The Snowden Operation Read online

  The priorities of the Snowden camp are rather different. Nothing so far in their revelations has cast non-Western, authoritarian regimes in a bad light. Was Snowden really unable to find anything in the NSA's files that reveals abuses in such countries—perhaps collected by the agency but ignored by politicians for cynical reasons of Realpolitik? It would be easy to imagine some intercepts on how the Communist slave-masters of Beijing regard with glee the repeated kow-tows of Western governments on the issue of Tibet. The NSA doubtless has some insights into what the Kremlin thinks of the British government's trade-focused and amnesiac policy towards Russia. A true whistleblower might be expected to seek out such material. It would highlight Western cynicism and cowardice on human rights issues, and make the Snowden camp's case far more effectively than spurious scandals about Swedish security.

  This inconsistency, I believe, is the result not just of a blinkered world outlook but of something more troubling.

  Chapter Two: Selective Outrage

  The intelligence agencies' capabilities are astonishing. They have the ability to plant malware on their targets' computers: either remotely, or by intercepting them before they are delivered to the customer. They can approach targets when they are playing computer games, monitor their web browsing habits, turn on webcams and microphones remotely and invisibly, use a mobile phone to bug a room, or a computer, and far more besides. They can read text messages and listen to phone calls. They have extraordinary access to the fibre-optic cables which carry data between countries and continents. The NSA and allies scamper through the plumbing of the internet like mice through the nooks and crannies of an old house. Huge slices of electronic traffic can be warehoused for days or even weeks. Powerful computers and ingenious algorithms can search for patterns and connections in a way that only recently would have seemed unimaginable.37

  The outline of these efforts was already known before the Snowden leaks, even if the code-names and techniques were not. The best-known programme, PRISM, stems from the Bush-administration Protect America Act. It collects data from companies under Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) Amendments Act 2008. The physical and digital monitoring of individuals is supervised both by congressional committees and by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (also known as the FISA court).38 The NSA must seek a warrant from this court if it believes that there is a greater than 50% chance of an American 'person'—ie citizen or resident—having their privacy breached.

  The greater the secrecy of these programmes and capabilities, the better chance they have of tackling terrorists, criminals, enemy spies or other targets. From a taxpayer's and citizen's point of view, they represent good value for money (or at least they did until exposed and rendered useless by Snowden and his friends). The agencies can deal with complex plots hatched by well-organised outfits, and, in terrorism, with lone-wolf threats from obscure individuals who may have only the most tangential connections to known plotters. If the American administration decides that it urgently needs more information about adversaries with connections in Panama, or Papua New Guinea, or Paraguay, or Peru, or Poland, the NSA should not start from scratch. It should have capabilities which it can use immediately.

  Unless you believe that the United States, Britain and other countries are inherently evil, it is hard to argue that their intelligence agencies should not develop the maximum capabilities available to them—especially as adversary countries are doing exactly the same. Whether they use those capabilities is a matter for political decision-makers and subject to judicial and legislative oversight.

  Revelations about the size and scope of collection programmes may seem shocking. But they should not really be surprising. Elected governments of all political stripes in all big Western countries have given these agencies many billions of dollars or euros or pounds of their taxpayers' money. The rough size of their budgets is as well known as their huge buildings. Anyone with more than a passing interest in intelligence or security knows that the capabilities are vast too. If they were not, it would be a scandalous waste of public money.

  The vulnerability of the NSA's actions was not that they were illegal, but that they were secret. Experts and specialists had a rough idea of what was going on. The general public (and even some lawmakers and officials) did not. As David Cole, a law professor, wrote in a recent New York Review of Books article,

  … the meta-data programme was blessed by all three branches. The Bush administration instituted it and Obama maintained it. Fifteen federal judges on the FISA court declared it lawful. And Congress reauthorised the Patriot Act provision upon which the programme was based.39

  Imagine the following questions being posed in early June 2013: 'Does the NSA have the ability to read an e-mail if it really wants to? Does it have means to get round commercially available encryption? Does it cooperate with other intelligence agencies? Does it have the means to tap into international fibre-optic cables? Does it store electronic information in order to search it later if necessary? Were these capabilities envisaged at the time the relevant laws were drafted?' To all these questions the honest answer would have been 'yes'.40

  What Snowden has done is give a level of detail confirming these suppositions, coupled with, from his allies, a level of spin that verges on the hysterical, and doses of accidental or deliberate misinterpretation (as in the case of allegations that millions of telephone calls in Norway had been intercepted by the NSA).41

  A more sensible question concerns not the capabilities but how they are exercised. Is it really worth spying on Angela Merkel's phone? Is the risk of the collection proportionate to the gain? These are hard questions for spy chiefs and their political masters. (The administration has now indicated that it will stop snooping on friendly foreign leaders' communications.) But to portray the NSA and its partner services, as Greenwald does, as akin to East Germany's Stasi, or to the KGB, and claiming that they have the 'literal' goal to 'eliminate privacy globally'42 is an extraordinary claim, which requires extraordinary evidence. So far, nothing of the kind has been forthcoming.

  As Snowden's 'Christmas message' broadcast on Britain's Channel Four television stated:

  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, unanalysed thought. And that's a problem because privacy matters, privacy is what allows us to determine who we are and who we want to be.43

  But this is a huge exaggeration. What the Snowden documents do appear to show is that the NSA and allied agencies have, unsurprisingly, colossal abilities when it comes to collecting and storing meta-data. They are also able to crack or sidestep a lot of commercially available cryptography. Moreover, if they have you in their sights, they have in principle the ability (though not necessarily the time, or the authority) to find out anything about you that you store or communicate online. Those are impressive capabilities. But they do not mean that they can target everyone (nor, their defenders would argue, do they want to). Being able to see who has communicated with whom is not useful in itself. It is a good way of finding suspects to target. Such targeting may in turn need political approval or a court order. And it is does not mean that everyone is targeted. As the American blogger Bob Cesca argued:

  Activists like Snowden want you to believe that NSA is directly, and without court approval, spying on you personally, because hyperbole like this feeds an agenda that involves scaring anyone susceptible to anti-government paranoia. But this quote from Snowden goes beyond anything we've read about so far, saying point blank that the government is watching everything we do.

  However, if this is true, Glenn Greenwald or another Snowden flack needs to reveal any and all evidence that NSA has installed cameras and listening devices in our homes and is actively observing and recording our daily activities without warrants. Again, 'watching everything we do' is a major revelation, but if evidence doesn't exist, Snowden needs to issue a clarification.44r />
  The Snowdenistas' exaggeration stems from a conflation of self-criticism with self-hatred. In their eyes, democracy, the rule of law and constitutional government have been so eroded that the West carries no moral weight at all. The authorities are capable of anything, so it is sensible to assume that they do what they are capable of. Why would they stop? Greenwald dismisses judicial and congressional oversight of the NSA as a stooges' pantomime. The Obama review commission was designed to 'prettify' the 'surveillance state' but not to reform it.45 If you think that America, Britain and their allies are hypocritical, sleazy oppressors, then it becomes much easier to justify overstating your case and maximising the damage you do.

  Recklessness is one explanation. Sabotage would be another. The pattern of disclosures so far does not support the idea that the Snowden camp is chiefly worried about the moral standing of America or the civil liberties of Americans, either now or as they might be threatened by a putative authoritarian government. Even leaving aside the leaks that seem deliberately designed to damage American diplomacy, others include disclosures of capabilities and programmes that clearly affect national security. One such leak was of secret parts of the intelligence budget, showing how much is spent where. The same leak in the Washington Post included secret self-assessments in 50 aspects of counter-terrorism. It noted: 'blank spots include questions about the security of Pakistan's nuclear components when they are being transported, the capabilities of China's next-generation fighter aircraft, and how Russia's government leaders are likely to respond to "potentially destabilizing events in Moscow, such as large protests and terrorist attacks".' As Paul Rosenzweig dryly pointed out on the excellent Lawfare blog, 'The Pakistani, Chinese, and Russian intelligence agencies surely appreciate the status report.'46

  Another category of leak revealed American offensive cyber-warfare capabilities.47 To be sure, digital weapons are controversial. But other countries have them too. Campaigning for unilateral digital disarmament is a respectable if idealistic approach. But there is no sign that the American people support it. And the issue is a long way from the purported abuse of privacy that Snowden wanted to expose. So too is the revelation that America launched 231 cyber attacks against 'top-priority targets'.

  Some of the leaks include exactly the sort of thing that intelligence agencies are paid to do. Why is it scandalous or improper that Britain's GCHQ spied on foreign diplomats at a summit in London?48 If the NSA is able to intercept the communications of a top Russian politician, surely it deserves praise (in private), not censure and exposure (in public). Providing the full list of Snowden's damaging disclosures would be tedious. But even the highlights are shocking. They include: how the NSA intercepts e-mails, phone calls, and radio transmissions of Taliban fighters in Pakistan, and that it is keeping a closer eye on the security of that country's nuclear weapons; an operation to gauge the loyalties of CIA recruits in Pakistan; e-mail intercepts regarding Iran; and global tracking of cell-phone calls to (as the Washington Post naively put it) 'look for unknown associates of known intelligence targets by tracking people whose movements intersect'. To the South China Morning Post Snowden revealed details of how the NSA hacks into computers and mobile phones in China and Hong Kong.49

  The obvious result of this is to damage America and its allies. Most of the criticism of the Snowdenistas has so far focused on this point. But much less attention has gone to a deeper question: in whose interest would this damage be? One candidate leaps to mind. A long-term intelligence adversary with a stellar record of penetrating and disrupting American agencies, it has a record of highly effective 'active measures' (in the parlance of its intelligence service) to sow dissension between America and its European allies. This country regards the Atlantic alliance as out-dated and ripe for demolition. It knows that NATO's credibility is waning, that the Pentagon is cash-strapped and that many European countries have lost interest in defence. It knows that in theory, the West is more than a match for it—economically, diplomatically and militarily. But in practice, division in the West levels the playing field.

  That country is Russia. The uncannily good fit between the damage done by Snowden, and the Kremlin's geopolitical and intelligence interests, is in my view more than a coincidence. As Russia grapples with its own problems, the need to rely on covert measures grows (these problems include: failure to modernise, its undiversified economy's dependence on oil and gas revenues, crumbling infrastructure and a shrinking demographic base). Russia's symbolic counterweights to the European Union and NATO, respectively the Eurasian Economic Union and the Collective Security Treaty Organisation, aim to restore Kremlin influence in the former Soviet empire. That plan is succeeding. The main obstacle to its success would be determined Western resistance, which Snowden's leaks make less likely.

  Russia also wants to block attempts to reboot the Atlantic alliance on the basis of economic security, through the planned Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP). Stoking anti-American fury in countries such as Germany harms that deal's prospects. The Kremlin also is determined, along with China, to wrest control of the internet from the American-based committees which run it now. It wants the internet to be under governmental control, with an entrenched right for national authorities to promote 'information security'—a concept which sounds anodyne or even reassuring to Western ears, but in practice would allow authoritarian governments to censor and control their subjects' diet of information. In both Russia and China misuse of social media, for example, is perceived as a significant national security issue requiring extensive active and passive efforts by the authorities.50 Assumptions about who should control the internet are shifting as it moves away from its Anglosphere roots.51 The perception fostered by the Snowden revelations, that America is abusing internet freedom and undermining commercial cryptographic security, allows authoritarian countries to lay criticisms against the West which would have seemed laughable only a few months earlier.52

  These are big and important tussles. They will determine the shape of the world in coming decades. The overwhelming interest of the public in democratic, law-governed countries is that we come out on top. If we want to stay rich, safe and free, we need to win multiple battles with those who want us to be poor, vulnerable and constrained. Snowden has weakened our chances, and helped our enemies.

  A further level of damage is to America's commercial interests. Big US technology companies and service providers have to varying degrees collaborated with the NSA, either voluntarily or in response to judicial warrants. Sometimes these warrants were so secret that the companies were unable to tell their customers or shareholders even in outline what they had been forced to do. Any attempt to contest the rulings had to be in secret too. They were unable to respond truthfully to requests for comment from the media or elsewhere. So long as nothing leaked, this was perhaps a defensible tactic from the NSA's point of view. If you have developed a secret and effective means of collecting electronic information, it is important that the target does not find out. Terrorists, criminals and enemy spies read English and use the internet. They will pick up clues about hardware and software which may have been compromised, and use alternatives.

  Yet in retrospect, this approach taken by the NSA looks reckless. It depended on these arrangements staying completely secret. In June 2013, the Washington Post said that Microsoft, Google, Facebook, Apple, YouTube, Skype, AOL and Yahoo cooperated with the NSA's PRISM programme. The companies said that they provided data only when legally obliged to do so.53

  It is worth noting that the initial coverage of PRISM was accompanied by some serious inaccuracies and misrepresentations.54 It does not give the NSA the claimed 'direct access' to these companies' servers. It is a way of transferring data collected under a court order. The Washington Post also backed away from its initial claim that the companies concerned 'participate knowingly'.

  Nonetheless, the business models and brands of these companies are dented. They are furious with the administration, bot
h for what they were made to do, and because it has been made public. Microsoft, for example, has issued a statement decrying the interception of customer data on its networks as an 'advanced persistent threat'—the term normally used for Chinese and other cyber attacks.55 Microsoft says it will expand the use of encryption, challenge gag orders in court and make its software more transparent (to allay fears that it may contain accidental or deliberate flaws which enable snooping).

  But the distorted lens through which the Snowden cheerleaders view the world magnifies failings close to home, and obscures those abroad. The shortcomings of the West become its defining characteristics. Greenwald, with his extensive experience as a trial lawyer specialising in corporate wrongdoing, provides a caustic if glib account of America's misdeeds. He cites the Bush administration's foreign policy, the rendition (kidnapping) and torture of terrorist suspects, past incidents of warrantless wiretapping, and much more besides. These are real problems and should indeed provoke soul-searching among those who wish the West to occupy the moral high ground, and for democracies to maintain their political and economic pre-eminence. But they are no excuse for nihilism.

  As the journalist Brendan O'Neill points out:56

  Conspiracy theorising and the cult of the whistle-blower have the same origins: a crisis of democracy, the collapse of public engagement, and a dearth of faith in politicians and even in politics itself. The more that some people feel alienated from politics, cut off from the old to-and-fro of political debate, the more they can feel tempted to embrace hare-brained stories about tiny cliques of rich folk or lizards or Jews running everything behind our backs. Conspiracy theories feed off the carcass of democratic engagement. And so it is with whistle-blowing, too: the more that radicals lose faith in both the political system, which they view as totally corrupt, and the little people, who are 'wilfully ignorant', the more they come to believe that only brave, truth-wielding individuals can save the world from enslavement by a dastardly elite.