Excerpts from "No Place to Hide"
Author: Glenn Greenwald
We've all heard about the revelations of former CIA employee Edward Snowden. Journalists played a key role in disseminating the materials, but unfortunately, we know very little about their involvement in this disclosure. It is this gap that Glenn Greenwald fills. This book tells what happened on the other side of the revelations and what responsibility the journalists bore. Properly presenting the material and building a strategy for delivering this information requires a high level of professionalism.
Glenn Greenwald is an American writer, lawyer, and journalist. His articles have been published in many newspapers, and four of his five books have made the bestseller lists. He began his career with a blog devoted to national security issues in 2005. The main theme of the blog was the curtailment of civil liberties after the September 11 attacks.
Another journalist involved in disseminating the materials was Laura Poitras, a documentary filmmaker. At the height of the Iraq War, she went to the "Sunni Triangle" and made the film "My Country, My Country," which openly showed the lives of Iraqis during the American occupation.
The US population's reverence for security agencies after September 11 created a climate in society extremely favorable to abuse of power.
In 2001, the Bush administration secretly ordered the National Security Agency (NSA) to conduct electronic wiretapping of Americans' phone calls without obtaining the permission required by criminal law.
The government tried to justify the secret NSA program by proposing a theory of executive authority acting under emergency circumstances. The idea that the threat of terrorism gives the president virtually unlimited freedom to do whatever he wants.
Surveillance of one's own people is something inherent in rulers of very different political persuasions. At the beginning of the 20th century, special government departments were created in the British and French empires to combat the threat posed by the anti-colonial movement. After World War II, the East German Ministry for State Security, known as the Stasi, became synonymous with state intrusion into citizens' private lives.
Secrecy, as we understood, is the core of abuse of power, its driving mechanism. The antidote to such abuse can only be genuine openness.
We can guarantee all people equal protection against unreasonable surveillance through universal laws, but only if the technical community is willing to see the threat and can offer highly sophisticated technical solutions.
It is difficult to arouse public concern about state surveillance of citizens: violations of personal freedoms and abuse of power seem to many people to be abstractions that have little to do with them. Moreover, the issue of citizen surveillance is very complex, making it very difficult to get the general public to engage with it.
In the early 2000s, intelligence suffered from a lack of technically savvy personnel. The agency had become such a huge and sprawling system that it had difficulty finding people for its technical support. The NSA had to resort to unconventional talent searches. They began accepting people with sufficient computer skills, very young and sometimes unambitious, even those who had not exactly excelled at universities and colleges. For them, internet culture proved to be a more stimulating environment than the formal education system and personal interaction.
One of the central places in Snowden's worldview was occupied by the Internet. As for many people of his generation, the Internet was not just a tool for performing specific tasks. It was a whole world in which his mind developed and his personality was shaped, a place that in itself provides freedom, allows you to explore the universe, and grants opportunities for intellectual growth and understanding of the world.
For Snowden, these unique possibilities of the Internet were an unquestionable value that should be preserved at all costs. He used the Internet as a teenager, exploring the world and communicating with people from the most distant places, of very different backgrounds and origins — those he would never have met under other circumstances. "The most important thing is that the Internet allowed me to feel what freedom is and to explore what my potential as a human being is."
"For many children, the Internet is a means of self-expression. Through it, they learn who they really are and who they want to be, but in the future this is only possible if our right to privacy and anonymity, the right to make mistakes without subsequent persecution, is preserved. I fear that we are the last generation that has had this freedom."
The BOUNDLESS INFORMANT program showed that over a one-month period starting March 8, 2013, one NSA division engaged in global access operations collected data on more than 3 million phone calls and emails passing through the US electronic communications system. (DNR, or Dial Number Recognition, refers to phone calls; DNI, or Digital Network Intelligence, refers to internet communications such as emails.) This exceeds the amount of data collected in similar systems in Russia, Mexico, and almost all European countries, and is roughly equivalent to the level of data collection in China. In total, in just thirty days, data on more than 97 billion emails and 124 billion phone calls from around the world were accumulated. Another BOUNDLESS INFORMANT document presented detailed data for a thirty-day period in Germany (500 million), Brazil (2.3 billion), and India (13.5 billion). Other files contain information on data collected jointly with the governments of France (70 million), Spain (60 million), Italy (47 million), the Netherlands (1.8 million), Norway (33 million), and Denmark (23 million).
EGOTISTICAL GIRAFFE, whose purpose is to combat the Tor browser, which enables anonymous web browsing; MUSCULAR — a means of intruding into private Google and Yahoo! networks; OLYMPIA — a Canadian program tasked with monitoring the Brazilian Ministry of Mines and Energy.
The US government has built a system aimed at completely eliminating the confidentiality of electronically transmitted information around the world. It is no exaggeration to say that the objectives of the surveillance are: collection, storage, tracking, and analysis of all electronic communications of the entire population of the globe. The goal of the intelligence services has become to carry out a single mission: to ensure that not the slightest detail escapes the systematic collection of information related to electronic communications.
According to mid-2012 data, the Agency processed over 20 billion communications (both telephone and internet) per day from around the world.
For each individual country, the NSA daily produces a chart with the number of collected emails and calls. In Poland, on some days, over 3 million calls were processed, and over a thirty-day period, more than 71 million.
In a 2012 interview with Democracy Now!, Binney said that "they have collected about 20 trillion communications from US citizens to US citizens."
After Snowden's disclosure of classified information, the Wall Street Journal reported that the NSA's interception system "can cover approximately 75% of US internet traffic for the purpose of surveilling foreigners, including a wide range of communications between foreigners and Americans."
"70% of the national budget for intelligence operations goes to the private sector." There is a business park located about a mile from NSA headquarters where all major NSA contractors, from Booz Allen and SAIC to Northrop Grumman, work for the Agency.
In 2011 and 2012, PRISM was the sole source of data in 74% of cases.
The close cooperation between the NSA and private companies is best illustrated by documents related to Microsoft, which demonstrate the company's diligent efforts to provide the NSA with access to several of its most popular online services, including SkyDrive, Skype, and Outlook.com.
Due to the unstructured nature of calls, their content is much more difficult to analyze automatically. In contrast, metadata is like mathematics: clear, precise, and therefore easy to process. And, as Felten put it, they often "replace content."
A significant portion of the Agency's activity has nothing to do with fighting terrorism or even national security. Most of the documents in the Snowden archive are devoted to what can only be called economic espionage: wiretapping phone calls and intercepting emails of the Brazilian oil giant Petrobras, an economic conference in Latin America, an energy company in Venezuela and Mexico, as well as spying on NSA allies, including Canada, Norway, and Sweden, the Brazilian Ministry of Mines and Energy, and energy companies in several other countries. One interesting document from the NSA and GCHQ describes a considerable number of surveillance targets that were clearly economic in nature: Petrobras, the SWIFT banking system, the Russian energy company Gazprom, and the Russian airline Aeroflot.
Not all intelligence methods involve signal interception and remote network access. In fact, some of them are quite hands-on! These methods work as follows: interference in the delivery process of computer network equipment (servers, routers, etc.). The goods are then rerouted to a secret location, where department employees install transmitters in the electronic devices of our surveillance targets. The electronic devices are then repackaged and placed back in the transit area, from where they are sent to their original destination. All of this is done with the support of intelligence community partners and technical specialists from Special Access Operations.
Such operations involving supply chain interference are the most productive operations in Special Access Networks, as they create the opportunity for access in advance.
Among other devices, the Agency intercepts routers and servers manufactured by Cisco in order to redirect large volumes of internet traffic to NSA storage.
Chinese routers and servers create not only economic competition but also surveillance competition: when someone buys a Chinese device instead of an American one, the NSA loses one of its primary espionage tools for collecting large amounts of data.
Both the NSA and GCHQ were consumed by the idea of controlling Internet and telephone communications of people on commercial airline flights. Since messages in this case are transmitted through a system of independent satellites, they are extremely difficult to intercept. The thought that there is a moment, even if it lasts only a few hours of flight, when someone can use the Internet or phone without fear of surveillance was unbearable for intelligence agencies. Therefore, they devoted serious forces and resources to developing systems capable of intercepting communications during flights.
Ultimately, beyond diplomatic manipulation and economic gain, the system of ubiquitous espionage allows the United States to maintain its influence over the world. If the United States is able to know everything that US residents, foreign citizens, leaders of international corporations, and leaders of other countries do, say, think, and plan, its power over them becomes maximal. This is doubly true when the government operates with increasingly high levels of secrecy. Secrecy creates a one-way mirror: the United States government sees everything the rest of the world does, including its own citizens, while no one sees what the US authorities do. This critical imbalance creates the most dangerous conditions for human existence imaginable.
After Snowden drew attention to the problem of mass surveillance, I spoke with many people who agree with Eric Schmidt's perspective that privacy should only concern those who have something to hide. But none of them were willing to voluntarily give me their email password or allow me to install a camera in their home.
The right to privacy is a fundamental condition of human freedom.
Only when we are sure that no one is watching us do we feel free and secure enough to truly experiment, test our limits, explore new ways of thinking and being, and discover what it means to be ourselves. The Internet became so popular because it became a place where we can speak and act anonymously, and this is important for exploring ourselves and our potential.
For this reason, privacy is the foundation of creativity, fostering new perspectives and new ways of thinking. A society in which surveillance of every member is permitted, where privacy is eliminated, is a society in which these opportunities are lost, both at the social and individual level.
Therefore, mass surveillance, justified by law, is inherently a repressive measure.
The destructive effect of the controlling forces of mass surveillance and self-censorship has been confirmed in a huge number of social experiments. The influence of these forces extends far beyond politics. Numerous studies show that they have an impact at the deepest personal and psychological levels.
The threat of surveillance or actual state surveillance can psychologically suppress freedom of speech.
From 1947 to 1975, under a secret agreement with three telegraph companies, the National Security Agency obtained millions of telegrams sent to, from, or within the United States. Moreover, during the CIA operation called CHAOS (1967-1973), "approximately 300,000 people were entered into the CIA computer system, files were kept on about 7,200 Americans, and on more than 100 organized groups."
The government's assurances that surveillance targets only those "who have done something wrong" cannot bring us comfort, since the state automatically understands this to mean any action that challenges its authority.
Scientists from a wide variety of fields, including sociology, psychology, anthropology, neuroscience, and biology, worked to help GCHQ employees achieve maximum effect through deception on the Internet.
The true measure of whether a society is free is how it treats dissidents and other marginalized groups, not how it treats its defenders.
It is worth highlighting the fact that today Americans consider the threat of surveillance a greater danger than the threat of terrorism.
Republicans, who were defenders of the NSA during the Bush years, were displaced by Democrats as soon as the surveillance system fell into the hands of President Obama, and thus into Democratic hands. "Nationwide, the data collection program receives more support from Democrats (57% approve) than from Republicans (44%)."
Depending on which party was in power, people fundamentally changed the arguments they made for and against surveillance.
New York Magazine cites data showing that from 2006 to 2009, the use of the law to "sneak and peek" (warrants for searches without notifying the person) occurred in 1,618 drug-related cases, 122 fraud-related cases, and only 15 terrorism-related cases.
The probability of death within a year from a domestic terrorist attack is approximately 1 in 3.5 million.
The NSA's colossal expenses would be cost-effective if "they prevented, thwarted, or protected against 333 major terrorist attacks per year."
Even if the threat of terrorism matched the level claimed by the government, it still couldn't justify the NSA surveillance program. Besides physical security, other values are equally, if not more, important. This understanding has been embedded in the political culture of the United States since the nation's founding and is no less important for other countries.
Fear very convincingly explains the expansion of government power and the reduction of civil rights. Since the beginning of the war on terror, Americans have been told that if they want to avoid catastrophe, they must give up their basic political rights.
There are obvious reasons for carrying out personal attacks on those who criticize the status quo. As noted, one of them is that the whistleblower's actions become less effective: no one wants to communicate with and help strange or crazy people. Another reason is deterrence: if dissidents are ostracized from society, it becomes a compelling reason not to become one.
If all journalists can do is glorify political leaders, then why are there constitutional guarantees of press freedom? Guarantees are necessary so that journalists can do the opposite.
Investigations by Bloomberg and the Wall Street Journal showed that many countries, during protests, turned to Western companies for technical assistance in surveilling their citizens. The government of Bashar al-Assad hired employees of the Italian detective agency Area SpA. In Egypt, Mubarak's secret police purchased technical means to hack Skype codes and wiretap the phone calls of political activists. And in Libya, as the Wall Street Journal reported, journalists and rebels who entered a government monitoring center in 2011 found a "wall of black devices the size of a refrigerator" supplied by the French company Amesys. This was equipment capable of "tracking internet traffic" of Libya's main ISP, "opening emails, cracking passwords, tracking chats and contacts of various suspects."
Data collection through the Upstream program (via fiber optic cables) and direct collection of information from internet company servers (PRISM) provide the NSA with the most data.
In the Five Eyes group, the NSA's closest ally is the British GCHQ. The US government has paid at least 100 million pounds sterling over the past three years to the British agency for access to and influence over British surveillance and data collection programs. Members of the Five Eyes group share most of their surveillance projects and meet annually at the Conference on Communications Development, where they boast about expanding their sphere of influence and report on the past year's successes.
From 1978 to 2002, the FISA court did not reject a single government request and approved many thousands of such requests. In the subsequent decade, up to 2012, the court rejected only 11 requests and approved over 20,000 in total.
2012 data showed that the court approved every single one of the 1,788 applications for electronic surveillance, while "modifications," meaning narrowing of the request, occurred in only 40 cases, or less than 3% of cases reviewed. During the 2012 calendar year, the government submitted 1,856 applications to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) requesting permission to conduct electronic and/or physical surveillance for foreign intelligence purposes. The 1,856 applications included requests for electronic surveillance only, physical surveillance only, and both electronic and physical surveillance. Of these, 1,789 applications involved electronic surveillance. Of these 1,789 applications, one was withdrawn by the government itself. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court did not reject any application, in whole or in part. An approximately similar situation was observed in 2011, when the NSA made 1,676 requests; the FISA Court modified 30 of them, "rejecting none." Thus, even in cases where a FISA Court decision was necessary to monitor the conversations and correspondence of a specific person, the judicial process was nothing more than a rubber stamp and bore no resemblance to a meaningful review of NSA operations.
The government insists that most of the data obtained through the surveillance described in the Snowden documents is "metadata, not content," trying to show that the surveillance is unobtrusive or, at least, not as intrusive as content collection. With these evasive arguments, the government tries to hide the fact that metadata obtained through surveillance can provide no less, and in some cases even more, information than the content of conversations. When the government knows about every call you made and every call you received, the exact duration of your phone conversations, when it can list every recipient of your emails and every place you sent them from, it can recreate a surprisingly complete and accurate picture of your life, your connections, and your activities, including some of the most intimate details of your private life.