In 2011 he returned to Maryland, where he spent about a year as Dell\u2019s lead technologist working with the CIA\u2019s account. \u201cI would sit down with the CIO of the CIA, the CTO of the CIA, the chiefs of all the technical branches,\u201d he says. \u201cThey would tell me their hardest technology problems, and it was my job to come up with a way to fix them.\u201d<\/p>\n

But in March 2012, Snowden moved again for Dell, this time to a massive bunker in Hawaii where he became the lead technologist for the information-sharing office, focusing on technical issues. Inside the \u201ctunnel,\u201d a dank, chilly, 250,000-square-foot pit that was once a torpedo storage facility, Snowden\u2019s concerns over the NSA\u2019s capabilities and lack of oversight grew with each passing day. Among the discoveries that most shocked him was learning that the agency was regularly passing raw private communications\u2014content as well as metadata\u2014to Israeli intelligence. Usually information like this would be \u201cminimized,\u201d a process where names and personally identifiable data are removed. But in this case, the NSA did virtually nothing to protect even the communications of people in the US. This included the emails and phone calls of millions of Arab and Palestinian Americans whose relatives in Israel-occupied Palestine could become targets based on the communications. \u201cI think that\u2019s amazing,\u201d Snowden says. \u201cIt\u2019s one of the biggest abuses we\u2019ve seen.\u201d (The operation was reported last year by The Guardian<\/em>, which cited the Snowden documents as its source.)<\/p>\n

Another troubling discovery was a document from NSA director Keith Alexander that showed the NSA was spying on the pornography-viewing habits of political radicals. The memo suggested that the agency could use these \u201cpersonal vulnerabilities\u201d to destroy the reputations of government critics who were not in fact accused of plotting terrorism. The document then went on to list six people as future potential targets. (Greenwald published a redacted version of the document last year on the Huffington Post.)<\/p>\n

Snowden was astonished by the memo. \u201cIt\u2019s much like how the FBI tried to use Martin Luther King\u2019s infidelity to talk him into killing himself,\u201d he says. \u201cWe said those kinds of things were inappropriate back in the \u201960s. Why are we doing that now? Why are we getting involved in this again?\u201d<\/p>\n

In the mid-1970s, Senator Frank Church, similarly shocked by decades of illegal spying by the US intelligence services, first exposed the agencies\u2019 operations to the public. That opened the door to long-overdue reforms, such as the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. Snowden sees parallels between then and now. \u201cFrank Church analogized it as being on the brink of the abyss,\u201d he says. \u201cHe was concerned that once we went in we would never come out. And the concern we have today is that we\u2019re on the brink of that abyss again.\u201d He realized, just like Church had before him, that the only way to cure the abuses of the government was to expose them. But Snowden didn\u2019t have a Senate committee at his disposal or the power of congressional subpoena. He\u2019d have to carry out his mission covertly, just as he\u2019d been trained.<\/p>\n

\"snowden<\/a><\/p>\n

The sun sets late here in June, and outside the hotel window long shadows are beginning to envelop the city. But Snowden doesn\u2019t seem to mind that the interview is stretching into the evening hours. He is living on New York time, the better to communicate with his stateside supporters and stay on top of the American news cycle. Often, that means hearing in almost real time the harsh assessments of his critics. Indeed, it\u2019s not only government apparatchiks that take issue with what Snowden did next\u2014moving from disaffected operative to whistle-blowing dissident. Even in the technology industry, where he has many supporters, some accuse him of playing too fast and loose with dangerous information. Netscape founder and prominent venture capitalist Marc Andreessen has told CNBC, \u201cIf you looked up in the encyclopedia \u2018traitor,\u2019 there\u2019s a picture of Edward Snowden.\u201d Bill Gates delivered a similarly cutting assessment in a Rolling Stone<\/em> interview. \u201cI think he broke the law, so I certainly wouldn\u2019t characterize him as a hero,\u201d he said. \u201cYou won\u2019t find much admiration from me.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Snowden<\/a>

Snowden with General Michael Hayden at a gala in 2011. Hayden, former director of the NSA and CIA, defended US surveillance policies in the wake of Snowden\u2019s revelations.<\/p><\/div>\n

Snowden adjusts his glasses; one of the nose pads is missing, making them slip occasionally. He seems lost in thought, looking back to the moment of decision, the point of no return. The time when, thumb drive in hand, aware of the enormous potential consequences, he secretly went to work. \u201cIf the government will not represent our interests,\u201d he says, his face serious, his words slow, \u201cthen the public will champion its own interests. And whistle-blowing provides a traditional means to do so.\u201d<\/p>\n

The NSA had apparently never predicted that someone like Snowden might go rogue. In any case, Snowden says he had no problem accessing, downloading, and extracting all the confidential information he liked. Except for the very highest level of classified documents, details about virtually all of the NSA\u2019s surveillance programs were accessible to anyone, employee or contractor, private or general, who had top-secret NSA clearance and access to an NSA computer.<\/p>\n

But Snowden\u2019s access while in Hawaii went well beyond even this. \u201cI was the top technologist for the information-sharing office in Hawaii,\u201d he says. \u201cI had access to everything.\u201d<\/p>\n

Well, almost everything. There was one key area that remained out of his reach: the NSA\u2019s aggressive cyberwarfare activity around the world. To get access to that last cache of secrets, Snowden landed a job as an infrastructure analyst with another giant NSA contractor, Booz Allen. The role gave him rare dual-hat authority covering both domestic and foreign intercept capabilities\u2014allowing him to trace domestic cyberattacks back to their country of origin. In his new job, Snowden became immersed in the highly secret world of planting malware into systems around the world and stealing gigabytes of foreign secrets. At the same time, he was also able to confirm, he says, that vast amounts of US communications \u201cwere being intercepted and stored without a warrant, without any requirement for criminal suspicion, probable cause, or individual designation.\u201d He gathered that evidence and secreted it safely away.<\/p>\n

By the time he went to work for Booz Allen in the spring of 2013, Snowden was thoroughly disillusioned, yet he had not lost his capacity for shock. One day an intelligence officer told him that TAO\u2014a division of NSA hackers\u2014had attempted in 2012 to remotely install an exploit in one of the core routers at a major Internet service provider in Syria, which was in the midst of a prolonged civil war. This would have given the NSA access to email and other Internet traffic from much of the country. But something went wrong, and the router was bricked instead\u2014rendered totally inoperable. The failure of this router caused Syria to suddenly lose all connection to the Internet\u2014although the public didn\u2019t know that the US government was responsible. (This is the first time the claim has been revealed.)<\/p>\n

Inside the TAO operations center, the panicked government hackers had what Snowden calls an \u201coh shit\u201d moment. They raced to remotely repair the router, desperate to cover their tracks and prevent the Syrians from discovering the sophisticated infiltration software used to access the network. But because the router was bricked, they were powerless to fix the problem.<\/p>\n

Fortunately for the NSA, the Syrians were apparently more focused on restoring the nation\u2019s Internet than on tracking down the cause of the outage. Back at TAO\u2019s operations center, the tension was broken with a joke that contained more than a little truth: \u201cIf we get caught, we can always point the finger at Israel.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"snowden<\/a><\/p>\n

Much of Snowden\u2019s focus while working for Booz Allen was analyzing potential cyberattacks from China. His targets included institutions normally considered outside the military\u2019s purview. He thought the work was overstepping the intelligence agency\u2019s mandate. \u201cIt\u2019s no secret that we hack China very aggressively,\u201d he says. \u201cBut we\u2019ve crossed lines. We\u2019re hacking universities and hospitals and wholly civilian infrastructure rather than actual government targets and military targets. And that\u2019s a real concern.\u201d<\/p>\n

The last straw for Snowden was a secret program he discovered while getting up to speed on the capabilities of the NSA\u2019s enormous and highly secret data storage facility in Bluffdale, Utah. Potentially capable of holding upwards of a yottabyte of data, some 500 quintillion pages of text, the 1 million-square-foot building is known within the NSA as the Mission Data Repository. (According to Snowden, the original name was Massive Data Repository, but it was changed after some staffers thought it sounded too creepy\u2014and accurate.) Billions of phone calls, faxes, emails, computer-to-computer data transfers, and text messages from around the world flow through the MDR every hour. Some flow right through, some are kept briefly, and some are held forever.<\/p>\n

The massive surveillance effort was bad enough, but Snowden was even more disturbed to discover a new, Strangelovian cyberwarfare program in the works, codenamed MonsterMind. The program, disclosed here for the first time, would automate the process of hunting for the beginnings of a foreign cyberattack. Software would constantly be on the lookout for traffic patterns indicating known or suspected attacks. When it detected an attack, MonsterMind would automatically block it from entering the country\u2014a \u201ckill\u201d in cyber terminology.<\/p>\n

Programs like this had existed for decades, but MonsterMind software would add a unique new capability: Instead of simply detecting and killing the malware at the point of entry, MonsterMind would automatically fire back, with no human involvement. That\u2019s a problem, Snowden says, because the initial attacks are often routed through computers in innocent third countries. \u201cThese attacks can be spoofed,\u201d he says. \u201cYou could have someone sitting in China, for example, making it appear that one of these attacks is originating in Russia. And then we end up shooting back at a Russian hospital. What happens next?\u201d<\/p>\n

In addition to the possibility of accidentally starting a war, Snowden views MonsterMind as the ultimate threat to privacy because, in order for the system to work, the NSA first would have to secretly get access to virtually all private communications coming in from overseas to people in the US. \u201cThe argument is that the only way we can identify these malicious traffic flows and respond to them is if we\u2019re analyzing all traffic flows,\u201d he says. \u201cAnd if we\u2019re analyzing all traffic flows, that means we have to be intercepting all traffic flows. That means violating the Fourth Amendment, seizing private communications without a warrant, without probable cause or even a suspicion of wrongdoing. For everyone, all the time.\u201d (A spokesperson for the NSA declined to comment on MonsterMind, the malware in Syria, or on the specifics of other aspects of this article.)<\/p>\n

Given the NSA\u2019s new data storage mausoleum in Bluffdale, its potential to start an accidental war, and the charge to conduct surveillance on all incoming communications, Snowden believed he had no choice but to take his thumb drives and tell the world what he knew. The only question was when.<\/p>\n

\"Platon\"<\/a>

Platon<\/p><\/div>\n

On March 13, 2013, sitting at his desk in the \u201ctunnel\u201d surrounded by computer screens, Snowden read a news story that convinced him that the time had come to act. It was an account of director of national intelligence James Clapper telling a Senate committee that the NSA does \u201cnot wittingly\u201d collect information on millions of Americans. \u201cI think I was reading it in the paper the next day, talking to coworkers, saying, can you believe this shit?\u201d<\/p>\n

Snowden and his colleagues had discussed the routine deception around the breadth of the NSA\u2019s spying many times, so it wasn\u2019t surprising to him when they had little reaction to Clapper\u2019s testimony. \u201cIt was more of just acceptance,\u201d he says, calling it \u201cthe banality of evil\u201d\u2014a reference to Hannah Arendt\u2019s study of bureaucrats in Nazi Germany.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s like the boiling frog,\u201d Snowden tells me. \u201cYou get exposed to a little bit of evil, a little bit of rule-breaking, a little bit of dishonesty, a little bit of deceptiveness, a little bit of disservice to the public interest, and you can brush it off, you can come to justify it. But if you do that, it creates a slippery slope that just increases over time, and by the time you\u2019ve been in 15 years, 20 years, 25 years, you\u2019ve seen it all and it doesn\u2019t shock you. And so you see it as normal. And that\u2019s the problem, that\u2019s what the Clapper event was all about. He saw deceiving the American people as what he does, as his job, as something completely ordinary. And he was right that he wouldn\u2019t be punished for it, because he was revealed as having lied under oath and he didn\u2019t even get a slap on the wrist for it. It says a lot about the system and a lot about our leaders.\u201d Snowden decided it was time to hop out of the water before he too was boiled alive.<\/p>\n

At the same time, he knew there would be dire consequences. \u201cIt\u2019s really hard to take that step\u2014not only do I believe in something, I believe in it enough that I\u2019m willing to set my own life on fire and burn it to the ground.\u201d<\/p>\n

But he felt that he had no choice. Two months later he boarded a flight to Hong Kong with a pocket full of thumb drives.<\/p>\n

\"snowden<\/a><\/p>\n

The afternoon of our third meeting, about two weeks after our first, Snowden comes to my hotel room. I have changed locations and am now staying at the Hotel National, across the street from the Kremlin and Red Square. An icon like the Metropol, much of Russia\u2019s history passed through its front doors at one time or another. Lenin once lived in Room 107, and the ghost of Felix Dzerzhinsky, the feared chief of the old Soviet secret police who also lived here, still haunts the hallways.<\/p>\n

But rather than the Russian secret police, it\u2019s his old employers, the CIA and the NSA, that Snowden most fears. \u201cIf somebody\u2019s really watching me, they\u2019ve got a team of guys whose job is just to hack me,\u201d he says. \u201cI don\u2019t think they\u2019ve geolocated me, but they almost certainly monitor who I\u2019m talking to online. Even if they don\u2019t know what you\u2019re saying, because it\u2019s encrypted, they can still get a lot from who you\u2019re talking to and when you\u2019re talking to them.\u201d<\/p>\n

More than anything, Snowden fears a blunder that will destroy all the progress toward reforms for which he has sacrificed so much. \u201cI\u2019m not self-destructive. I don\u2019t want to self-immolate and erase myself from the pages of history. But if we don\u2019t take chances, we can\u2019t win,\u201d he says. And so he takes great pains to stay one step ahead of his presumed pursuers\u2014he switches computers and email accounts constantly. Nevertheless, he knows he\u2019s liable to be compromised eventually: \u201cI\u2019m going to slip up and they\u2019re going to hack me. It\u2019s going to happen.\u201d<\/p>\n

Indeed, some of his fellow travelers have already committed some egregious mistakes. Last year, Greenwald found himself unable to open the encryption on a large trove of secrets from GCHQ\u2014the British counterpart of the NSA\u2014that Snowden had passed to him. So he sent his longtime partner, David Miranda, from their home in Rio to Berlin to get another set from Poitras. But in making the arrangements, The Guardian<\/em> booked a transfer through London. Tipped off, probably as a result of GCHQ surveillance, British authorities detained Miranda as soon as he arrived and questioned him for nine hours. In addition, an external hard drive containing 60 gigabits of data\u2014about 58,000 pages of documents\u2014was seized. Although the documents had been encrypted using a sophisticated program known as True Crypt, the British authorities discovered a paper of Miranda\u2019s with the password for one of the files, and they were able to decrypt about 75 pages. (Greenwald has still not gained access to the complete GCHQ documents.)<\/p>\n

Another concern for Snowden is what he calls NSA fatigue\u2014the public becoming numb to disclosures of mass surveillance, just as it becomes inured to news of battle deaths during a war. \u201cOne death is a tragedy, and a million is a statistic,\u201d he says, mordantly quoting Stalin. \u201cJust as the violation of Angela Merkel\u2019s rights is a massive scandal and the violation of 80 million Germans is a nonstory.\u201d<\/p>\n

Nor is he optimistic that the next election will bring any meaningful reform. In the end, Snowden thinks we should put our faith in technology\u2014not politicians. \u201cWe have the means and we have the technology to end mass surveillance without any legislative action at all, without any policy changes.\u201d The answer, he says, is robust encryption. \u201cBy basically adopting changes like making encryption a universal standard\u2014where all communications are encrypted by default\u2014we can end mass surveillance not just in the United States but around the world.\u201d<\/p>\n

Until then, Snowden says, the revelations will keep coming. \u201cWe haven\u2019t seen the end,\u201d he says. Indeed, a couple of weeks after our meeting, The Washington Post<\/em> reported that the NSA\u2019s surveillance program had captured much more data on innocent Americans than on its intended foreign targets. There are still hundreds of thousands of pages of secret documents out there\u2014to say nothing of the other whistle-blowers he may have already inspired. But Snowden says that information contained in any future leaks is almost beside the point. \u201cThe question for us is not what new story will come out next. The question is, what are we going to do about it?\u201d<\/p>\n

RELATED STORIES:<\/strong><\/p>\n

Call Me Ed: A Day with Edward Snowden<\/a> By Scott Dadich<\/p>\n

How the NSA Almost Killed the Internet<\/a> By Steven Levy<\/p>\n

The NSA Is Building the Country\u2019s Biggest Spy Center<\/a>\u00a0By James Bamford<\/p>\n

The Secret War<\/a> By James Bamford<\/p>\n

Snowden\u2019s First Move Against the NSA Was a Party in Hawaii <\/a>By Kevin Poulsen<\/p>\n

How a Crypto \u2018Backdoor\u2019 Pitted the Tech World Against the NSA<\/a> By Kim Zetter<\/p>\n

________________________________<\/p>\n

James Bamford is an American bestselling author and journalist noted for his writing about the NSA. Bamford has taught at the University of California, Berkeley, and has written for<\/em> The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic, Harper’s, and many other publications. In 2006, he won the National Magazine Award for Reporting for his article, <\/em>“The Man Who Sold The War,” published in <\/em>Rolling Stone.<\/em><\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 wired.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In May [2014] I received an email from his lawyer, ACLU attorney Ben Wizner, confirming that Snowden would meet me in Moscow and let me hang out and chat with him for what turned out to be three solid days over several weeks. It is the most time that any journalist has been allowed to spend with him since he arrived in Russia in June 2013.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[60],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-46178","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-whistleblowing-surveillance"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46178","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=46178"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46178\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=46178"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=46178"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=46178"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}