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.
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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.