2013的兩大教訓 ( 2 of 2)
史諾登給NSA的教訓：專訪史諾登
“What time does your clock say,
exactly?” he asked.
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
historic 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 the Guardian, 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 a
dangerous machine of mass surveillance was growing unchecked. Closed-door
oversight in Congress and the Foreign
Intelligence Surveillance Court was a “graveyard
of judgment,” he said, manipulated by the agency it was supposed to supervise.
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. Accustomed to watching without being watched,
the NSA 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 step 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.
Last Monday, 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.
On Tuesday, 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 war fighters 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 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 he
believed 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 then 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.
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, from or “about” 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’
“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
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
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