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.