The Edward Snowden Affair (12 page)

After a series of extremely volatile, highly condemning back-to-back exposés, the U.S. government was browbeaten. The requests by news sources for comments concerning top secret classified information had inexplicably stopped. Washington was too tired to wonder why and merely hoped it was a sign the war was over. As the weekend slowly wound down, the Capitol took a deep breath and braced itself for what promised to be a very busy week. Internet companies were frantically putting the finishing touches on their requests for transparency. The American Civil Liberties Union was picking out what tie it would wear when it filed suit against the NSA on Monday. Clapper began debating whether to declassify congressional “telephony metadata” records 21 years before their expiration date. Brokers anxiously hypothesized how the stock market might teeter between online security firms’ inevitable boom and what many expected would be the freefalling funds of Verizon and the cited Internet companies.

Then the news broke.
The Guardian
had posted a 12-minute interview with the American whistleblower.
⁵⁷
The video had been shot by an Academy Award-nominated filmmaker. The person responsible was talking and talking a lot. Everyone flocked to their televisions, and, against their better judgment, those not in close proximity to a television logged onto their computers or phones to get a glimpse of the man behind the leaks. (The video footage of the leaker was so ubiquitous, few noticed that a complementary, near mirror print interview by Greenwald and MacAskill had also been posted online.)
⁵⁸
It was the U.S. government’s worst nightmare. Greenwald was humanizing his reports by putting a face to his stories. The face was polite, well spoken, knowledgeable and worst of all, camera friendly. Washington ground its teeth because Snowden would now have personal, popular support. Bringing him up and convicting him of charges had just become exponentially harder.

The video opens with a sea of black before centered, white letters reading “PRISM” and beneath it “Whistleblower” emerge. Poitras’ audiences recognize this as her traditional title screen. The scene cuts to boats at port before “Hong Kong” appears in the bottom left corner of the frame. A thin, young man then appears. He is seated diagonally and facing stage right. His brunette hair with blond highlights is politely parted on the left. Rectangular, perhaps designer, glasses rest high on his aquiline nose. His gray-blue button-up is left open, not at the top, but two buttons down. He harbors a fashionable growth of beard. He introduces himself.

His speech is clear, paced and deliberate. “My name is Ed Snowden. I’m 29 years old. I worked for Booz Allen Hamilton as an infrastructure analyst for NSA in Hawaii.” As he does so the words “EDWARD SNOWDEN” fade in above “NSA Whistleblower” in the left, bottom corner of the screen. This brings attention to what appears to be someone in the background. It then becomes clear the speaker is stilling in front of a mirror.

The screen goes black once again as “June 6, 2013” slowly emerges where Snowden’s name had been. Below it reads “GLENN GREENWALD, interviewer” and below that “LAURA POITRAS, filmmaker.”

In the tradition of whistleblowers, the world did not expect to learn the source of the disclosures until the person was either caught or made a deathbed confession. Viewers were even more surprised when they saw Snowden. Much like Poitras and Greenwald, the intimation was that top secret information would only be available to intelligence personnel who had climbed their way up the administrative ladder after decades of dedicated work. Instead audiences were met by a guy who looked to be a graduate student at best, at worst the assistant manager of a retail outlet.

Greenwald judiciously opens off-screen by asking Snowden his credentials.

“I’ve been a systems engineer, systems administrator, senior adviser for the Central Intelligence Agency, solutions consultant, and a telecommunications information system officer.” Aside from the implication Snowden was very well-versed and well-rounded in IT, his mention of having served as senior advisor for the CIA undoubtedly caught people’s attention. Audiences quickly deduced this person was either genuine or delusional because no sensible individual would attempt to lie about holding such a privileged position. For those familiar with the previous days’ articles, the immediate inference was that this person hadn’t merely grabbed a handful of papers stamped “Top Secret” and run. He knew what he was stealing, what the documents meant, and had a reason for taking them.

Greenwald then asks Snowden to explain when he decided to whistleblow. Instead of reporting, “When I was in Geneva I was witness to … ,” Snowden focuses upon the broader picture and ends on an egalitarian note.

“When you’re in positions of privileged access like a systems administrator for these sorts of intelligence community agencies, you’re exposed to a
lot
more information on a broader scale than the average employee and because of that, you see things that may be disturbing, but over the course of a normal person’s career, you’d only see one or two of these instances. When you see everything, you see them on a more frequent basis and you recognize that some of these things are actually abuses, and when you talk to people about them in a place like this, where this is the normal state of business, people tend not to take them very seriously and move on from them. But over time that awareness of wrongdoing sort of builds up, and you feel compelled to talk about it, and the more you talk about it, the more you’re ignored, the more you’re told ‘It’s not a problem’ until eventually you realize that these things need to be determined by the public and not by somebody who was simply hired by the government.” He later adds, “[ … ] you have to make a determination about what it is that’s important to you, and if living unfreely but comfortably is something you’re willing to accept—and I think that many of us are, it’s the human nature—you can get up everyday, go to work, you can collect your large paycheck for relatively little work against the public interest, and go to sleep at night after watching your shows. But if you realize that that’s the world you helped create and it’s going to get worse with the next generation and the next generation who extend the capabilities of this sort of architecture of oppression, you realize that you might be willing to accept any risk, and it doesn’t matter what the outcome is so long as the public gets to make their own decisions about how that’s applied.”

Snowden makes it apparent he did not blow the whistle out of spite, for money, or fame but due to an overbearing sense of moral obligation. If his intention was to deliberately harm the United States, he assures Greenwald he could—and would—have already done so: “Anybody in the positions of access with the technical capabilities that I had could suck out secrets [and] pass them on the open market to Russia. They always have an open door as we do. I had access to the full rosters of everyone working at the NSA, the entire intelligence community, and undercover assets all over the world, the locations of every station; we have what their missions are, and so forth. If I had just wanted to harm the U.S.…? You could shut down the surveillance system in an afternoon.” In a little over a week, to quell any concerns he was a double agent, Snowden would put to his audience the rhetorical question, “Ask yourself: If I were a Chinese spy, why wouldn’t I have flown directly into Beijing? I could be living in a palace petting a phoenix by now.”

After making clear he had what many would consider an idyllic life: “[I was] living in Hawaii, in paradise, and making a ton of money.” With this, he asks, “What would it take [for]
you
to leave everything behind?” As history proved, he was not exaggerating the life he’d been living. He had a six-figure salary, lived in a world-renowned vacation destination and was in a relationship of several years. He remarks that he is now susceptible to being “[ … ] rendered by the CIA. I could have people come after me or any of their third-party partners. They work closely with a number of other nations or they could pay off the Triads, any of their agents or assets.“ (The Triads are the most recent incarnation of a centuries-old Chinese crime syndicate.) He readily admits this is “[… ] a fear I’ll live under for the rest of my life, however long that happens to be.” With the concluding statement in which a hint of desperation is evident in his voice, Snowden obviously believes what he told Gellman months before: “[The intelligence community] will most certainly kill you if they think you are the single point of failure that could stop this disclosure and make them the sole owner of this information.”

Some might claim Snowden’s dramatic response is an inflated cloak-and-dagger fantasy proving his delusions of grandeur, but when Greenwald asked him how he thought the U.S. government might react to his disclosures, Snowden’s patient response did not include discussion of media spin, government slander or outright denial. If he didn’t truly believe his life was in jeopardy, he would have likely proffered a more modest and therefore believable reply. Interestingly, during an intelligence conference the day before the interview aired, a foreign affairs analyst named Steve Clemons was sitting in Dulle’s airport in Washington D.C., when he overheard four intelligence officers discussing Snowden and Greenwald. One remarked that both whistleblower and reporter should be “disappeared.”
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MacAskill asked Snowden his opinion of the matter. “Someone responding to the story said ‘real spies do not speak like that.’ Well, I am a spy and that is how they talk,” Snowden testified. “Whenever we had a debate in the office on how to handle crimes, they do not defend due process—they defend decisive action. They say it is better to kick someone out of a plane than let these people have a day in court. It is an authoritarian mindset in general.”
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Yet Snowden divulges that his greatest fear is not death but his efforts might ultimately be in vain, “[ … ] that nothing will change. People will see the media, all of these disclosures [and] they’ll know the lengths that the government is going to grant themselves powers unilaterally to create greater control over American society and global society, but they [the American people] won’t be willing to take the risks necessary to stand up and fight to change things, to force their representatives to actually take a stand in their interests.” He closes the interview with a prediction of where the current state of affairs might ultimately lead: “And the months ahead, the years ahead, it’s only going to get worse until eventually there will be a time where policies will change because the only thing that restricts the activities of the surveillance state are
policy
. Even our agreements with other sovereign governments, we consider that to be a stipulation of
policy
rather than a stipulation of
law
and because of that, a new leader will be elected … they’ll find the switch … say that ‘Because of the crisis—because of the dangers we face in the world—some new and unpredicted threat, we need more authority, we need more power’ and there will be nothing the people can do at that point to oppose it and it will be turnkey tyranny.”

Early in the dialogue, Greenwald bluntly puts to Snowden, “Does it [the intelligence community] target the actions of Americans?” Greenwald wants to have the world hear, directly from the lips of a high-ranking ex-CIA employee and NSA contractor, what is taking place behind the surveillance curtain.

“The NSA, and intelligence community in general, is focused on getting intelligence wherever it can, by any means possible. It believes—on the grounds of sort of a self-certification—that they serve the national interest. Originally we saw that focus very narrowly tailored as foreign intelligence gathered overseas. Now, increasingly, we see that it’s happening domestically and to do that they, the NSA specifically, targets the communications of everyone. It ingests them by
default
. It collects them in its system and it filters them and it analyses them and it measures them and it stores them for periods of time simply because that’s the easiest, most efficient, and most valuable way to achieve these ends.” He continues, “Any analyst at any time can target anyone, any selector, anywhere. Where those communications will be picked up depends on the range of the sensor networks and the authorities that analyst is empowered with. Not all analysts have the ability to target everything, but I, sitting at my desk, certainly had the authorities to wiretap anyone from you or your accountant, to a federal judge, to even the president if I had a personal email.” He adds that the American populace should take notice “[b]ecause even if you’re not doing anything wrong, you’re being watched and recorded, and the storage capability of these systems increases every year consistently by orders of magnitude to where it’s getting to the point where you don’t have to have done anything wrong. You simply have to eventually fall under suspicion from somebody even by a wrong call, and then they can use this system to go back in time and scrutinize every decision you’ve ever made, every friend you’ve ever discussed something with and attack you on that basis to sort of derive suspicion from an innocent life and paint anyone in the context of a wrongdoer.”

Aside from affirming with first-hand experience that the intelligence community is “target[ing] the communication of everyone,” the most intimidating facet of his narrative is reference to the NSA’s propensity to operate under “self-certification.” Preceding history confirms this tendency by the agency after Clapper blatantly lied to Congress regarding domestic surveillance and Boundless Informant had been hidden from oversight committees. The day Poitras’ video aired, Clapper appeared on NBC
⁶¹
to backpedal. He told interviewer Andrea Mitchell, “To me, collection of a U.S. person’s data would mean taking the books off the shelf, opening it up, and reading it.” Under this semantic designation, an item’s purpose must be utilized if the object is to be part of a collection. Under Clapper’s definition coin, stamp or wine collections would be an oxymoronic impossibility.