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.