1. The Fog of Outrage
This is the first chapter of News of Devils: The Media and Edward Snowden. The next chapters are linked to at the foot of the page. It can also be read as part of the free ebook Need to Know, which you can download in the format of your choosing here.
The military theorist Carl von Clausewitz famously wrote of the ‘fog of war’, whereby events in a conflict pile on one another until it becomes impossible to understand what’s happening.
The same could be said of the fog of news, or the fog of outrage. Headlines blare out telling us of shocking events or revealing previously unknown information. In the ensuing hubbub, parts of the story are sensationalised, embellished and misunderstood, and inaccuracies multiply and spread. It’s usually only in the aftermath of such events that the true facts, and the bigger picture, can be found. Sometimes that’s too late, as the initial distortions might have become too embedded in the public consciousness to be shifted, or have had other consequences.
Since June 2013, a fog of outrage has swirled around the world of intelligence thanks to the actions of Edward Snowden and the journalists to whom he gave many thousands of classified documents he took from the National Security Agency. The main thrust of the disclosures isn’t new: it’s that in the last couple of decades, and particularly since September 11 2001, the NSA and its allies have stepped up their surveillance capabilities to an extent that oversteps the line of invading civil liberties. This is familiar from the ECHELON scandal, revealed in 1988 largely via reporting by investigative journalist Duncan Campbell, and from the 2005 story, broken by the New York Times, that the Bush administration ordered warrantless wiretapping.[1]
The gist of the revelations has also long been a familiar element in popular culture. In 1999, filmgoers watched the Hollywood thriller Enemy of the State, in which Will Smith plays a lawyer unwittingly targeted by the NSA, his every movement and communication tracked by satellites. In the Bourne films starring Matt Damon as an American operative on the run, the CIA is able to track characters’ moves via telephone records and surveillance cameras in other countries. The TV series Person of Interest, which began in 2011, involves a computer genius who in the wake of 9/11 creates a near-omniscient surveillance system for the US government, before deciding to try to put it to good use.
All of these are entertainment rather than fact, of course—although one of the advisors on Enemy of the State was a former NSA technician[2]—but along with journalistic investigations and whistleblowers have added to the public’s conception—and fears—of how intelligence agencies, particularly American intelligence agencies, operate.
Edward Snowden has had such an impact because he wasn’t simply saying that there was surveillance overreach, as whistleblowers had done before him and as spy films have long suggested, but provided evidence for it in the form of documents. Unfortunately, they weren’t the only documents he took.
~
Both Snowden and the journalists who have reported on his cache of material have talked about the disclosures sparking a debate about privacy, surveillance and constitutional rights. They have done. The leaks have unquestionably highlighted a lack of oversight regarding several aspects of US (and British) intelligence activity, and many would agree that some form of reset is needed to avoid intrusions into everyone’s privacy.
The disclosures have been a public relations disaster for the intelligence community—it’s surely no coincidence that since the stories began the directors of the NSA, MI6 and GCHQ have all been replaced—but their response has been overwhelmingly inept, and has included wild accusations, abuse and threats directed at Snowden and the journalists. The NSA has singularly failed to persuade the public of its case.
As I write this, the ‘USA Freedom Act’, a bill designed to curb the NSA’s surveillance activities, has been blocked by the US Senate. If passed, it would have ended the NSA’s open-ended bulk collection of metadata. Privacy advocates had hailed it as a significant step towards surveillance reform, albeit a compromised one.[3] Michael Hayden, a former director of the NSA, had argued that it would make it even harder for the agency to follow up suspect communications than in simple criminal investigations, and that it would benefit groups such as Islamic State.[4]
For now, Hayden’s side of the argument has won the day. The bill might still pass in an amended form, and if not some other legislation to curb the NSA will probably emerge. But it will be some time before we know if any measures that are introduced have been constructive, cosmetic or counter-productive.
~
The Snowden story has been the biggest spy case of this century and perhaps of the last, too, but with the focus on the privacy debate there’s been far less analysis of how the journalists Snowden entrusted with the material have handled the task he assigned them. I think the fog has now cleared enough for this to be worth taking a closer look at. The terms of the debate Snowden has opened up have almost entirely been set by the reporting on this. Without access to the documents or the full context for precisely who created them, in what circumstances, for what audience and with what purpose, it’s impossible to weigh the significance ourselves. Our only context as members of the public is the parts of documents journalists have selected to publish, and their explanations for what they mean in accompanying articles. So to judge the material’s significance, we have to consider the reporting. Has it been credible? Has it been responsible? Has it been honest?
I think too much of it has been none of those things. There has been some excellent reporting, but there has also been a catalogue of exaggerated claims, distortions, errors that have gone uncorrected and unacknowledged, security breaches and stories that have completely misunderstood the NSA’s remit and the complexities of how intelligence is gathered and how hostile forces work. I think with much of the reporting little or no distinction has been made between revealing wrongdoing by the NSA and revealing valid espionage activities and methodologies directed at legitimate targets.
Journalists are often reluctant to criticise other journalists. Sometimes this is out of a sense of comradely loyalty, sometimes due to an unwillingness to burn bridges in case paths cross again. It can also be difficult to persuade editors that stories about the media interest readers. But journalists can—and I believe should—criticise other journalists when they think they’ve gone seriously amiss in their work. In this particular case, there’s an added impetus, as the stakes are extremely high.
So this short book isn’t about Edward Snowden’s private life, or his decision to flee to Moscow, or whether he’s a hero or a traitor. Neither is it about the private lives of the journalists who have reported on the material. It’s about the reporting itself.
If that subject isn’t sensational enough for you, please read another book. This one is about sensationalism, and what sadly now seems to be viewed as an old-fashioned journalistic principle: the public interest.
~
A good test of a journalist is how they react to criticism, and how they deal with errors. Everyone makes mistakes, but how one responds to them being pointed out is often more important. Do you refuse to admit the error, or ignore it, or question the motives of whoever pointed it out, or find ways to claim it wasn’t an error after all in a succession of long-winded ‘updates’? Or do you consider such criticisms carefully, and if wrong swallow your pride and correct the record clearly for your readers?
The journalists Snowden entrusted with his material have all been the subject of criticism, some of it unwarranted, some of it personally abusive, some of it constructive. It can be hard to distinguish between them if you’re on the receiving end of it. Nobody likes having their work criticised, of course, but it’s vital to listen to it because otherwise you might find yourself in an echo chamber. Considering criticism is key in an ongoing story such as this, because it is far too easy to become hunkered down and as a result remain blind to problems in one’s approach.
In researching this book, I’ve watched many lectures, interviews and panel discussions featuring the journalists and others involved in the story. All of them are highly intelligent, gifted individuals. But there is also a complacency and unshakeable conviction with many of them. There is a worrying lack of doubt. If doubts are mentioned, they are firmly in the past tense and have been resolved. ‘Oh, yes, we discussed that. We agonized about that.’ But there is no sign of anxiety at possibly having made a wrong decision, or acknowledgement that it’s possible it might have happened and what that would mean. This might be because to do so would cause problems—if a journalist shared a moment of doubt that they might have inadvertently endangered national security, it would be handing ammunition to critics of Snowden and the media at large, and the project might not recover the public’s goodwill.
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In 2011, The Guardian’s science correspondent Ben Goldacre said:
‘Ideas in science and medicine improve because they’re criticized. That’s not a sort-of side issue: that’s the core of how ideas progress. If you go to any academic conference, you’ll see scientists being absolutely vicious with each other about their ideas, and that’s because it’s really important that our ideas improve, because in science and medicine you can do great harm even when you think you’re doing good...’[5]
The same applies, or should, to journalism. Note that Goldacre said scientists were vicious about each other’s ideas. The journalists Snowden gave access to these documents haven’t spent 18 months combing through them looking for evidence of good practice by the NSA—because that isn’t a story. A journalist’s role is to speak truth to power and uncover wrongdoing, so it’s no surprise that the reporting has barely mentioned anything the NSA have done right. Similarly, while some of the reporting was well executed and fully justified, my focus here is also wrongdoing. I’m being rather brutal in my condemnation of the ways in which this story has been reported, but I’m criticising the reporting, not the people. In the same way scientists peer review and criticise problems in methodologies, I’m pointing out problems I see with their methodologies and working. I’m not attacking these journalists personally.
This might seem obvious, but part of the reason the reporting hasn’t been criticised more is, I suspect, because of the nature of the debate, which has become very confrontational and often personally abusive, from all sides.
But criticism doesn’t need to be a vicious personal attack. Journalists have put the NSA, GCHQ and other intelligence agencies under the microscope, but they shouldn’t be immune from substantive scrutiny themselves. It’s the job of journalists to speak truth to power, but that can also include holding other journalists to account. The reporters Snowden entrusted with these documents wielded and still wield enormous power, and there is a potential to do great harm even when they think they are doing good. With a lot of reporting, journalistic errors tend to have relatively minor consequences: a restaurant fails to receive a few bookings because a phone number is misprinted, or a celebrity is irritated that their age is stated incorrectly (or perhaps correctly).
But with this story, the stakes could scarcely be higher. A Der Spiegel article from July 2013 noted that the magazine had withheld some details from the documents because they ‘could endanger the lives of NSA workers’.[6] The same month, Glenn Greenwald, one of the journalists at the heart of the reporting and in many ways its most prominent voice, claimed that Snowden had sufficient information to ‘cause more damage to the US government alone in a minute than anyone else has had in the history of the United States’[7] and that this included ‘basically the instruction manual for how the NSA is built’[8]:
‘In order to take documents that proved that what he was saying was true he had to take ones that included very sensitive, detailed blueprints of how the NSA does what they do, and so he’s in possession of literally thousands of documents that contain very specific blueprints that would allow somebody who read them to know exactly how the NSA does what it does, which would in turn allow them either to evade that surveillance or to replicate it.’[9]
He added that the American government should be praying every day that nothing happen to Snowden, because several people around the world had been given access to the full trove of his documents, which would be released in its entirety if he were to be harmed, and that this would represent the United States’ ‘worst nightmare’.[10]
We don’t know who has had access to the full trove, or how strong their security measures are. The reporting has slowed down but this remains an extraordinarily sensitive situation, akin to a mine that might go off at any moment. Thousands of documents are currently in the hands of journalists, and the box can’t simply be closed. Over time, many of the secrets in the documents are likely to lose their ability to compromise national security, but not all of them will.
The worst-case scenario would be the one Greenwald raised: a full release of all the documents, WikiLeaks-style, with no redactions made to protect national security. That hasn’t happened yet, but it still could. The circle of journalists with access to this material has widened in the last year and a half, as Greenwald pointed out in a recent tweet:
‘Your periodic reminder: there are at least 5 media outlets w/huge parts of the Snowden archive (NYT, WPost, Guardian, ProPublica, Intercept)’[11]
We don’t know the number of people within those organisations who have had or still have access to the documents, and there are other gaps in the story. The New York Times has revealed that in June 2013 when The Guardian didn’t move as quickly as Greenwald and Laura Poitras wanted with the first story based on the documents,
‘…Greenwald discussed taking it elsewhere, sending an encrypted draft to a colleague at another publication. He also considered creating a Web site on which they would publish everything, which he planned to call NSADisclosures. In the end, The Guardian moved ahead with their articles. But Poitras and Greenwald have created their own publishing network as well, placing articles with other outlets in Germany and Brazil and planning more for the future. They have not shared the full set of documents with anyone.’[12]
Human nature being what it is, relationships and agreements between journalists with access to the documents could change, and indeed already have—in October 2013, Greenwald left The Guardian and helped found the online publication The Intercept with Poitras (conceptually akin to the mooted NSADisclosures), and took Snowden documents with him.
The journalists involved would no doubt argue that reasons of source protection and personal security demand it, but there’s an irony in there being so many calls for greater transparency from the NSA in the media when it remains a secret which journalists have had access to these documents. Greenwald named five organisations, but didn’t mention Der Spiegel: perhaps it received fewer documents than the others, but it has published several stories drawing on them, most with Laura Poitras listed as a co-author. It also seems from articles in The Independent and The Register that Duncan Campbell has some of the documents from the cache, although it’s unclear how he got them and Snowden has denied providing him with them. It would be unsurprising if encryption specialist Jacob Appelbaum, who has collaborated closely with Laura Poitras and accepted the Whistleblower Prize on behalf of Snowden in 2013, had also had access to some of the documents.
These journalists don’t all share the same concept of what constitutes wrongdoing by the NSA, and what deserves to be revealed in the public interest. Barton Gellman of the Washington Post, for instance, has been notably more cautious than some of the other journalists. It may be that Duncan Campbell published material exposing British intelligence operations in The Register because larger publications didn’t feel it was warranted. Appelbaum now appears to have his own source inside the NSA feeding him documents, and is notably less stringent about what he regards as being in the public interest than most of the others.
It might be—let’s hope—that the mine never explodes, but it might also be that in a month, or a year, or five years, parts or even all of Snowden’s cache will leak into the public domain and cause catastrophic damage. To be anxious about that possibility doesn’t nullify the importance of the wrongdoing exposed by some of the reporting. A lot of people seem to have approached the Snowden disclosures in a binary way: you’re either for or against them, as though they were all necessarily of the same nature. But with such a long-running story—there have been 290 primary reports from the documents so far—more nuanced positions are possible and, I think, appropriate. One can, after all, do a useful and noble thing on Monday and do a reckless and damaging thing on Tuesday, especially if the latter is inadvertent.
It is also the case that just because the worst possible damage hasn’t yet been done, that doesn’t mean that a lot of serious damage hasn’t already been. The Snowden leaks may be simultaneously the most significant exposure of illegitimate activities by Western intelligence agencies in recent history and the most significant exposure of legitimate ones. At least one espionage expert has referred to the disclosures so far as representing ‘the West’s greatest intelligence disaster’.[13] Some feel that’s hyperbole and claim there is no proof of it, but intelligence agencies will likely have had to presume the worst in many cases: if there has been a chance of an operation being compromised, it would have been closed down if possible rather than risk exposure.
Edward Snowden and several of the journalists involved have repeatedly dismissed NSA officials’ claims that the leaks have harmed US national security on the grounds that there is no proof of it. The NSA are in a bind there, of course. To reveal the specifics of how some bad actors have used the leaks to their advantage would run the risk of revealing this to other bad actors who haven’t yet taken advantage of the same information.
It may be that no serious damage has been caused, but there are several reasons why accepting the journalists’ word on this as proof is also unwise. One is they have made some basic mistakes: a review by Associated Press in February 2014 found that six NSA employees had been accidentally named in the reporting due to redaction errors.[14] Another is the way several of them approached the story. Responsible journalists would view the documents Snowden gave them as a trove of information that needs to be read very carefully because it could contain evidence that one of the United States’ intelligence agencies has overreached its remit and committed some wrongdoings that need to be exposed. But some of the reporters have, from the outset, instead approached the cache of documents as though it necessarily contains multiple examples of serious wrongdoing, and seem in some cases to have approached this story with the view that the NSA is an almost entirely and unequivocally malign organization.
There’s also the danger of accepting a premise of false balance. For instance, if it were the case that journalists reporting this story have judged the public interest correctly 80 percent of the time, one might say they’d done their job well. But it’s not as simple as percentages. A single article might, as a whole, reveal serious wrongdoing in the public interest, but also reveal a name or a plan or an activity that could also be extremely useful to enemies of the United States and/or its allies.
Glenn Greenwald has made some encouraging comments about his approach to this, such as this remark in an interview with The Daily Beast:
‘“I do not want to help other states get better at surveillance,” Greenwald said. He added, “We won’t publish things that might ruin ongoing operations from the U.S. government that very few people would object to the United States doing.”’[15]
He has reiterated this, and all the others involved have said they’ve taken national security concerns into due consideration. But stating this and doing it aren’t the same. This has been an unprecedented disclosure of secrets—many thousands of documents—and with each story the potential for damage is renewed.
With nearly 300 stories published over a period of 18 months, the idea that legitimate secrets haven’t been exposed in a perfect run of decisions would be remarkable. If you feel that the journalists in question cannot possibly have misjudged any of these stories, that’s a lot of faith in these individuals, and as I think I show in the coming pages the pattern of their work doesn’t warrant such faith. You might well still disagree with me by the time you finish this short book, but if you’ve been following the Snowden saga I hope you’ll find it an interesting look at the story from another angle. And with the fog of outrage over surveillance overreach largely lifted, you might be surprised at what remains in plain sight.
Notes
[1] http://web.archive.org/web/20070103071501/http://duncan.gn.apc.org/echelon-dc.htm
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/16/politics/16program.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0
[2] Larry Cox. See: http://www.martykaiser.com/enemy.htm and https://vticcae.files.wordpress.com/2010/04/cox-saic-bio-010810.pdf
[3] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2014/11/usa-freedom-act-week-whats-come-and-what-you-need-know
[4] http://online.wsj.com/articles/michael-v-hayden-and-michael-b-mukasey-nsa-reform-that-only-isis-could-love-1416268847
[5] Goldacre interviewed in the documentary ‘See You In Court’, BBC One, May 3 2011.
[6] http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/secret-documents-nsa-targeted-germany-and-eu-buildings-a-908609.html
[7] http://www.lanacion.com.ar/1600674-glenn-greenwald-snowden-tiene-informacion-para-causar-mas-dano
[8] http://bigstory.ap.org/article/greenwald-snowden-docs-contain-nsa-blueprint An accompanying video can be seen at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FoxP70oojfY (‘Greenwald: Snowden Has NSA Blueprint’)
[9] Ibid.
[10] http://www.lanacion.com.ar/1600674-glenn-greenwald-snowden-tiene-informacion-para-causar-mas-dano
[11] https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/534753327066931200
[12] http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/18/magazine/laura-poitras-snowden.html?smid=tw-share&_r=0&pagewanted=all
[13] Edward Lucas – his ebook on the saga, The Snowden Operation, is subtitled ‘Inside the West's Greatest Intelligence Disaster’.
[14] http://bigstory.ap.org/article/media-sometimes-try-fail-keep-nsas-secrets
[15] http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/06/25/greenwald-snowden-s-files-are-out-there-if-anything-happens-to-him.html
2. The Spy’s Lot
This is a chapter from News of Devils: The Media and Edward Snowden. The next chapter is linked to at the foot of the page. This can also be read as part of the free ebook Need to Know, which you can download here.
It’s no secret that spies aren’t always saints—even when doing good, they can cross ethical boundaries. But when a spy agency’s secrets are exposed, pretty much anything they get up to looks bad, and it can be very difficult to remind everyone why we need them at all. When the curtain is drawn back on spooks’ activities, the public tends to lap it up. We’re getting a glimpse into what we’re not meant to know, like seeing how a magician performs their tricks.
The danger is that this fascination can seem justification enough for secrets to be revealed. Most people understand that espionage involves deception, and that we can’t expect our intelligence agencies to gather information on our enemies by simply asking them what they’re doing, so instead must resort to other means: recruiting assets, pretending to be people they aren’t, and all the rest. As long as the aim of this is to gather intelligence on our enemies, we accept this as necessary.
Intellectually, we might know that espionage is often justified and extremely important, but the thrill of discovering how it’s done can blind us to that, especially because to deceive people nowadays, and to deceive terrorist cells and other spies, our intelligence operatives are being much sneakier than we could possibly have imagined. So the complexity of their techniques can seem bewildering, shocking—and de facto wrong.
But the significant point ethically is not how they do it, but why they do it. As long as they are trying to extract intelligence needed for the security of our country—and it doesn’t needlessly invade people’s privacy—it doesn’t make any difference if the method is simply to swipe a USB drive filled with Russian passwords, as we’re used to seeing in Hollywood thrillers, the seconds counting down as the hourglass icons hangs on the screen and the footsteps in the corridor outside grow louder, or if they’ve set up an entire fake cyber-cafe to lure in surveillance targets.
This strange concoction of emotions, where readers are fascinated to learn how spies operate and at the same time are shocked that they behave in such ways and feel it must be wrong regardless of the intentions or success of these activities, isn’t new to the Snowden affair. It happened in Britain with Peter Wright and his memoir Spycatcher, and with David Shayler and Richard Tomlinson. All three were disgruntled British intelligence officers who did their best to paint MI5 and MI6 in the blackest light they could. Many of these revelations were spurious or exaggerated, but the agencies had very little comeback: who would believe the spooks?
So unfortunately, we tend to be interested in reading about top secret information even if it’s a leak from our own side, and it’s all too easy to forget or dismiss that people’s lives may depend on it. I’d personally find it fascinating to read all of the CIA’s and MI6’s operational documents from the last fifty years, but my interest doesn’t mean they should all be declassified. As is frequently pointed out but more frequently ignored, public interest doesn’t mean ‘what the public is interested in’.
To give an example, one of the most important spies of the Cold War was Oleg Penkovsky, a colonel in Soviet military intelligence who passed reams of classified material to the CIA and MI6 in the early Sixties. His intelligence is widely credited as having been instrumental in forestalling a nuclear conflict during the Cuban Missile Crisis. But in 1961 someone with access to material about the operation might have been shocked by some of the practices involved in it: Penkovsky’s intelligence was so highly valued that MI6 and the CIA went to great lengths to keep him sweet, even going so far as to arrange for prostitutes for him. One can easily imagine a leak of this distasteful fact to an enterprising reporter, who could then have splashed their scoop all over the Guardian or the New York Times. ‘British And US Intelligence Buy Prostitutes For Soviet Asset’ would be a juicy headline, and lots of people would have been outraged by such an exposé. But the lapse in scruples is miniscule when placed against the wider scheme of things, and had the operation been exposed in the Western press in such a way, the KGB would have launched an immediate enquiry and might have identified Penkovsky sooner than they did as a result—and I might not be here writing this nor you reading it.
I’m not suggesting that all the revelations from the Snowden documents have been as small beer as that indiscretion—but I think some have been, and a few haven’t been indiscretions at all. And the principle is the same: in exposing a wrongdoing one might in the process traipse into exposing legitimate and even very valuable activities and methods.
The rise of the Islamic State and Russia’s invasion of Crimea have both put into stark relief the fact that, although it is clear surveillance practices have overstepped the mark in several areas that endanger civil liberties, we still very much need our intelligence agencies. One hopes further events won’t make that clearer, but if they do that will likely be a result of our intelligence agencies not doing enough rather than doing too much.
And let’s not be complacent about what is at stake here. A common argument I’ve seen on social media is that Snowden’s disclosures can’t have caused damage because those who could benefit from knowing about these techniques would have already known about them and taken measures to avoid them. This doesn’t withstand scrutiny. Firstly, there’s no way of knowing that every cyber-criminal, terrorist or person with ill intentions against the United States and its citizens already knew about each revelation. Such people take security measures into greater consideration than the average person, naturally, but that doesn’t afford them clairvoyance into the every movement of the NSA, GCHQ or other agencies whose methods and activities have been revealed. If everything these agencies do or consider is known to their targets, both agencies might as well pack up and go home.
If it were the case that the Bad Guys know about everything already, leaving these agencies only to spy on Us Good Guys, no terrorists or cyber-criminals’ plots would have been foiled, and the American administration would be spending an enormous budget thinking up operations and schemes that have no chance of working because they have already been guessed at by the targets. And yet the documents contain numerous instances of NSA staff noting that this or that method had yielded useful intelligence.
Common sense suggests a far more likely scenario: that prior to the Snowden disclosures there was a range of knowledge among bad actors of what the NSA can do. Perhaps some of their methods were suspected—but confirmation in black and white could nevertheless prove useful.
One of the clearest examples of this is The Guardian’s story revealing that in 2009 the NSA, working with GCHQ, had spied on the then Russian president Dmitry Medvedev when he’d visited London for the G20 summit.[1]
There was no public interest in revealing this, and it could only really have caused national security and/or diplomatic damage, even if it were minor. Bizarrely, The Guardian effectively acknowledged the damage the exposure they’d chosen to pursue would likely cause:
‘While it has been widely known the two countries spy on each other, it is rare for either to be caught in the act; the latest disclosures will also be deeply embarrassing for the White House as Obama prepares to meet Vladimir Putin, who succeeded Medvedev as president, in the margins of the G8 summit this week.’[2]
The Guardian seems to have been under the impression that this was activity worth exposing in the public interest because the NSA was operating on British soil:
‘The new revelations underline the significance of RAF Menwith Hill and raise questions about its relationship to the British intelligence agencies, and who is responsible for overseeing it. The 560-acre site was leased to the Americans in 1954 and the NSA has had a large presence there since 1966.’[3]
The UK and the US are close allies, and the NSA and GCHQ working in tandem to intercept communications such as this has been standard for decades and isn’t evidence of wrongdoing. Both are part of Five Eyes, and the article indicates the intelligence was shared within that group. It might say something about the relative power dynamic that the US has intelligence officers operating with Brits in the UK like this, but that’s simply common knowledge: it was a theme in John le Carré novels three decades ago. The fact that the NSA has been at Menwith Hill since 1966 is a clue that this isn’t news.
As for who’s responsible for overseeing such activities, an article published by The Guardian the same day on this and other attempts to intercept communications at that summit seems to provide an answer:
‘The documents suggest that the operation was sanctioned in principle at a senior level in the government of the then prime minister, Gordon Brown, and that intelligence, including briefings for visiting delegates, was passed to British ministers.’[4]
That second article mentions that the NSA and GCHQ were trying to intercept communications of diplomats from ‘long-standing allies such as South Africa and Turkey’ and that it wasn’t to stop terrorism or nefarious acts but ‘the more mundane purpose of securing an advantage in meetings’. There is an ignorance of realpolitik here, and either real or feigned naivety. If the NSA’s remit were only to stop terrorism or nefarious acts, there might be a point. But it isn’t. It’s ‘to gain a decision advantage for the Nation and our allies under all circumstances’.[5] GCHQ’s remit also includes this, and has done since 1994:
‘We are primarily a foreign-focused intelligence agency, with a signals intelligence role that can only be exercised for three limited purposes:
In the interests of national security
In the interests of the economic well-being of the UK
In support of the prevention or detection of serious crime.’[6]
The nature of allies often shifts, and diplomatic discussions at the level of the G20 or G8 are often of crucial importance to how nations operate in many different fields, most of which interconnect. Natural resources like gas and oil are often not just economically important, but politically vital—Russia uses its control over them as a weapon. And away from shocked headlines, it’s well known that all intelligence agencies spy on diplomats of apparently friendly countries, even as their leaders shake hands for the television cameras and talk about how strong the ties are between them.
Pointing more to the interpretation of feigned naivety is the conspicuous absence in the second, wider article of listing Russia as an ally along with Turkey and South Africa despite also mentioning that Medvedev was a surveillance target at the summit. This is surely because it was common knowledge even in 2009 that the Russians were allies in name only. The assassination of Alexander Litvinenko in London in broad daylight in 2006 caused a serious diplomatic chill between Britain and Russia, and recent events have only made clearer what had long been known: Putin’s regime has simply been play-acting as a democratic state on the diplomatic stage. Attempting to intercept the Russian president’s communications is something American and British intelligence should have been doing in 2009, and should still be doing today if possible. Russia isn’t mentioned as an ally in the second piece, so that it isn’t part of the public interest of the first. There was no real public interest in exposing it, in fact. I suspect Russian intelligence would have been grateful to The Guardian for revealing details about this—and next time (if they are still attending such summits) they’ll be more careful.
Notes
[1] http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jun/16/nsa-dmitry-medvedev-g20-summit
[2] Ibid.
[3] Ibid.
[4] http://www.theguardian.com/uk/2013/jun/16/gchq-intercepted-communications-g20-summits
[5] https://www.nsa.gov/about/values/index.shtml
[6] http://www.gchq.gov.uk/how_we_work/running_the_business/oversight/Pages/the-law.aspx
3. 'Make Them A Little Bit Angry'
This is a chapter from News of Devils: The Media and Edward Snowden. The next chapter is linked to at the foot of the page. This can also be read as part of the free ebook Need to Know, which you can download here.
I think there have been four major factors contributing to problems in the reporting of the Snowden affair, all of which have led to a darker picture of the NSA’s activities than the raw material published so far indicates, as well as to the needless exposing of Western secrets in some cases:
Confirmation bias from journalists with access to the documents, in at least three cases a strong assumption going in that the agency would be proved to be corrupt/malign.
A lack of scepticism about deceptive or exaggerated statements by Edward Snowden regarding the NSA’s motives and intentions.
Gaps in basic knowledge about how the intelligence world operates, and a failure to grasp how strong the public interest defence needs to be when dealing with thousands of national security secrets.
A desire to up the ante and find ever-more shocking ‘scoops’ to publish from the documents. This has been exacerbated by Snowden effectively pitting journalists against each other by giving people at different publications access to the cache.
The latter has also applied to newspapers without access to Snowden’s cache, creating an NSA disclosure feeding frenzy. Der Spiegel has gone to town in particular, but so have others. In June 2013, a couple of weeks after the first stories, The Observer—part of the Guardian Media Group but with a completely different editorial staff from The Guardian—published a front-page ‘scoop’ about the NSA. The story was based on information that a single source, one Wayne Madsen, had given in an interview to the website privacysurgeon.org about a secret deal European governments had done with the NSA. The Observer didn’t even interview Madsen for the article, but simply repeated his claims to the website. Madsen himself is an extreme conspiracy theorist who believes, among many other things, that Anders Breivik was a Mossad agent carrying out a false flag attack on behalf of Israel.[1]
The story was soon taken down from The Guardian’s website, which The Observer shares with its sister paper, but even that was done shoddily, with an error page conspicuously avoiding admitting to what the error was:
‘Sorry—the page you are looking for has been removed
This may be because of a legal objection, a rights consideration or for another reason.’[2]
On the problem of confirmation bias, there’s an obvious potential flaw in my argument. What if, despite my best intentions, my assessment of this is misjudged, and I’m the one with the confirmation bias? Well, that could be the case, of course. I’ve tried to come to an honest assessment after a year and a half following the story, but it’s for you as a reader to decide if I’ve been unfair, and the journalists themselves are of course free to disagree with any of my points.
But there is a crucial difference between this book and the reporting I’m criticizing. I don’t think I’ve misjudged my assessments or been biased, obviously, but if I have then I’ve simply unfairly criticized some journalists. That’s regrettable, but it happens every day of the week, and having one’s work criticized is part of the job. If you can’t take the sort of criticism I’m offering here, you should probably look into a new line of work. But if the journalists working on this story have misjudged their assessments, the potential in each and every case is for a risk to the national security of the US and/or its allies, and individuals’ lives may be at stake.
I’ve also examined elements of the reporting that are less open to bias. I’ve looked at where stories have directly misrepresented information in the Snowden documents; conflicts of interest; ignorance of basic security and realpolitik matters, and knowledge of which countries are valid intelligence targets.
None of this is as hard-and-fast as a table of results for an experiment in, say, the efficacy of a drug in combating dengue fever, but I hope that even readers who are sympathetic to Snowden’s aims might see I haven’t imagined these problems.
~
Let’s start with the issue of bias, and Laura Poitras. In her case, her bias against the NSA isn’t just political, but deeply personal. A film director who mixes journalism and art, Poitras’s documentaries on the United States after 9/11 have included interviews with two NSA whistleblowers, and it is because of her interest in the agency and criticisms of its domestic surveillance programs that Snowden contacted her. But her work had also had consequences: she has discussed how she was repeatedly detained at airports by Customs and Border Patrol agents from the Department of Homeland Security, and she eventually moved to Germany to escape all the hassle.[3] So she isn’t simply an observer of government surveillance, but also a high-profile victim of it.
The focus of Poitras’ work is often an appeal to emotion. In an interview in 2011, she said:
‘I think 9/11 has affected all Americans and, being an artist working in these times, the work I’ve tried to do is to document it, the repercussions, and also to try to tell human stories that we can relate to on a more, I guess, emotional level.
But the real motivation for the work that I’ve been doing is not actually the events of 9/11, but how the US has responded to those events: the invasion of Iraq, Guantanamo, legalization of torture. And those are the things that were not created on 9/11—those are things that we chose.
The job of an artist is to express things, right? So we’re not activists, we’re not organizers, we’re not politicians, right? So even though I do have political beliefs, my job as an artist is to express how I’m perceiving the world. And so the work I’ve tried to do as a storyteller, as a filmmaker, as somebody who captures images, is to create documents, to create a record, and to create a record that’s grounded in human stories.’[4]
Despite Poitras saying she avoids pushing her political beliefs or operating as an activist in her films, these strands are extremely obvious in her work, and indeed are obvious even as she denies it—it doesn’t take a genius to figure out her position on the War on Terror from her comments on Iraq, Guantanamo and torture. She seems to feel that by not explicitly stating her political positions in her work she isn’t getting them across to her audience, but the people she chooses to interview and the information she selects and omits all form a narrative framed by her world-view and political thinking.
In November 2012, Poitras discussed a new film she was working on, investigating domestic surveillance. She also explained that she had come to documentary-making after she had taken art classes and ‘fallen in love with story-telling’:
‘I really care about the craft, I really care about taking an aesthetic approach towards story-telling, but it’s about the people for me now, it’s about going on that journey and having that emotional connection and trying to bring that to the audience… What I’m often trying to do is look at big themes, but ground them in human experience. And so, as a viewer you don’t necessarily have to care so much about the big themes that I’m interested in, but I do want you to care about the people I’m spending time with and go on the journey with them and then through that experience maybe reflect on those bigger themes. And so there’s a really tangible experience you have when you spend a lot of time with people documenting what they’re going through.’[5]
This is a good description of how to craft compelling narratives, but it has obvious risks when it comes to journalism, not least an abandonment of ethics in favour of empathy. An example that springs to mind is My Silent War, the memoir of Kim Philby. A senior MI6 officer in the Cold War, Philby had secretly been working as a double agent for the KGB since he was a student at Cambridge University. My Silent War was published after his defection to Moscow with a foreword by Graham Greene, and is largely a stodgy account of his career, with several notable omissions and misrepresentations. But Philby was partly such a successful double agent because he was extraordinarily charming, and over the course of a book by him it’s very difficult not to succumb to it at any point. This is a man who betrayed hundreds of secrets, and as a result many British agents went to their deaths. But he was still a human being. He was often astute and witty.
This is often an effect of spending a lot of time with people. Nick Broomfield, Jon Ronson and Louis Theroux often interview people who do or have done awful things, but the more time they (and we) spend with them, the harder it is to not to like them. Poitras’ approach can work extremely effectively, but the people she elects to spend time filming in this way are going to end up being people we are emotionally attached to—that’s her self-declared aim. And that’s fine. But her selection of who those people are becomes pretty important.
The interviewer asked her if the idea for her new film had come about because she had herself become a subject of domestic surveillance. She replied:
‘I think my personal experience definitely informs it because being targeted, it really does impact the way you do everything in your life. Every phone call you make, you imagine it’s being listened to by somebody else, every email you send, you imagine it’s being read by other people. And that’s not paranoia, I mean, that’s really happening. And several of the people I’ve been filming with I know are targets as well—three of the people. So we’re four targets. So there’s a good chance that everything’s getting monitored.’[6]
Towards the end of the interview, she briefly discussed her plans:
‘I’m also going to probably do something else on the NSA, which would be more web-based, collaborative, a lot of fun—make them a little bit angry.’[7]
She seems to have been planning a film based partly around NSA whistleblower Thomas Drake. On the eve of Drake’s espionage trial in 2010, Poitras and her cinematographer Kirsten Johnson had met William Binney, another NSA whistleblower, who was one of Drake’s defence witnesses. Binney turned to Poitras and Johnson and said ‘Just so you know, I’d never commit suicide’. Poitras comments on this in the interview with dark humour: ‘The government does things—we know that.’
The government dropped espionage charges against Thomas Drake. William Binney is, at the time of writing, still alive, and an openly vocal critic of the NSA. In August 2012, The Program, Poitras’ ‘Op-Doc’ short film about Binney, appeared on the New York Times’ website. In the accompanying article, Poitras revealed just how thin the line is between her politics and her storytelling instincts:
‘In this Op-Doc, Mr. Binney explains how the program he created for foreign intelligence gathering was turned inward on this country. He resigned over this in 2001 and began speaking out publicly in the last year. He is among a group of N.S.A. whistle-blowers, including Thomas A. Drake, who have each risked everything—their freedom, livelihoods and personal relationships—to warn Americans about the dangers of N.S.A. domestic spying.
To those who understand state surveillance as an abstraction, I will try to describe a little about how it has affected me. The United States apparently placed me on a “watch-list” in 2006 after I completed a film about the Iraq war. I have been detained at the border more than 40 times. Once, in 2011, when I was stopped at John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York and asserted my First Amendment right not to answer questions about my work, the border agent replied, “If you don’t answer our questions, we’ll find our answers on your electronics.”’ As a filmmaker and journalist entrusted to protect the people who share information with me, it is becoming increasingly difficult for me to work in the United States. Although I take every effort to secure my material, I know the N.S.A. has technical abilities that are nearly impossible to defend against if you are targeted.’[8]
With this background and these views of it, how critical of NSA whistleblowers is Poitras capable of being? In her film, Binney makes some fairly extreme claims. He says the amount of information gathered by the NSA is out of control, and then states:
‘This is something the KGB, the Stasi or the Gestapo would have loved to have had about their populations.’[9]
In March that year, he had told journalist James Bamford that the US was on the verge of becoming ‘a turnkey totalitarian state’. In his first interview with The Guardian, Snowden spoke of the danger of ‘turnkey tyranny’ coming to the US.[10] But totalitarian regimes don’t allow people to repeatedly state they are totalitarian in the media. Snowden is currently in Moscow, fearing imprisonment if he were to return to the United States. But Binney remains a free man. Similarly, a compelling piece of evidence to refute Snowden’s fears that the United States is on the brink of becoming a totalitarian surveillance state is the fact that the NSA was unaware he had stolen their documents, or who he was, until after he’d fled the country.[11] They don’t appear to be watching everyone all the time quite yet.
~
There are signs of Laura Poitras’ focus on emotional narrative in her approach to the Snowden story. In a recent interview with the New Yorker, she explained that after Snowden contacted her in January 2013 she corresponded with him for several months, becoming emotionally and psychologically drawn in. She had wanted to film him for her documentary on domestic surveillance—she wasn’t initially interested in publishing the documents he had taken or conducting the straight factual reporting of them herself:
‘Snowden urged her to find a collaborator for publishing the documents, which were complex and voluminous, and she agreed to do so. She didn’t care about sharing, or even losing, a scoop—the documents were a print story. She was interested in Snowden. She wanted to know what drove him to risk everything. “Unlike my previous films, this was somebody I had built a dialogue with, and wanted to meet,” she told me. “Because I cared.”’
In May, Poitras flew to New York and was informed by Snowden that she should travel to Hong Kong to meet him. She wanted someone else to be in the room with her when she filmed him:
‘She never shot herself conducting interviews—it broke one of the tenets of cinéma vérité. When she had trouble enlisting someone, she began to panic.
Snowden asked her to involve Greenwald, who at the time was a columnist for the Guardian. In fact, he had approached Greenwald before Poitras, but Greenwald hadn’t made the effort to install encryption software for e-mails, and Snowden had moved on. Greenwald was contacted again, and in late May he flew from Rio to New York. Now Poitras had a partner.’[12]
A few problems stand out here. Poitras’s level of emotional commitment to a still-anonymous source suggests she had convinced herself that he was credible before meeting him. This is a common problem for journalists when they have a sniff of a scoop, but Poitras wasn’t at this point interested in the hard graft of investigative journalism: she was interested in Snowden.
Her search for a journalist to do the reporting on the facts while she told the human story led to two newspapers competing for the same scoop. In late May 2013, she informed Greenwald that there was a snag with the story: she’d spoken to a journalist at the Washington Post about some of the documents, but the source was now worried by how the paper had reacted. Snowden then contacted Greenwald online, as Greenwald relates in his book No Place To Hide:
‘We spoke online that day for two hours. [Snowden’s] first concern was what was happening with some of the NSA documents that, with his consent, Poitras had talked about to a Washington Post reporter, Barton Gellman. The documents pertained to one specific story about a program called PRISM, which allowed the NSA to collect private communications from the world’s largest Internet companies, including Facebook, Google, Yahoo!, and Skype.
Rather than report the story quickly and aggressively, the Washington Post had assembled a large team of lawyers who were making all kinds of demands and issuing all sorts of dire warnings. To the source, this signaled that the Post, handed what he believed was an unprecedented journalistic opportunity, was being driven by fear rather than conviction and determination. He was also livid that the Post had involved so many people, afraid that these discussions might jeopardize his security.
“I don’t like how this is developing,” he told me. “I had wanted someone else to do this one story about PRISM so you could focus on the broader archive, especially the mass domestic spying, but now I really want you to be the one to report this. I’ve been reading you a long time,” he said, “and I know you’ll be aggressive and fearless in how you do this.”’[13]
The PRISM story was indeed an unprecedented journalistic opportunity, and Snowden was right to be concerned about the security issue of involving others. But there’s also a lot of ground between potentially compromising your source’s security by dithering and involving too many people and reporting a story ‘quickly and aggressively’. There was some need to act rapidly, as Snowden was a fugitive but also offered the promise of being able to provide additional context to the documents. But why report ‘aggressively’? Why not simply responsibly and accurately? What if Snowden’s documents weren’t as damning as he was claiming? Perhaps in part because he wanted the scoop over The Washington Post, Greenwald seems to have sided with Snowden on the issue and presumed in advance of seeing any of the documents he’d taken that they would be as damning about the NSA as he was suggesting.
~
Laura Poitras’ experiences of being repeatedly stopped and questioned by government agents informed the documentaries she made before Snowden appeared on the scene, and in them she focused on narrative journeys revolving around interviewees for whom she felt a strong connection. That’s all well and good in those documentaries—her Binney film, for instance, was labeled an ‘Op-Doc’ because like an op-ed it contained her own opinions rather than being hard news. But as the Snowden story developed, Poitras switched from being a storyteller-cum-artist to a straight journalist, with her name on the bylines of several news reports on the Snowden documents, at Der Spiegel, The Intercept and elsewhere. In doing so, I wonder if she has put aside her pre-existing bias towards the agency she wanted to make ‘a little bit angry’, her caring about Snowden and her penchant for empathizing so thoroughly with the subjects she covers.[14]
Early on in the Snowden saga, she did make some attempt at the kind of source verification that is more akin to news reporting than documentary storytelling, but that also contained the feedback loop of confirmation bias. In May 2013, she informed Jacob Appelbaum, who also lived in Berlin, that she was in contact with someone claiming to be an NSA whistleblower, and asked if he could provide some specific technical questions she could pose to check he was the genuine article and not a provocation of some sort. Appelbaum, a former hacker and encryption expert who had been a volunteer for WikiLeaks, sent a detailed list of questions, which was later published by Der Spiegel.[15]
Appelbaum had more technical knowledge of the intelligence apparatus than Poitras, but she was hardly reaching out to test her own confirmation bias: Appelbaum lives in Berlin for the same reason as she does, and shared many of her views on the issues.
At a surveillance ‘teach-in’ at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York in late 2012 at which Poitras had been a key participant, Appelbaum had interviewed William Binney on stage. Like Poitras, he uncritically believed Binney’s claims, and stated:
‘[Binney] left the NSA because each and every one of us was being targeted by the NSA as Americans on American soil, talking to other Americans. That scares the shit out of me. And it’s especially amazing to have him here saying this, because all this time I thought I was paranoid, I wasn’t paranoid enough.’[16]
Snowden’s documents have confirmed that the NSA has a huge surveillance capability, but by no stretch of the imagination does it suggest that each and every American on American soil is being targeted. Before Snowden emerged, Appelbaum was already convinced that the United States was turning to totalitarianism. In 2012, he told Democracy Now he couldn’t elaborate on his treatment at the hands of federal agents ‘Because we don’t live in a free country’.[17]
Since the Snowden story broke, Appelbaum has also worked on several articles about NSA activities for Der Spiegel, including some that draw on internal NSA documents, although he hasn’t revealed his source for those. His articles use the idiom of news reporting, but this can act as a façade of neutrality to give political points more authoritative force: ‘Well, it’s been reported in Der Spiegel’. Away from the printed page and the screen, Appelbaum is barely able to conceal that, for him, a large part of the NSA/Snowden story is payback against the intelligence agencies who have hounded him and people he knows. In a discussion with journalist John Goetz at the “Whatever happened to Privacy?” International Activism Conference in Berlin in December 2013, he was asked to put himself in the shoes of the then-NSA director General Keith Alexander. Appelbaum replied:
‘Well, it’s really hard to put myself into the shoes of someone who is such a fucking asshole. But I’ll try to do a good impression here, which is something along the lines of “Damn, I wish we understood this internet thing”. Because I suspect that Keith Alexander is sort of having a lot less sleep these days.’[18]
He went on to say that he felt Alexander might be anxious about not knowing what material Glenn Greenwald and other journalists had in their possession. He pointed out that intelligence officials could no longer make blanket assertions about intelligence activity without the risk of being contradicted, because the Snowden cache provided hard evidence of their programmes. ‘And so I suspect that that’s a really awful experience for them,’ he said, ‘and I’m so glad that I can return the favour, and that the rest of us can return that favour to them.’ Goetz asked him what he meant by this, and Appelbaum expanded:
‘For years, Julian [Assange], myself and a number of other people, some of whom are in this audience, have suffered immense harassment from the US government and from these spy agencies themselves—almost certainly the NSA. And so it’s really nice actually to be able to give them a little bit of the stress, a little bit of the Zersetzung they gave to us.
You know, when they wouldn’t give me files on myself or my family or my friends, I had to look into how the systems work for collecting these things so that I could understand what could be in those files. So it’s ironic because in a sense they created this situation, for a lot of people. This is a sort of natural reaction to it.
So I hope that Keith Alexander is kept up at night a little bit, you know—that some of the other people that are working on this spying, they have to think about the Nuremberg principles a little bit and maybe something’s going to come to light about that. I really hope that that is on their conscience. Not in a terrorizing way, but in a “Truth is coming, you motherfuckers, and you cannot stop it” kind of way.’[19]
~
Glenn Greenwald also has a history with the NSA, albeit not as personal a one as Appelbaum or Poitras. In 2012 he wrote about Poitras being put on the watch list, and this seems to have led to a relieving of pressure on her.[20] Greenwald’s view of the government before the Snowden story is reminiscent of Binney’s and Appelbaum’s view that the US was on the verge of being a totalitarian state:
‘Poitras is afraid to talk on a US telephone to anyone involved in her project, travel into her own country with any materials relating to her film work, or physically keep any of her unedited film on US soil. Does that sound like the behavior of a citizen and a filmmaker of a free country?’[21]
There is a very clear pattern of hyperbole in Greenwald’s work: if he reads an article by another journalist presenting evidence that the government may be doing something wrong, he might write an op-ed about it. But in his hands the original concern about circumstantial evidence will often be ramped up until he has made it seem like proof of systematic and wide-reaching abuse.
In 2010, the Washington Post ran a series of articles on the NSA that caused a lot of commotion. Greenwald wrote an op-ed about it for Salon, but rather than write, say, that it showed that 9/11 had created a disturbing shift in US intelligence methods and that the NSA was in dire need of increased oversight, he wrote that the Post’s journalism illustrated an ‘out-of-control, privacy-destroying Surveillance State’ and concluded that the United States had ‘become a militarized nation living under an omnipotent, self-perpetuating, bankrupting National Security State’. He claimed that the world of national security ‘is so vast, secretive and well-funded that it’s very difficult to imagine how it could ever be brought under control.’[22]
This is impressive rhetoric, but it is all from someone else’s reporting. It also relies on distorting and cherry-picking information from that reporting that suits his more amped-up narrative.[23]
~
Before Snowden came into their lives, Poitras, Appelbaum and Greenwald all believed that the United States was, if not a totalitarian state, on the verge of becoming one. Poitras and Greenwald, far from being neutral observers of the NSA, went into the story already feeling that the agency was a malign force, and so were looking for material that would support that pre-existing view. I’m not the first to make that observation—it was a criticism levelled by many people from the start of the reporting. But Greenwald had a response ready for anyone who raised this objection: his bias was in fact noble because he had never hidden it, and because it was the truth.
Notes
[1] http://www.infowars.com/wayne-madsen-link-between-breivik-and-israeli-mossad Michael Moynihan wrote an excellent dissection of this fiasco: http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/07/01/nsa-nutjob-anatomy-of-a-fake-observer-story.html
[2] http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jul/01/european-private-data-america
[3] CORRECTION: This sentence originally stated that Poitras had been subject to surveillance by the NSA at this time. My thanks to Alan Kurtz for pointing out to me on Twitter that there is no proof that that particular agency was monitoring Poitras then. For more about her being questioned by border agents and the Department of Homeland Security, see http://www.democracynow.org/2012/4/20/detained_in_the_us_filmmaker_laura
[4] http://www.nytimes.com/video/arts/100000001028097/laura-poitras.html
[5] http://creativetimereports.org/2012/11/28/an-interview-with-laura-poitras
[6] Ibid.
[7] Ibid.
[8] http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/23/opinion/the-national-security-agencys-domestic-spying-program.html?_r=0
[9] http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/23/opinion/the-national-security-agencys-domestic-spying-program.html
[10] http://www.wired.com/2012/03/ff_nsadatacenter/all/1;
http://www.theguardian.com/world/video/2013/jun/09/nsa-whistleblower-edward-snowden-interview-video
[11] CORRECTION: The word ‘refute’ was accidentally omitted from this sentence. My thanks again to Alan Kurtz for pointing it out.
[12] http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/10/20/holder-secrets
[13] Chapter 1, ‘Contact’, No Place To Hide by Glenn Greenwald (Penguin, 2014)
[14] UPDATE: This paragraph is new to this edition, as I realised that I hadn’t made it clear enough that Poitras switched approaches and has been one of the major bylines in straight news reports about the Snowden documents. My thanks to Willard Foxton and Max Dunbar for their feedback on this.
[15] http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/interview-with-whistleblower-edward-snowden-on-global-spying-a-910006.html
[16] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s976iyaO39A
[17] http://www.democracynow.org/2012/4/20/we_do_not_live_in_a
[18] http://www.boell.de/en/whatever-happened-privacy
[19] Ibid. Thanks to Martin Keegan for deciphering the word ‘Zersetzung’ in the clip.
[20] http://www.salon.com/2012/04/08/u_s_filmmaker_repeatedly_detained_at_border
[21] http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/dec/04/us-constitution-and-civil-liberties
[22] http://www.salon.com/2010/07/19/secrecy_6/
[23] There are many examples of this, but I discuss a few here: http://www.jeremy-duns.com/blog/2014/5/30/some-thoughts-on-the-reporting-of-prism?rq=greenwald His characterisation of the 2010 Washington Post excerpt is particularly misleading, as the entire idea in the original was to point out how bureaucracy has made over-collection unmanageable and near-useless. For examples of Greenwald citing sources he hasn’t read – including citing three sources saying the same thing because he hadn’t realised two simply cited the original findings of the third – see this blogpost: http://www.jeremy-duns.com/blog/2014/5/30/the-perils-of-googledemia?rq=greenwald
4. Bias as Truth
This is a chapter from News of Devils: The Media and Edward Snowden. The next chapter is linked to at the foot of the page. This can also be read as part of the free ebook Need to Know, which you can download here.
In the 2002 film 8 Mile, Eminem played B-Rabbit, a young man from Detroit who takes part in local rap battles with peers to prove his mettle and attain recognition. In the final round of one rap battle, he cleverly pre-empts all the attacks he thinks his opponent is about to make against him and ends his allotted time by throwing the microphone to the other rapper with the line: ‘Here, tell these people something they don’t know about me.’
When it comes to criticism of his work and approach, Glenn Greenwald has adopted a B-Rabbit approach. Just as he engages in hyperbole in his articles, he often shoots down criticism in overegged terms—or, as he might put it, points out the unbelievable ignorance and dishonesty of unwarranted attacks from drooling national security establishment shills and authoritarian idiots. Occasionally, he’ll refrain from tu quoque accusations and address the substance of criticisms, but even then it’s most often in aggressive and condescending terms, and almost always at such tedious length that nobody will bother to read it all to untangle it to see why the original criticisms were correct. The back and forth becomes so convoluted that few are prepared to take the time and be branded a pedant and/or neo-conservative security state shill for their trouble.
Some people who criticize Greenwald’s work are idiots, and no doubt some are drooling establishment shills. But I think his work has received so much criticism for a broader reason, which is that his view of events is often more extreme than the evidence he draws on for it, because he hasn’t properly researched the topic. A striking statistic dug up by another journalist or organization is sometimes enough for him to draw blunt or even apocalyptic assumptions, and over time this tendency in his work has been noticed. He unwittingly put his finger on the problems in his own approach in a tweet about Sam Harris:
‘Anyone who ever criticizes his writing is either lying, misrepresenting, or too stupid to understand his genuis.’[1]
That Glenn Greenwald is more interested in re-affirming his own prejudices than researching to get at the truth is something he has himself admitted. He told the New York Times shortly after the first Snowden story broke ‘I approach my journalism as a litigator. People say things, you assume they are lying, and dig for documents to prove it.’[2]
The problem with this, of course, is that it’s entirely the wrong way round, and the definition of confirmation bias. If a scientist goes into an experiment already convinced of what the result will be, he or she might end up fudging the data so that result will be produced. It’s healthy to treat new information with scepticism—I wish he’d shown more of his litigator’s side with some of Snowden’s statements. But rather than assuming people are lying and then trying to find evidence to prove your worst suspicions, a journalist should simply be trying to find evidence of the truth. Other journalists who have worked on this story, from The Guardian, The New York Times and The Washington Post, seem to regard trying to ascertain the truth of statements regardless of their preconceptions as their aim, as professional journalists should.
Greenwald’s litigator approach to journalism is most obvious in discussions on how to gauge the risk to national security. He acts from a position not just of scepticism of government claims—which all journalists should have—but a premise that they are almost certainly lying. On November 5 2014 he tweeted a link to a Reuters report, saying:
‘By the way, U.S. is still killing lots of people via drones in places like Yemen—don’t worry: “suspected militants”’[3]
With no evidence at all—there is none in the Reuters piece—he simply decided that the government must be guilty of wrongdoing here. And not just wrongdoing, but deliberate murder of innocent civilians.
~
Greenwald’s most adept B-Rabbit move has been to head off early criticism that he approached the story with a set of pre-existing biases by not only openly admitting it but attempting to make a virtue of the fact. His argument is that he can ignore the fundamental principles of journalism because, in effect, everyone else does, too, and he’s the only honest soldier prepared to admit it. Here is what he wrote in an exchange in the New York Times with Bill Keller in October 2013:
‘I don’t think anyone contends that what has become (rather recently) the standard model for a reporter—concealing one’s subjective perspectives or what appears to be “opinions”—precludes good journalism.
But this model has also produced lots of atrocious journalism and some toxic habits that are weakening the profession. A journalist who is petrified of appearing to express any opinions will often steer clear of declarative sentences about what is true, opting instead for a cowardly and unhelpful “here’s-what-both-sides-say-and-I-won’t-resolve-the-conflicts” formulation. That rewards dishonesty on the part of political and corporate officials who know they can rely on “objective” reporters to amplify their falsehoods without challenge (i.e., reporting is reduced to “X says Y” rather than “X says Y and that’s false”).
Worse still, this suffocating constraint on how reporters are permitted to express themselves produces a self-neutering form of journalism that becomes as ineffectual as it is boring. A failure to call torture “torture” because government officials demand that a more pleasant euphemism be used, or lazily equating a demonstrably true assertion with a demonstrably false one, drains journalism of its passion, vibrancy, vitality and soul.
Worst of all, this model rests on a false conceit. Human beings are not objectivity-driven machines. We all intrinsically perceive and process the world through subjective prisms. What is the value in pretending otherwise?
The relevant distinction is not between journalists who have opinions and those who do not, because the latter category is mythical. The relevant distinction is between journalists who honestly disclose their subjective assumptions and political values and those who dishonestly pretend they have none or conceal them from their readers.’[4]
This is an extraordinary justification for unprincipled journalism. He is absolutely right, of course, that good reporting should involve stating what is demonstrably true or false without having to create a contrived sense of balance, and it is unfortunately the case that many journalists fall down on that score. It’s perhaps most pronounced in broadcast media: the BBC, for example, is required to present an ‘impartial’ editorial view, and this can lead to precisely the sort of equivocations Greenwald mentions.
But if a claim is false it should be clearly stated as such, whoever makes it. Greenwald’s claim that it’s acceptable for journalists to do otherwise as long as they honestly disclose their subjective assumptions is contrary not just to well-established journalistic tenets, but to common sense. There’s a path between the two extremes of failing to call demonstrable falsehoods lies and approaching a story with a set of assumptions and letting them influence one’s reporting. Scientists are also human beings, and yet are capable of putting their opinions to one side in order to seek out hard evidence. If they weren’t, science wouldn’t advance.
Greenwald’s confirmation bias against the corporate-political establishment is so entrenched he fails to see that his argument doesn’t only apply to it. Biases exist and can seep into work, but this is poor practice whether it’s in support of statements by corporate or political officials or in opposition to them. If a journalist can’t separate their prejudices from their responsibility to report the truth, the problem occurs regardless of what those prejudices are. It isn’t only political and corporate officials who can be dishonest. A willingness to accept the claims of those opposing government or establishment claims is also toxic.
Additionally, as Keller pointed out in his response to Greenwald, reporters rarely produce work alone, and checking for such blind spots is an essential part of preparing a story for any publication valuing good journalism:
‘I don’t think of it as reporters pretending they have no opinions. I think of it as reporters, as an occupational discipline, suspending their opinions and letting the evidence speak for itself. And it matters that this is not just an individual exercise, but an institutional discipline, with editors who are tasked to challenge writers if they have given short shrift to contrary facts or arguments readers might want to know.
The thing is, once you have publicly declared your “subjective assumptions and political values,” it’s human nature to want to defend them, and it becomes tempting to omit or minimize facts, or frame the argument, in ways that support your declared viewpoint. And some readers, knowing that you write from the left or right, will view your reporting with justified suspicion.’[5]
Journalists and their colleagues shouldn’t be embracing their preconceived notions, as Greenwald suggests, but simply trying to find out what is true. If you don’t believe it’s even possible to keep an open mind when researching a story, let alone believe that’s worth doing, you’re in the wrong profession. A journalist’s prejudices can affect the way they report facts, but this is something they should try to avoid.
The hypothetical problem raised by Bill Keller applies in practice to Greenwald, who has a history of omitting or minimizing facts and framing arguments in a way that supports his established views predating the Snowden story.
That Greenwald’s hollow argument has largely been left unchallenged and even praised by some as a valid and bold new direction for journalism is both a depressing indictment of modern journalism and evidence of the problem of confirmation bias. Greenwald claims to despise it in others’ work, but feels it’s justified in his own because he is open about it.
So: a source gives selected journalists an unprecedented number of US intelligence secrets. One of the reporters says that he isn’t trying his best to put his biases aside and looking at the documents with as neutral an eye as possible so he can determine what is properly in the public interest, but admits he is looking at them to see what he can publish that will suit his political beliefs and fit his argument. This simply isn’t an acceptable principle.
Most have ignored this, but I think it’s important to respond to Greenwald’s B-Rabbiting. An argument doesn’t become true simply because it counters received wisdom and is stated boldly. Reporting hard news from a position of bias is the opposite of good practice. All journalists have biases, but good ones try to combat, not pander to them. The Snowden stories are presented as hard reporting, not opinion columns, and need to be as devoid of any agenda as is possible. Journalism isn’t a science, but the idea of looking for evidence and then making your conclusions rather than vice versa is a sound one that, until this story, was widely accepted. Greenwald has admitted he went into the laboratory having already decided the NSA is almost wholly malignant, so his ‘finding’ that all the evidence fits that view should be viewed askance
Greenwald’s self-declared biases are also obvious if one has read his columns in the past couple of years, but despite his claims to transparency his views aren’t stated anywhere in the news reports about the Snowden documents that bear his and others’ bylines. Readers of such articles can’t be expected to be aware of the previously stated political opinions of the articles’ authors in opinion pieces in order to judge how they have spun the information.
But Greenwald’s political position, which is similar in several ways to that of Laura Poitras and Jacob Appelbaum, is a significant factor in his reporting. Greenwald supported the war in Iraq and then had a change of heart. Like many converts, he has leaped with zeal from one extreme to another and has adopted some of the views he once attacked. In 2005, he railed against the ‘anti-Americanism’ of the European Left, which he saw as eager to find fault and evil with the United States to the extent that this had become their primary goal:
‘That goal is then fulfilled by selectively and endlessly highlighting and exaggerating America’s faults and downplaying, ignoring and even defending far worse flaws in others. In its most virulent (and quite common) form, this extends to making common cause with the most abusive and genuinely evil regimes and movements around the world, whose only virtue—the only one the European Left needs—is that they are opposed by the U.S.
This is a deeply dishonest and manipulative syndrome, having nothing whatever to do with the principles to which its adherents claim fidelity. Indeed, their supposed “principles” (human rights, the sanctity of human life, individual liberty) are simply weapons, pretexts, used to promote the only real principle they have—that the U.S. is a uniquely corrupt and evil country. And the reason one knows that to be the case is because these same individuals systematically overlook and even excuse far more severe violations of their ostensible principles when perpetrated by the countries and governments with which they inexcusably sympathize (sympathy which itself can be explained by a desire to sit in opposition to any and every American interest).’[6]
Greenwald’s views have changed so much since he wrote this that it’s odd to read these words from him. While he would no doubt strenuously object to being called anti-American, his current focus on highlighting the faults of the US government is one he admits to and defends robustly. In the last couple of years, he has repeatedly cited Noam Chomsky’s argument for focusing on abuses by United States administrations, in interviews[7], on Twitter[8] and in two of his Guardian ‘Comment is Free’ columns, one from 2012 on Julian Assange, Ecuador and Pussy Riot[9] and one from April 2013 on Sam Harris, ‘New Atheists’ and Islamophobia[10]. In the latter, he wrote:
‘…I find extremely suspect the behavior of westerners like Harris (and Hitchens and Dawkins) who spend the bulk of their time condemning the sins of other, distant peoples rather than the bulk of their time working against the sins of their own country. That’s particularly true of Americans, whose government has brought more violence, aggression, suffering, misery, and degradation to the world over the last decade than any other. Even if that weren’t true—and it is—spending one’s time as an American fixated on the sins of others is a morally dubious act, to put that generously, for reasons Noam Chomsky explained so perfectly:
“My own concern is primarily the terror and violence carried out by my own state, for two reasons. For one thing, because it happens to be the larger component of international violence. But also for a much more important reason than that; namely, I can do something about it.
“So even if the U.S. was responsible for 2 percent of the violence in the world instead of the majority of it, it would be that 2 percent I would be primarily responsible for. And that is a simple ethical judgment. That is, the ethical value of one’s actions depends on their anticipated and predictable consequences. It is very easy to denounce the atrocities of someone else. That has about as much ethical value as denouncing atrocities that took place in the 18th century.”
I, too, have written before about the hordes of American commentators whose favorite past-time is to lounge around pointing fingers at other nations, other governments, other populations, other religions, while spending relatively little time on their own. The reason this is particularly suspect and shoddy behavior from American commentators is that there are enormous amounts of violence and extremism and suffering which their government has unleashed and continues to unleash on the world. Indeed, much of that US violence is grounded in if not expressly justified by religion, including the aggressive attack on Iraq and steadfast support for Israeli aggression (to say nothing of the role Judaism plays in the decades-long oppression by the Israelis of Palestinians and all sorts of attacks on neighboring Arab and Muslim countries). Given the legion human rights violations from their own government, I find that Americans and westerners who spend the bulk of their energy on the crimes of others are usually cynically exploiting human rights concerns in service of a much different agenda.’
Greenwald’s position in 2005 and his position today are two sides of the same coin: people who only ever criticize US actions and minimize those of authoritarian regimes aren’t to be trusted, but neither are people who only criticize other states and turn a blind to American abuses. It is, of course, possible to have a more balanced view of world affairs. One can condemn the US for the abuses at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay and also object to, say, Russia’s oppression of gay people and murder of journalists and dissidents.
Binary positions can seem attractive in their purity, but the real world tends to be much messier. Greenwald’s hyperlink for the Chomsky quote in that Guardian piece takes readers to a ‘Noam Chomsky Quotes’ Tumblr, but the passage is in fact from a lecture Chomsky gave in March 1986 at the Universidad Centroamericana in Nicaragua—the lecture series was later printed as a book, On Power and Ideology. The full lecture is worth reading, because Chomsky couldn’t even maintain his own position over the course of a few minutes. In the paragraph following the one Greenwald quotes, he said that political actions were most significant when one had a chance of influencing and controlling their consequences, and that for him this ‘overwhelmingly’ applied to American actions. He added:
‘But I am also involved in protesting Soviet imperialism, and also explaining its roots in Soviet society. And I think that anyone in the Third World would be making a grave error if they succumbed to illusions about these matters.’[11]
This ruins his previous paragraph’s argument that, quoted out of context, Greenwald now admires so much. By Chomsky’s own logic just a couple of minutes earlier, protesting Soviet imperialism would have had ‘about as much ethical value as denouncing atrocities that took place in the 18th century’. So why did Chomsky protest Soviet imperialism, then, and why did he add this statement to his argument? Presumably because he realized that the argument collapsed when faced with reality. If he couldn’t even bring himself to object in any way to the self-evident totalitarianism of the Soviet Union, he was doing precisely what 2005 Greenwald objected to: overlooking and excusing violations of his professed principles in order to attack the United States instead.
Greenwald understood the weakness of such a position very well in 2005, but he has now adopted it wholeheartedly. On November 4 2014, he tweeted a link to a new article by Chomsky:
‘“It’s official: The U.S. is the world’s leading terrorist state, and proud of it”—new Noam Chomsky http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/27201-the-leading-terrorist-state …‘[12]
There’s nothing ‘official’ in the claim: it’s just Chomsky overstating the finding of a declassified CIA study that covert aid has often been ineffective in order to list a string of now-familiar American abuses. It’s an extension of the same point Greenwald made in his 2013 piece on Sam Harris et al, that the American government ‘has brought more violence, aggression, suffering, misery, and degradation to the world over the last decade than any other’.
In that TruthOut article, Chomsky wrote:
‘Jihadism’s most fearsome current manifestation is the Islamic State, or ISIS, which has established its murderous caliphate in large areas of Iraq and Syria.
“I think the United States is one of the key creators of this organization,” reports former CIA analyst Graham Fuller, a prominent commentator on the region. “The United States did not plan the formation of ISIS,” he adds, “but its destructive interventions in the Middle East and the War in Iraq were the basic causes of the birth of ISIS.”’
Chomsky doesn’t give a source for where Graham Fuller ‘reported’ his view on this, incidentally, but it was in an interview he gave to Al-Monitor in September.[13]
This is the political view Greenwald has brought to his reporting. Like Jacob Appelbaum, he is skilful at using formalistic news reporting idioms to make his political points, so much so that even when he reveals his agenda nobody bats an eyelid. Greenwald has given many interviews, but his more extreme views of the NSA situation have been largely missed. Many people who support Snowden’s actions feel that the NSA’s surveillance reach has spiralled beyond what is needed to protect the US since 9/11 and infringed on civil liberties in the process. But that isn’t Greenwald’s view. He’s convinced that the NSA aren’t carrying out surveillance to protect citizens from threats at all, but that their goal is to spy on civilians to subvert the democratic process. You don’t believe me that he’s that extreme? Here’s what he said in an interview with the New Zealand TV programme The Nation in September 2014:
‘If these agencies were using this technology to spy on Al Qaeda and to spy on terrorists, to spy on ISIS, there would never have been an Edward Snowden in the first place. There would be no public debate. It’s precisely because that is the pretext and not the actual reason that this spying is being used that there is these disclosures and there is a public debate.’[14]
This is an astonishing idea, and if it were true would be deeply troubling—but none of the documents published so far indicate that this is the case at all. In fact, many of them detail the value of intelligence gained. Many thousands of people work for the NSA, the CIA, MI6, GCHQ and other intelligence agencies in the West. Many work for decades for no recognition and put their lives in danger in order to protect their countries from terrorists, hostile governments and other bad actors. The idea that they are simply pretending to do this as a pretext so they can read innocent citizens’ emails is not just absurd, but insulting.
Notes
[1] https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/522446923610202112
[2] http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/07/business/media/anti-surveillance-activist-is-at-center-of-new-leak.html?_r=1&
[3] https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/529768277740756992 He linked to this Reuters article: http://uk.reuters.com/article/2014/11/04/yemen-attack-drones-idUKL6N0SU1YQ20141104
[4] http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/28/opinion/a-conversation-in-lieu-of-a-column.html
[5] Ibid.
[6] http://glenngreenwald.blogspot.com/2005/12/true-character-of-european-left.html
[7] http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/tom-ricks-glenn-greenwald-edward-snowden
[8] For example: https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/224959524069588992
https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/439110549419606016
https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/433625820972580864
https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/401150706779815936
https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/392757657154490368
https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/380841278943920128
https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/376331652143673345
[9] http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/aug/21/human-rights-critics-russia-ecuador
[10] http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/apr/03/sam-harris-muslim-animus
[11] On Power and Ideology by Noam Chomsky, p51 (Black Rose Books, 1990)
[12] https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/529414514249191424
[13] http://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/politics/2014/09/turkey-usa-iraq-syria-isis-fuller.html#
[14] http://www.3news.co.nz/tvshows/thenation/interview-glenn-greenwald-2014091311
5. Skypefail
This is a chapter from News of Devils: The Media and Edward Snowden. The next chapter is linked to at the foot of the page. This can also be read as part of the free ebook Need to Know, which you can download here.
There have been and remain two major areas of danger to national security in this story. The first is reckless or inadvertent exposure of information in the articles and the excerpts of documents published. The second is in Snowden or those with access to the documents practising poor security measures, or simply not knowing what they’re doing to make sure the material doesn’t fall into the wrong hands.
Before travelling to Hong Kong to meet Snowden, Glenn Greenwald asked him to send him some documents so he could have some idea of what he was letting himself in for:
‘To do that, [Snowden] told me again to install various programs. I then spent a couple of days online as the source walked me through, step by step, how to install and use each program, including, finally, PGP encryption. Knowing that I was a beginner, he exhibited great patience, literally on the level of “Click the blue button, now press OK, now go to the next screen.”’[1]
Snowden then sent Greenwald a file containing around 25 documents:
‘I un-zipped the file, saw the list of documents, and randomly clicked on one of them. At the top of the page in red letters, a code appeared: “TOP SECRET//COMINT/NOFORN/.”
This meant the document had been legally designated top secret, pertained to communications intelligence (COMINT), and was not for distribution to foreign nationals, including international organizations or coalition partners (NOFORN). There it was with incontrovertible clarity: a highly confidential communication from the NSA, one of the most secretive agencies in the world’s most powerful government. Nothing of this significance had ever been leaked from the NSA, not in all the six-decade history of the agency. I now had a couple dozen such items in my possession. And the person I had spent hours chatting with over the last two days had many, many more to give me.’[2]
Earlier, Greenwald and Poitras had discussed the possibility the source might send them forged documents, perhaps as part of a trap by the government. But as soon as he received this first batch of documents, Greenwald seems to have forgotten about that possibility and immediately assumed they must be authentic, apparently simply on the basis that the acronyms at the top of the documents were ones used in real life. This was, for him, ‘incontrovertible clarity’. Clearly, they looked real, and in fact were. But they might nevertheless not have been. He doesn’t seem to have reconsidered the possibility they were doctored or well-crafted fakes, despite his knowledge that nothing coming close to their purported significance had ever been leaked before. It’s a basic tenet that the larger a claim the more evidence you need to back it, and forged and fabricated intelligence documents are extremely common in the espionage world. But his scepticism, fact-checking ability and cold eye to the possibilities of unseen issues that all good journalists have as second nature seems to have been entirely lacking here.
On top of this, having spent a couple of days being walked through programs by his source to ensure their communications were secure, Greenwald doesn’t seem to have grasped the reason why Snowden had bothered to do that with him. His dedication to protecting his source was so minimal that as soon as he’d read this first batch of documents he called Janine Gibson, the editor-in-chief of the American edition of The Guardian, via Skype to tell her, as Gibson remembers it, that he thought he might have ‘the biggest intelligence leak in a generation—if not ever’.[3]
That behaviour is astonishing enough, but even more so when you consider that the second document of Snowden’s he’d just looked at was a PowerPoint presentation revealing an NSA program to collect information ‘directly from the servers of these U.S. Service Providers: Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, Paltalk, AOL, Skype, YouTube, Apple’.[4]
Yes, Glenn Greenwald was sent a document saying that the NSA could access Skype’s servers, and the first thing he did was call his editor to discuss his source on Skype.
Gibson hadn’t read the document, of course, but even so was already aware that Skype wasn’t a particularly safe form of technology because of the WikiLeaks story.[5] She told Greenwald to get off Skype at once and catch a plane to New York so they could discuss it in person instead. But that was some way into their Skype chat: by then Greenwald had already told her he had a source with access to ‘a large amount of top secret documents from the NSA’ and that the source was in Hong Kong.
Technical ignorance is one thing, a basic lack of common sense another—even allowing for excitement at the scoop, this was stunning carelessness. Had anyone been listening in—if the NSA were as omniscient as Snowden has claimed[6]—he wouldn’t have been in Hong Kong by the time Greenwald arrived there on June 2, but more likely on his way back to the United States in handcuffs.
Unlike Greenwald, Janine Gibson didn’t instantly believe that the documents were real. The verification process at The Guardian was, she says, ‘really intense’.[7] The first step in that process was for Greenwald and Ewen MacAskill to interview Snowden face to face in Hong Kong. The initial feedback from that meeting worried Gibson, because Snowden appeared too young to be as senior as he had claimed. After three days of grilling Snowden on his career and credentials, MacAskill and Greenwald were convinced by him, but Gibson and others at the paper were very conscious that all their work on the story could be in vain, and it might still be nothing but ‘a massive, massive hoax’. It wasn’t until a Verizon spokesperson called The Guardian back regarding the FISA court order story and journalists at the paper had spoken to the administration that Gibson was finally convinced that the documents were genuine.[8]
Greenwald’s hunch had been right, of course—but his concern about the material’s authenticity seems to have been much less pronounced. In the past year and a half, he has repeatedly claimed that there is no possibility any foreign intelligence agency could have accessed Snowden’s documents, either through Snowden, through any of the journalists he gave the documents to or some other way. But his amateur-hour cock-up with Skype straight after receiving Snowden’s first documents don’t give those statements much credibility.
Neither does his knowledge of espionage.
‘“He was very insistent he does not want to publish documents to harm individuals or blow anyone’s undercover status,” Greenwald said. He added that Snowden told him, “Leaking CIA documents can actually harm people, whereas leaking NSA documents can harm systems.”[9]
Did Snowden really say this and, if so, did Greenwald believe him? The NSA employs intelligence officers, runs agents and assets around the world, and even a codename or hint about an operation might blow someone’s cover and harm living, breathing human beings. Neither does one need to be under cover to be at risk of harm.
Gauging the risks to national security is a hard task and this story is on an unprecedented scale. But one’s confidence that these issues are being considered carefully is seriously undermined if one of the journalists publishing this material doesn’t even understand such fundamental issues. His own source—a human being, not a system—had worked for the CIA and the NSA, and in both cases information about his role, if picked up by bad actors, could have led to him being harmed. It’s hard to believe he is oblivious to the possibility of harm coming to people in the NSA from careless exposure.
Notes
[1] Chapter 1, No Place To Hide by Greenwald.
[2] Ibid.
[3] http://www.journalism.columbia.edu/event/901/14
[4] No Place To Hide by Greenwald.
[5] http://www.journalism.columbia.edu/event/901/14
[6]‘“Perhaps I am naive,” he replied, “but I believe that at this point in history, the greatest danger to our freedom and way of life comes from the reasonable fear of omniscient State powers kept in check by nothing more than policy documents.”’ and ‘“It is not that I do not value intelligence, but that I oppose . . . omniscient, automatic, mass surveillance. . . . ”’: http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/code-name-verax-snowden-in-exchanges-with-post-reporter-made-clear-he-knew-risks/2013/06/09/c9a25b54-d14c-11e2-9f1a-1a7cdee20287_story.html
[7] http://www.journalism.columbia.edu/event/901/14
[8]Ibid.
[9] http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/06/25/greenwald-snowden-s-files-are-out-there-if-anything-happens-to-him.html
6. Conspiracies, Conflicts and Evaluations
This is a chapter from News of Devils: The Media and Edward Snowden. The next chapter is linked to at the foot of the page. This can also be read as part of the free ebook Need to Know, which you can download here.
The journalists reporting this story have two sources to consider: the cache of documents Snowden took, and Snowden himself. They’re entirely separate, but have often been conflated.
Glenn Greenwald has often accused other journalists of being ‘in the tank’ for the intelligence community, which might well be the case, but he and the other journalists reporting the NSA documents all seem to have fallen heavily for Snowden. Despite insisting that Snowden is not the story, his material is, they have made him a key part of it. Snowden wanted to reveal his identity, but the Guardian video interview with him and accompanying story put him centre-stage, and was unequivocal in its support. Snowden has appeared in several interviews since, and even delivered a ‘Christmas message’ on British television in 2013. Poitras has now made a film about him, Citizenfour.
It would have been possible to separate Snowden’s claims from the documents he took, but this hasn’t happened. After the initial shock of discovering he wasn’t a grizzled old-timer, as Greenwald and Poitras had thought he would be from his correspondence and self-descriptions, and having questioned him for hours in his hotel room in Hong Kong, all questions seem to have vanished. As someone with direct intelligence experience, which none of the reporters appear to have, Snowden clearly has the capability of providing some context to the documents—but how valuable and reliable is his information? How sceptical have the journalists been of his claims? How independent has their thinking been, and how much has his narrative led their reporting? There are obvious dangers in relying on his take on the documents, because he has very tangible motives for painting the NSA in the blackest light possible. Both his credibility and his self-image since he fled the United States in 2013 depend on his narrative being wholly true. If the documents don’t show catastrophic levels of wrongdoing, it’s hard to justify his having taken them. He seems highly unlikely, therefore, to be swayed by evidence suggesting that the truth might not be as dark as he makes out.
Several comments Snowden’s made suggest he has delusions of grandeur. ‘Truth is coming, and it cannot be stopped,’ he said in a live chat with Guardian readers in June 2013.[1] He seems convinced he’s on a noble quest to change the world—and perhaps he is, or perhaps he partly is. There’s a pattern in his interviews: he’s softly spoken, calm and very articulate, but he’ll often say a few things that are not just implausible but absurd. Everyone grandstands from time to time, even the most credible of sources, but in his Christmas message on British TV, for example, he said:
‘A child born today will grow up with no conception of privacy at all. They’ll never know what it means to have a private moment to themselves, an unrecorded, unanalyzed thought.’
Really? What about all the unrecorded thoughts I’ve had in the last year, then? Does he genuinely believe this? How has he predicted the development of telepathy?
He’s made several statements like this, and they’ve gone virtually completely unchallenged by the journalists. In August 2013, The Independent recklessly published a story by Duncan Campbell and several others hinting at the location of a British intelligence base in the Middle East, citing information they claimed was from documents from Snowden’s cache.[2] Instead of considering the most likely scenario, that someone from The Guardian with access to the trove had sent some of the documents to Campbell, Snowden came up with a preposterous conspiracy theory to explain it: he accused the British government of leaking the information to The Independent so as to discredit him and the journalists he’d worked with. Greenwald quoted Snowden’s statement to him on this in an article in The Guardian:
‘It appears that the UK government is now seeking to create an appearance that the Guardian and Washington Post’s disclosures are harmful, and they are doing so by intentionally leaking harmful information to The Independent and attributing it to others. The UK government should explain the reasoning behind this decision to disclose information that, were it released by a private citizen, they would argue is a criminal act.’[3]
Note Snowden’s slide between the first sentence and the second. In the first, he says it ‘appears’ the British government have done this: his opinion, his theory, with no substantiation for it at all. In the second sentence, he calls on the British government to ‘explain the reasoning behind this decision’—not to answer if they made the decision, but to explain why they did it. So he assumes as fact that they did, but without any evidence for it. This is very troubling, because Snowden has made a lot of bold statements that are impossible to check without full access to the documents he has—as this is how he reasons here, one has to question if he has done so with previous statements. It is the classic behaviour of a conspiracy theorist: in a single bound, he’s convinced himself of something most people would dismiss as absurd on its face. Anything is possible, of course, but considering Duncan Campbell’s history with the British state this is extremely far-fetched.
Not for Greenwald, though. Equally troubling is that he reported Snowden’s theory totally unquestioningly. He didn’t call The Independent and ask for comment, or contact the British government. He didn’t ask Snowden for any substantiation for his allegation. He didn’t pursue any other avenues at all, but simply took Snowden’s out-there conspiracy theory as fact, seemingly without any critical thought at all, and even added to it:
‘In other words: right as there is a major scandal over the UK’s abusive and lawless exploitation of its Terrorism Act—with public opinion against the use of the Terrorism law to detain David Miranda—and right as the UK government is trying to tell a court that there are serious dangers to the public safety from these documents, there suddenly appears exactly the type of disclosure the UK government wants but that has never happened before. That is why Snowden is making clear: despite the Independent’s attempt to make it appears that it is so, he is not their source for that disclosure. Who, then, is?’[4]
Most likely someone at The Guardian.
~
Greenwald isn’t alone in this sort of behaviour. Snowden has been painted by most of the journalists who have access to his documents as almost wholly selfless and noble—despite several glaring holes in his story. His expertise on espionage matters in general, and on matters relating to this story in particular, has gone virtually unquestioned. His more extravagant claims for the NSA’s capabilities and intentions have been eaten up, even though none of the material released so far support them. The journalists are so close to the source who provided them these documents as to represent a major conflict of interest.
The Guardian’s code of conduct states that it is ‘always necessary to declare an interest when the journalist is writing about something with which he or she has a significant connection’, and that this applies ‘to both staff journalists and freelances’. It also says that ‘full transparency may mean that the declaration should appear in the paper or website as well’.[5]
Greenwald and Poitras currently sit on the board of the same non-profit organisation, the Freedom of the Press Foundation, which was established in 2012. Jacob Appelbaum is on its technical advisory board, as are several Intercept contributors. Snowden came onto the board in February 2014. The Intercept launched on February 10 2014. Under the terms of The Guardian’s sensible code, Greenwald and Poitras sitting on the board of directors of the same non-profit as Snowden should have been mentioned in every article they’ve published since then, but it hasn’t been. The conflict of interest is clear, as is the abandonment of any pretence of trying to approach their source with any scepticism. In the FPP press release on Snowden’s appointment to the board, Greenwald said:
‘We began this organization to protect and support those who are being punished for bringing transparency to the world’s most powerful factions or otherwise dissent from government policy. Edward Snowden is a perfect example of our group’s purpose, as he’s being persecuted for his heroic whistleblowing, and it is very fitting that he can now work alongside us in defense of press freedom, accountability, and the public’s right-to-know.’[6]
~
One significant piece of information that hasn’t been addressed is Snowden’s much vaunted concern for the public interest. In the first interview he gave The Guardian, in which he argued that there was clear blue water between his approach and that of Daniel Ellsberg and Chelsea Manning, he said:
‘“I carefully evaluated every single document I disclosed to ensure that each was legitimately in the public interest,” he said. “There are all sorts of documents that would have made a big impact that I didn’t turn over, because harming people isn’t my goal. Transparency is.”
He purposely chose, he said, to give the documents to journalists whose judgment he trusted about what should be public and what should remain concealed.’[7]
This sounds encouraging, as it appears to contain not one but two safeguards. Snowden claimed he was very careful to ensure that every single document he passed to journalists was legitimately in the public interest, but he didn’t trust his own evaluation on that point completely, because he also deliberately selected journalists whose judgement he trusted to decide precisely that. In principle, this sounds like someone who has given the issue serious attention.
But if we look a little closer at it, questions come to mind. The first is: how does this square with Glenn Greenwald’s statements that Snowden also had ‘thousands of documents that contain very specific blueprints that would allow somebody who read them to know exactly how the NSA does what it does, which would in turn allow them either to evade that surveillance or to replicate it’? It seems those are documents he didn’t hand over to journalists, but why did he take them at all if he was so concerned with exposing wrongdoing in the public interest? Greenwald has suggested they were needed to prove his claims, but he had already taken many thousands of documents. And as a trained intelligence official, he would surely have known that retrieving such a huge cache of US secrets would not only have been an intense goal of the NSA, but also of hostile groups.
Then there’s his claim he ‘carefully evaluated’ every single document he handed to journalists. What could that mean? Greenwald has also commented on this. He’s claimed that although Snowden had access to ‘enormous’ sums of top-secret documents that would be ‘incredibly harmful’ if published, Snowden had taken this into consideration:
‘He went through and turned over only a small portion of those documents to us, all of which he read very carefully. And I know that not only because he told me that, but also because the way we got the documents was in extremely detailed folders all divided by content, that you could have only organized them had you carefully read them. And when he gave them to us, he said, “Look, I’m not a journalist. I’m not a high-level government official. I am not saying that everything I gave you should be published. I don’t want it all to be published. I want you, as journalists, to go through it and decide what is in the public interest and what will not cause a lot of harm.” He invited—in fact, urged—us to exercise exactly the kind of journalistic judgment that we have exercised. And so, had it been his intention to harm the United States, he could have just uploaded all these documents to the Internet or found the most damaging ones and caused them to be published. He did the opposite. The NSA and the rest of the country owe him a huge debt of gratitude for all of the work he has done to inform the American public without bringing about any harm to them.’[8]
It strikes me that Mr Greenwald is protesting a little too much on this point. Regardless, this is simply an impossible claim by Snowden, and obviously so. Firstly, his claim that he wanted these journalists to filter the documents he handed them and decide which were in the public interest is contradicted by The Washington Post’s account of their reporting of the PRISM story. Barton Gellman revealed that in late May 2013 Snowden had decided to apply for asylum in Iceland or somewhere else with strong internet freedoms:
‘To effect his plan, Snowden asked for a guarantee that The Washington Post would publish—within 72 hours—the full text of a PowerPoint presentation describing PRISM, a top-secret surveillance program that gathered intelligence from Microsoft, Facebook, Google and other Silicon Valley giants.’[9]
In the event, both The Washington Post and The Guardian decided to publish only a few of the slides from that presentation, citing national security reasons. This suggests that Snowden was correct to say that his ability to gauge the public interest is not as well-attuned as that of professional journalists—but he tried to impose his judgement with the very first story, contradicting his own statements on this issue.
Secondly, it’s not physically possible. If you skim-read a few paragraphs of a document, you might have evaluated it, but to carefully evaluate it you would have to, at a bare minimum, read the whole thing. Otherwise, you might miss crucial information. But there are far too many documents for this to make sense. In September 2013, the New York Times ran a story on the NSA’s battle against encryption, working from ‘newly disclosed documents’ provided by Snowden, and noted:
‘The documents are among more than 50,000 shared by The Guardian with The New York Times and ProPublica, the nonprofit news organization. They focus on GCHQ but include thousands from or about the N.S.A.’[10]
As Snowden had had no access to classified material between June and September 2013, this figure must refer to the material he claimed he’d carefully evaluated. But if that figure is true, Snowden must be lying about this. The most basic requirement to carefully evaluate a document is to have read the whole thing in its entirety, but Snowden can’t even have done that.
On January 14 2014, Janine Gibson was asked in a panel discussion how many documents Snowden had taken. She replied:
‘There are 56,000 in one cache alone, which was the cache that Edward Snowden gave to Ewen [MacAskill], but there are several other caches.’[11]
She added that she doubted anyone knew the complete number of documents Snowden had taken, either journalists or the NSA. In an interview with the New Zealand TV programme The Nation in September 2014, Greenwald was asked how he knew that the New Zealand spy agency Government Communications Security Bureau engaged in mass surveillance on the country’s citizens. He replied:
‘Because I happen to have access to hundreds of thousands of documents in the possession of the NSA in which they discuss both amongst themselves and with the GCSB and the New Zealand government exactly what it is they’re doing.’[12]
Why does this matter? Well, either the New York Times, the editor-in-chief of The Guardian’s American edition and Glenn Greenwald have all lied about a central aspect of the Snowden story—how many documents they received—which would be a serious journalistic breach and for which there doesn’t seem any plausible motive—or Snowden lied that he had carefully evaluated them all. It’s simply not humanly possible in the time-scale he had—December 2012 to May 2013. Even if one redefines the word ‘document’ to mean a page and take just the one cache given to MacAskill, 56,000 pages would be the equivalent of well over 100 thick books. And that is an extremely generous interpretation, as some of the documents he took ran to many pages: the Black Budget was 178, for instance.[13] Factor in that these are mostly highly technical documents about intelligence work, not all of which Snowden can have been familiar with, and the level of concentration and expertise needed to evaluate them all carefully is well beyond reading, say, 100 Hardy Boys adventures, or even 1,000.
It’s simply not feasible, and any independent-minded journalist should have realised this. There are several reasons he might have had for lying about this point—for instance, to give himself more credibility because he knew that WikiLeaks had been branded reckless—but the real question is: if he lied about something as fundamental as this, what else has he lied about? This is a source prone to exaggeration and prepared to lie about basic facts.
~
The first disclosures from Snowden’s cache appeared in two publications almost simultaneously.[14] Both the Verizon and the PRISM stories were covered by The Washington Post and The Guardian, and triggered outrage and a media frenzy. But the reporting was sloppy and overstated from the start, with both newspapers having to dial back inaccuracies in their initial claims. On the Verizon story, The Washington Post had to add an embarrassing correction to the top of the story, reading:
‘Correction: A previous version of this story incorrectly stated the National Security Agency had been able to receive information including customers’ names, addresses and financial information through a court order. This version has been corrected.’[15]
With the PRISM story, both papers claimed to have a top-secret document showing how the programme allowed officials to tap directly into the central servers of companies such as Facebook, Apple and Skype to extract audio and video chats, photographs, emails and other information to ‘enable analysts to track foreign targets’.
That last bit was overlooked in the ensuing uproar. The idea was not simply to spy on your email or Facebook updates, and no evidence was presented that this was the case. Snowden was yet to reveal his identity, but the way The Washington Post addressed the issue of their source was telling:
‘Firsthand experience with these systems, and horror at their capabilities, is what drove a career intelligence officer to provide PowerPoint slides about PRISM and supporting materials to The Washington Post in order to expose what he believes to be a gross intrusion on privacy. “They quite literally can watch your ideas form as you type,” the officer said.’[16]
One of the bylines on that article is Laura Poitras, who hadn’t worked on the story but had facilitated Barton Gellman receiving the presentation. In his first email to Poitras, Snowden had claimed to be ‘a senior government employee in the intelligence community’.[17] But by the time this story was published, Poitras had filmed Snowden in Hong Kong and watched as Glenn Greenwald and Ewen MacAskill had questioned him closely about his career. She should have known, and told Gellman, that Snowden had exaggerated. He was clearly an accomplished computer analyst, and was able to gain access to major secrets within the NSA, although it’s still not clear precisely how he did that. But one has to be wilfully blind to reality to call him a ‘career intelligence officer’. He was a 29-year-old systems analyst with seven years of experience in intelligence. At the time he wasn’t even an employee, but a consultant with Dell.
Here we have direct evidence of what can happen when journalists report on secret sources. When the article was published, nobody was in any position to challenge the newspaper’s characterisation of their source—how could they, as he hadn’t been revealed? We only had their word to go on. It’s a prestigious newspaper, so most would trust that they would play with a straight bat. But they didn’t. From the get-go, when they thought nobody could find out, they overegged the pudding and gave their readers the impression that their source had much more experience and gravitas than he in fact did. As they were untrustworthy on such a basic issue as this, it erodes trust that they were fair in their reporting of the contents of the document.
And indeed, it soon appeared that they hadn’t been. The central claim in both papers’ articles on PRISM, that the NSA was ‘tapping directly into’ or had ‘direct access’ to these companies servers without needing to obtain individual court orders, turned out to be a misinterpretation, as The New York Times reported:
‘Each of the nine companies said it had no knowledge of a government program providing officials with access to its servers, and drew a bright line between giving the government wholesale access to its servers to collect user data and giving them specific data in response to individual court orders. Each said it did not provide the government with full, indiscriminate access to its servers.’[18]
This error is bad enough, but neither paper posted a clarification on the articles. The Guardian slipped in a revision of the mistake in a later article with much less prominence, and even then managed to make it sound as if their categorically false claim had in fact, somehow, been true:
‘The Guardian understands that the NSA approached those companies and asked them to enable a “dropbox” system whereby legally requested data could be copied from their own server out to an NSA-owned system. That has allowed the companies to deny that there is “direct or indirect” NSA access, to deny that there is a “back door” to their systems, and that they only comply with “legal” requests—while not explaining the scope of that access.’[19]
This is very slyly done, because it makes the difference between direct and indirect sound as if it’s a corporate use of weasel words, when it is in fact their own, and slides past the paper’s claim about bypassing individual court orders with the use of scare-quotes. It also tries to deflect attention from the fact they inaccurately explained the terms of this access by blaming the companies for not having explained it fully. If you had read this paragraph quickly, and you were a Guardian reader not predisposed to liking massive companies like Google and Facebook—well, who does?—it would no doubt have elicited the desired reaction, which is to feel that the companies have pulled a fast one, as usual, rather than that The Guardian cocked up their story.
The Verizon and PRISM stories were the first two scoops, and remain some of the best known disclosures even after 18 months of reporting. Their impact was enormous, but it was nevertheless a shoddy start to the reporting, littered with sensationalism, errors and a misunderstanding of the basic context of the documents, exacerbated by a refusal to admit any of this openly once it had become clear.
Within a day of publication of the first story, Glenn Greenwald was on CNN and explaining to Piers Morgan’s viewers the context as he saw it:
‘There is a massive apparatus within the United States government that with complete secrecy has been building this enormous structure that has only one goal. And that is to destroy privacy and anonymity not just in the United States but around the world.’[20]
Had Greenwald read all of the material to come to such a bald conclusion that would have been fine, but of course he hadn’t. When he said this, it had been just a week since he had received the first Snowden documents.
Notes
[1] http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jun/17/edward-snowden-nsa-files-whistleblower
[2] http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/exclusive-uks-secret-mideast-internet-surveillance-base-is-revealed-in-edward-snowden-leaks-8781082.html The following few paragraphs on this are adapted from a blogpost I wrote in August 2013: http://www.jeremy-duns.com/blog/2014/5/30/what-if-glenn-greenwald-is-wrong-about-a-national-security-threat?rq=greenwald
[3] http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/aug/23/uk-government-independent-military-base
[4] Ibid.
[5] http://www.theguardian.com/info/guardian-editorial-code
[6] https://freedom.press/blog/2014/01/edward-snowden-join-daniel-ellsberg-others-freedom-press-foundations-board-directors
[7] http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jun/09/edward-snowden-nsa-whistleblower-surveillance
[8] http://www.democracynow.org/2013/6/10/on_a_slippery_slope_to_a
[9] http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/code-name-verax-snowden-in-exchanges-with-post-reporter-made-clear-he-knew-risks/2013/06/09/c9a25b54-d14c-11e2-9f1a-1a7cdee20287_story.html
[10] http://nytimes.com/2013/09/06/us/nsa-foils-much-internet-encryption.html
[11] http://www.journalism.columbia.edu/event/901/14 Thank you to Cryptome for pointing me to this information.
[12] http://www.3news.co.nz/tvshows/thenation/interview-glenn-greenwald-2014091311
[13] http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/black-budget-summary-details-us-spy-networks-successes-failures-and-objectives/2013/08/29/7e57bb78-10ab-11e3-8cdd-bcdc09410972_story.html
[14] The following paragraphs on this are adapted and expanded from my June 2013 blogpost: http://www.jeremy-duns.com/blog/2014/5/30/some-thoughts-on-the-reporting-of-prism?rq=greenwald
[15] http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/verizon-providing-all-call-records-to-us-under-court-order/2013/06/05/98656606-ce47-11e2-8845-d970ccb04497_story.html
[16] http://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/us-intelligence-mining-data-from-nine-us-internet-companies-in-broad-secret-program/2013/06/06/3a0c0da8-cebf-11e2-8845-d970ccb04497_story.html
[17] http://www.wired.com/2014/10/snowdens-first-emails-to-poitras/
[18] http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/08/technology/tech-companies-bristling-concede-to-government-surveillance-efforts.html?_r=1&
[19] http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jun/12/microsoft-twitter-rivals-nsa-requests With thanks to Little Green Footballs, who spotted this: http://littlegreenfootballs.com/article/42121_The_Guardian_quietly_walks_back_their_PRISM_overreach_without_correcting_previous_reporting
[20] http://piersmorgan.blogs.cnn.com/2013/06/06/glenn-greenwald-on-the-nsa-and-prism-its-well-past-time-that-we-have-a-debate-about-whether-thats-the-kind-of-country-and-world-in-which-we-want-to-live/?hpt=pm_mid
7. Wrongry Birds
This is a chapter from News of Devils: The Media and Edward Snowden. The next chapter is linked to at the foot of the page. This can also be read as part of the free ebook Need to Know, which you can download here.
A few decades from now, I suspect historians will be excavating Twitter’s servers to analyze the Snowden saga. Although the platform is still routinely dismissed as trivial—usually by those not using it—it has radically transformed how journalists and their readers communicate with each other, and it has been the public square in which a lot of the Snowden debate has taken place.
Almost all of the journalists and editors who have worked on the Snowden story are active on Twitter, and some are very avid users of it. Glenn Greenwald currently has over 400,000 followers, but a tweet from him will usually reach many more people, because lots of his followers will retweet him to their followers, who will then see it even if they don’t follow him, and so might in turn retweet it to their followers.
This has had a considerable impact on the debate around Snowden’s disclosures, because a tweet can and often is read by more people than an article it links to. There has been research suggesting that people often share links on social media to material that they haven’t fully read, listened to or watched. Traffic analysis company Chartbeat has examined this in some detail.[1] In a discussion about Upworthy in February 2014, the CEO of Chartbeat tweeted that the company had ‘found effectively no correlation between social shares and people actually reading’.[2]
That statement of his was retweeted over 100 times, and most people who did that would surely have read it. It’s simply a lot easier to read a few tweets than slog through a whole article, or even a book, and we’ve become used to it.
In effect, tweets often act like banners or headlines, and frequently give the Twitter user’s spin on an article. This can be very influential, especially if you then don’t read the story in full. Most of the Snowden documents that have been covered by the media have very complicated contexts: a bite-sized explanation of what a long article exploring an even longer document can be an attractive proposition, but also often results in a black and white impression. This is convenient for any journalists who are fudging a story or making it seem more important than it is. A lot of people will click on a new Snowden story, glance at the headline and the first few paragraphs and stop. If already shocked by previous revelations, there’s a good chance they’ll be shocked anew by the ‘take-home’ of the latest one. But if they read the whole story, a more nuanced picture would emerge.
A vivid example of this effect in practice is the story published by The Guardian, The New York Times and ProPublica in January 2014, working with each other. The Guardian’s headline was ‘Angry Birds and “leaky” phone apps targeted by NSA and GCHQ for user data’. The first three paragraphs read:
‘The National Security Agency and its UK counterpart GCHQ have been developing capabilities to take advantage of “leaky” smartphone apps, such as the wildly popular Angry Birds game, that transmit users’ private information across the internet, according to top secret documents.
The data pouring onto communication networks from the new generation of iPhone and Android apps ranges from phone model and screen size to personal details such as age, gender and location. Some apps, the documents state, can share users' most sensitive information such as sexual orientation—and one app recorded in the material even sends specific sexual preferences such as whether or not the user may be a swinger.
Many smartphone owners will be unaware of the full extent this information is being shared across the internet, and even the most sophisticated would be unlikely to realise that all of it is available for the spy agencies to collect.’[3]
Most people who read this far and who had ever played Angry Birds or anything like it were shocked and outraged. The impression they drew was that the NSA was spying on their apps and games, and extracting information about their lives from them. But if you read the whole piece, paragraph 17 states:
‘The documents do not make it clear how much of the information that can be taken from apps is routinely collected, stored or searched, nor how many users may be affected. The NSA says it does not target Americans and its capabilities are deployed only against “valid foreign intelligence targets”.’[4]
So there’s no evidence of wrongdoing, then—and the public interest defence in the story collapses as a result. If GCHQ and the NSA tried to do this on valid foreign intelligence targets, it’s a fair guess those targets weren’t aware that their apps could be accessed in such a way, making valuable intelligence vulnerable to being captured. But thanks to these articles, they might well have been alerted to the possibility. Western intelligence agencies might have lost several targets as a result of this—targets whose communications they wanted to infiltrate because they might provide valuable intelligence that would help protect national security.
The takeaway most people got from this story would have been ‘the NSA is currently exploiting Angry Birds’, and in some cases ‘the NSA might be gathering intelligence on me while I play Angry Birds’. This is a result of misrepresentations in the reporting. For instance, ProPublica’s headline was ‘Spy Agencies Probe Angry Birds and Other Apps for Personal Data’.[5] ‘Probe’ is in the present tense and the headline suggests the agencies are extracting personal data from it. But paragraph 19 of The Guardian’s article revealed that there wasn’t any evidence that Angry Birds had been exploited in this way—instead, a GCHQ document in 2012 had listed the code needed to do this, using the game as a case study to show what could be extracted from it. And to find the year of that GCHQ document I had to triangulate the reporting, as it’s mentioned by ProPublica and The New York Times, but not The Guardian. With all of these stories, there’s a bait and switch: an alarming claim at the top of the stories that, as you read further, you realise isn’t supported by the evidence. The New York Times story opened:
‘When a smartphone user opens Angry Birds, the popular game application, and starts slinging birds at chortling green pigs, spies could be lurking in the background to snatch data revealing the player’s location, age, sex and other personal information, according to secret British intelligence documents.’[6]
Well, yes, they could be. But there is no evidence they are. It’s not until paragraph 6 that the story comes clean and admits this:
‘The scale and the specifics of the data haul are not clear. The documents show that the N.S.A. and the British agency routinely obtain information from certain apps, particularly those introduced earliest to cellphones. With some newer apps, including Angry Birds, the agencies have a similar ability, the documents show, but they do not make explicit whether the spies have put that into practice.’[7]
And yet the reporting in all three publications leaned towards suggesting to their readers that this very thing was put into practice, and was current. ProPublica’s headline was flat-out misleading, but The New York Times and The Guardian did at least make some effort to add caveats early on. Attentive readers will have noted that hypothetical ‘could’ undermining the significance of the story in The New York Times’ opening paragraph, for instance. It’s true that spies could be lurking as you play Angry Birds, but they could be doing anything. These articles would have been in the public interest if they had presented any evidence that GCHQ and/or the NSA were indiscriminately accessing and actively using information of people who they had insufficient reasons to suspect were a threat to national security—but none of the three articles did that. Indeed, of nearly 300 articles published to date from Snowden’s material, almost none of them present evidence of that.[8]
The Guardian, meanwhile, used a photograph of Angry Birds in their piece but noted in the caption that this was as part of a case study. But newspapers know that people generally won’t read as carefully as this, and that they will give the wrong impression. They are trying to give the wrong impression, in fact, because they want the headline and early paragraphs to generate outrage among readers, so they read it and share it. That’s more likely to happen if they imply that a hypothetical proposal from 2012 is a current operation, and that it might be aimed at their own readers. That Guardian caption, for instance, read ‘GCHQ documents use Angry Birds—reportedly downloaded more than 1.7bn times—as a case study for app data collection’. Most won’t have read that caption, but simply seen the accompanying image and presumed that Angry Birds was being exploited. But even if you did read the caption, you would probably have assumed by its use of the present tense that the GCHQ documents in question were current rather than from two years earlier. One could argue that the caption was technically correct, as the documents exist in the present, but it’s misleading nevertheless, and deliberately so. Because ‘Internal GCHQ documents from 2012 discussed the hypothetical use of Angry Birds to collect intelligence against suspected targets’ isn’t as exciting a story. In fact, it’s not a story at all, as there’s no public interest to it—there’s no evidence of wrongdoing here, just the exposing of classified information about an idea our intelligence agencies had. It was an interesting story, certainly. But it wasn’t in the public interest.
This clickbait sensationalist approach is the pattern of a lot of media today, of course, but it’s disheartening to see it applied to our national security secrets, especially by newspapers as respected as The Guardian and The New York Times. And once it had appeared there, the Chinese whispers began and the story became even more baldly stated and lurid. In a White House press conference, Victoria Jones of Talk Radio News Service said: ‘The NSA is lurking in the background of your game of Angry Birds, waiting to scoop up all your personal data as you lob hapless creatures into the air. It feels like this is the last bastion of American freedom that’s been breached.’[9] ABC News ran a story headlined ‘A Little (Angry) Bird Told the NSA What You’re Up To’.[10]
That headline epitomises one of the biggest problems with the media’s approach to the Snowden leaks: it distorts the truth to drive traffic, misrepresenting an unrealized idea from 2012 to legitimately target suspected bad actors as a current operation directed at invading the privacy of you, the reader. This sort of story—and there have been hundreds of them in the coverage of Snowden’s documents—has created a new kind of scaremongering. Where national security state hawks once sold the public the message ‘BE AFRAID—THE TERRORISTS ARE PLANNING TO ATTACK US!’, the Snowden story has repeatedly sold the public a new but equally terrifying narrative: ‘BE AFRAID—YOUR GOVERNMENT IS SPYING ON YOU!’ As the public only knows what the Snowden documents contain through the distorted lens of this kind of coverage in the media, it’s little wonder that the debate over surveillance reform has largely been framed as being about the needless invasion of citizens’ privacy.
Notes
[1] http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2013/06/how_people_read_online_why_you_won_t_finish_this_article.html
[2] http://www.theverge.com/2014/2/14/5411934/youre-not-going-to-read-this
[3] http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jan/27/nsa-gchq-smartphone-app-angry-birds-personal-data
[4] Ibid.
[5] http://www.propublica.org/article/spy-agencies-probe-angry-birds-and-other-apps-for-personal-data
[6] http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/28/world/spy-agencies-scour-phone-apps-for-personal-data.html?_r=0
[7] Ibid.
[8] I can think of two exceptions. One is the ‘LOVEINT’ story: http://blogs.wsj.com/washwire/2013/08/23/nsa-officers-sometimes-spy-on-love-interests The number of cases where that was done deliberately seems very small, however. The other is the Washington Post story on ‘incidental collection’: http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/in-nsa-intercepted-data-those-not-targeted-far-outnumber-the-foreigners-who-are/2014/07/05/8139adf8-045a-11e4-8572-4b1b969b6322_story.html This is more alarming, and raises questions of where one draws the line in surveillance – the comparison with the FBI’s requirement to stop listening to a wiretapped call in a criminal investigation if a suspect’s partner or child is using the phone is an apt one, and would be worth emulating, I think. But it isn’t an easy problem to solve, as that example illustrates: it’s rather hard to conduct surveillance on a suspect and not also see what is going on around them. It’s also worth noting the many caveats in that Washington Post story as to how much valuable intelligence was being collected – this rather goes against Glenn Greenwald’s idea that the entire NSA is using surveillance of communications as a pretext to spy on innocent civilians.
[9] http://www.politico.com/story/2014/01/angry-birds-nsa-surveillance-question-jay-carney-102671.html#ixzz3Hr151xgJ
[10] http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/angry-bird-told-nsa-youre/story?id=22251583
8. Chinese Whispers
This is a chapter from News of Devils: The Media and Edward Snowden. The next chapter is linked to at the foot of the page. This can also be read as part of the free ebook Need to Know, which you can download here.
‘Edward Snowden: US Government Has Been Hacking Hong Kong and China for Years’ by Lana Lam, South China Morning Post, June 13 2013[1]
‘Internet exchange at Chinese University seen as target for hackers’ by Joshua But, Joyce Ng and Ernest Kao, South China Morning Post, June 13 2013 (updated August 29 2013)
‘Edward Snowden: Classified US data shows Hong Kong hacking targets’ by Lana Lam, South China Morning Post, June 14 2013 (updated June 15)
In June 2013, Snowden bypassed the other reporters to show documents from his cache to the South China Morning Post. The resulting series of articles, the above three of which discussed his material in detail, are usually skipped over by those who claim Snowden can’t have done any harm to US national security, perhaps because it’s very difficult to see how they didn’t.
The claimed public interest was the exposure of NSA activity in Hong Kong and China:
‘The detailed records—which cannot be independently verified—show specific dates and the IP addresses of computers in Hong Kong and on the mainland hacked by the National Security Agency over a four-year period.
They also include information indicating whether an attack on a computer was ongoing or had been completed, along with an amount of additional operational information.
The small sample data suggests secret and illegal NSA attacks on Hong Kong computers had a success rate of more than 75 per cent, according to the documents. The information only pertains to attacks on civilian computers with no reference to Chinese military operations, Snowden said.’
There’s no public interest here. There might have been for citizens of Hong Kong, but that is (at the time of writing) under Chinese jurisdiction. And China is no ally of the United States—quite the opposite. The US spies on China for very good reasons, and none of these stories presented a shred of evidence that the NSA was engaged in anything other than legitimate espionage activity.
That Snowden thought revealing any of these activities was even remotely in the public interest is mind-boggling, and should have raised serious alarm-bells about his judgment in the minds of Gellman, Poitras, Greenwald and the others working on the story. The closest we have to that happening is the following from a Daily Beast interview with Greenwald the same month:
‘Greenwald said he would not have published some of the stories that ran in the South China Morning Post. “Whether I would have disclosed the specific IP addresses in China and Hong Kong the NSA is hacking, I don’t think I would have,” Greenwald said. “What motivated that leak though was a need to ingratiate himself to the people of Hong Kong and China.”
However, Greenwald said that in his dealings with Snowden the 30-year-old systems administrator was adamant that he and his newspaper go through the document and only publish what served the public’s right to know. “Snowden himself was vehement from the start that we do engage in that journalistic process and we not gratuitously publish things,” Greenwald said. “I do know he was vehement about that. He was not trying to harm the U.S. government; he was trying to shine light on it.”[2]
These two paragraphs are a good example of the slapdash way other media outlets have examined the methods both of Snowden and the journalists with access to the documents. The first paragraph directly addresses the hole in the claims by Greenwald and others that no damage could have been caused. Instead of pressing Greenwald on this, the reporter segues into a claim by him that other stories haven’t caused damage. Greenwald might well have found Snowden to be adamant that gratuitous information not be published in his dealings with him, but that doesn’t justify these particular stories—Greenwald’s reason for feeling he wouldn’t have published this information is the unanswered question.
Snowden also might well have felt ‘a need to ingratiate himself to the people of Hong Kong and China’—but at what cost to US national security? This is the interview in which Greenwald stated that The Guardian ‘won’t publish things that might ruin ongoing operations from the U.S. government that very few people would object to the United States doing’—but this is precisely what Snowden had just done.
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These stories only become more troubling when you look at them in detail. Snowden not only gave the South China Morning Post information about the NSA’s operations against Hong Kong and ‘the mainland’, ie China itself—self-evidently damaging US national security in the process—but he showed reporter Lana Lam documents in an online interview he had with her and gave specific intelligence about NSA targets’ IP addresses and dates of activity. Again, there is no public interest here. Snowden’s attempt to justify handing this information over is a mix of contradictions, unsupported statements and an apparent total misunderstanding of what constitutes illegitimate espionage activity on the part of the United States:
‘“I don’t know what specific information they were looking for on these machines, only that using technical exploits to gain unauthorised access to civilian machines is a violation of law. It’s ethically dubious,” Snowden said in the interview on Wednesday.
Snowden, who came to Hong Kong on May 20 and has been in hiding since, said the data points to the frequency and nature of how NSA operatives were able to successfully hack into servers and computers, with specific reference to machines in Hong Kong and on the mainland… One of the targets Snowden revealed was Chinese University, home to the Hong Kong Internet Exchange which is a central hub of servers through which all web traffic in the city passes.
A university spokeswoman said yesterday that staff had not detected any attacks to its “backbone network”… “The primary issue of public importance to Hong Kong and mainland China should be that the NSA is illegally seizing the communications of tens of millions of individuals without any individualised suspicion of wrongdoing,” Snowden said. “They simply steal everything so they can search for any topics of interest.”
There are several problems with these stories, mainly as a result of the unknown quantity of the newspaper and its journalists. As well as exposing plenty of legitimate intelligence activity in specific terms, the elephant in the room is whether Chinese intelligence had access to any of the raw intelligence mentioned in these articles. It’s impossible to say with certainty, but considering the situation it would be surprising if they hadn’t at least tried to access it. In a follow-up piece explaining how she had come to interview Snowden this year, Lana Lam revealed the extent of Snowden’s consideration of this possibility—blind trust in a stranger:
‘At points throughout the interview, Snowden was clear that certain information he gave me—often in order to better explain what at times were complex technical issues—could not be published and that he trusted me not to reveal it.
That wish for confidentiality was complied with at the time and is an ongoing commitment of mine and this newspaper.’[3]
Well, if you say so—phew!
Snowden was taking a risk trusting anyone with this information, but he at least had a very good idea who Poitras and Greenwald were and had built a relationship with Poitras over months of correspondence before handing her any documents. It’s hard to see what good reasons he could have for entrusting US intelligence secrets with a newspaper in Hong Kong. Lam has denied having any intelligence links, but by the time she interviewed Snowden on June 12, Chinese intelligence would have been acutely aware Snowden had access to a trove of American secrets. They would have used every trick in the book to access whatever Lam and the paper learned. If they hadn’t, they wouldn’t have been doing their jobs.
These articles not only ask readers to pretend they are straight pieces of reporting shorn from any political context, but also to take Snowden’s wild claims at face value, without even a pretence at an attempt to determine if they’re true.
But it’s really Snowden who comes off worst here. His claim that it’s unethical for the NSA to gain ‘unauthorised access’ to ‘civilian machines’ in a university carries the implication that only military computers would be legitimate targets in China. This suggests either a complete ignorance of the intelligence world or someone looking for a justification for an unjustifiable leak. Snowden had been in the CIA, where officers often use civilian cover, so it’s even less convincing. Universities are often focal points for intelligence activity—academics make good cover roles—and university computer networks often contain classified data on technical subjects relevant to national security.
In that article, Snowden then goes on to say he doesn’t even know what information the NSA is looking for. How does he know this isn’t legitimate activity against foreign targets, then? Let’s say the NSA knew an important ring of Chinese intelligence assets was operating out of Chinese University in Hong Kong. Let’s say the content of their emails contains intelligence that is highly significant to the security of US personnel in the region. If this, or anything like it, were the case, why on earth would we want the NSA not to access it?
The same story presents no evidence for Snowden’s assertion that communications belonging to tens of millions of people are being intercepted in China without any cause for suspicion—we are again simply asked to take his word for it.
Thankfully, the paper didn’t publish any content of the documents Snowden handed over, which would have meant others would have been able to glean intelligence from it as well—but this also means the precise extent of what he passed the newspaper couldn’t be determined by the NSA. The paper mentions Snowden was in the CIA—might he have told the reporter intelligence about that agency? How many documents about cyber-espionage in China did he hand over, and were they simply relating to Chinese University or was the newspaper—perhaps instructed by the MSS—omitting other targets to see if they could turn the information on the Americans? In such an uncertain environment, the NSA might have decided to cease several activities and operations instead of risk further exposure, even if they were providing valuable and entirely legitimate intelligence.
As for ‘unauthorised access’, what does he think espionage is about? If our spies obeyed all the laws in hostile territory, they’d never have any success at all. ‘Dear Chinese University, can we please see the emails of the following operatives working under academic cover? We’ve attached the relevant forms. Thanks, guys!’ It’s mind-blowingly naïve, to the extent that it suggests Snowden doesn’t even understand the basic principles of espionage. By this logic, there is virtually no such thing as legitimate intelligence-gathering. If the NSA shouldn’t spy on China, who should it spy on?
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A further story relating to China was published in Der Spiegel in March 2014, revealing that in 2009 the NSA had launched ‘a major intelligence offensive against China, with targets including the Chinese government and networking company Huawei’.[4] The supposed public interest in this story was that poor little Huawei was being spied on, but this is not just naïve in the extreme but flatly contradicted by the very documents the piece relies on. In one of the documents, the NSA puts forward its reasons for this being a valid operation: many surveillance targets use Huawei products, so knowing how to exploit them would be a valuable intelligence boon from that standpoint; and Huawei’s widespread infrastructure would provide China with SIGINT capabilities.
This is hardly controversial: Huawei is known to do just that.[5] Some have pointed to an apparent hypocrisy in the US conducting cyber-espionage against China when they have complained of China doing the same to them, but this is to miss the point. Most intelligence agencies have cyber-espionage operations against hostile actors, and China is a hostile actor to the West and vice versa.
The story also suggested that the NSA might be targeting Huawei to boost American industry—but presented no evidence for it and quoted a denial from the NSA. It’s perhaps unlikely that the Chinese could learn much from the entirely unsurprising fact that the NSA were spying on them in 2009, as they almost certainly are still doing so today, but several specific points in this story, such as the fact that the NSA managed to access Huawei’s source code and that it had read a large amount of email traffic from its Shenzhen office starting from January 2009, must at best have been of interest but no real significance to Chinese intelligence, but at worst of some use, in which case the story damaged US national security. It’s hard to see how that risk was deemed worth taking by the unnamed writers of the article when there was no public interest for Germany or the West in the revelations.
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This story also featured a common thread in much of the Snowden reporting: no evidence of wrongdoing and a denial from the NSA that wrongdoing had been done. Because the language of official denials tends to sound stilted, the unsupported insinuations lodge in readers’ minds despite the basic requirement for a public interest defence—evidence of wrongdoing—not being met. A denial from the NSA has almost become a substitute for such evidence.
It seems scant comfort that, so far at least, Snowden’s entire trove hasn’t simply been uploaded for all the world to read. But I hope I’ve shown that, even without that happening, the media has hardly covered itself in glory so far.
Where will the Snowden saga go next? It might, finally, fizzle away as responsible journalists conclude there are no further wrongdoings of note to expose in the documents, and that one can’t honestly argue that the United States or Britain are on the brink of becoming totalitarian regimes because their intelligence agencies try to access the communications of targets in Russia or China, or of Islamist supremacists intent on global expansion, and that such revelations are likely to cause more harm than good. On the other hand, the story could spring back into life again, and more damage could be done.
Some of the journalists who have reported on this story have criticized what they see as a hidebound establishment culture in which journalists instinctively believe intelligence officials when they tell them information needs to be withheld to protect national security. There’s no doubt some truth to that. But the Snowden story has also solidified the emergence of a new culture that has more in common with WikiLeaks and Anonymous, and that is a trend of believing nothing intelligence officials or anyone in a position of authority says. The Greenwald position: assume they’re lying, then look for evidence to prove they are.
It’s the edgier option, of course, to believe that all government officials are corrupt liars and that our democracies are akin to totalitarian regimes. But if journalists take that approach too far, they might be surprised to wake up one day and find that corrupt liars in real totalitarian regimes have taken advantage of their blinkered rebellion against the status quo, and that the imagined devils they heralded emerge from the darkness in shapes they hadn’t anticipated.