THE NEWS THAT EDWARD SNOWDEN received Russian citizenship last Monday re-ignited the furious debate over whether the former National Security Agency contractor is a patriot or a traitor, with predictably diminishing returns.
Critics charged Snowden’s citizenship is proof he was working for the Russian government. Snowden’s admirers recalled how the techie, with a copy of the Constitution in his pocket protector, exposed the top-secret bulk data collection program that ingested personal information about the phone calls of virtually every American—a program that NSA director James Clapper at first told Congress did not exist. (“We probably should have been more transparent,” said Clapper, a master of understatement, told the Washington Post last week.)
Things quickly got
personal. State Department spokesman Ned Price trolled Snowden saying he “might
well” be conscripted into Russia's war in Ukraine. That wasn’t true, said
Snowden’s lawyer Anatoly Kucherena, who explained to RIA news service that President Vladimir Putin’s recent
mobilization is limited to men with Russian military experience, which Snowden
does not have. One Snowden critic, in turn, implied Putin exempted
Snowden from military duty in return for secret service to Mother
Russia.
Former CIA chief of staff
Larry Pfeiffer also sounded the traitor theme. “Complete
the process & visit your nearest US consulate to formally renounce your US
citizenship,” he urged Snowden in a tweet. It’s likely he'd be detained to stand trial on
espionage charges in the U.S., he suggested. “You’ll get to see your
parents and sons. On visitation days.”
Snowden, for his
part, prayed for privacy, saying he was simply trying to keep his
family together by enabling his wife and children to travel more easily between
Russia and the United States.
The Post’s coverage of the
Citizen Snowden dustup signaled a sea change in how the capital’s paper of
record describes the man who filched the crown jewels of the NSA. Eight years
ago, executive editor Marty Baron accepted the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for
reporting with a salute to the paper’s source, Snowden. “Disclosing the massive
expansion of the NSA’s surveillance network absolutely was a public service,”
Baron said.
This week, the Post, now
helmed by Sally Buzbee, a former executive editor of the Associated Press, took
a distinctly cooler editorial line. The lead of the Post’s page one story made no mention of public service or Pulitzer
prizes, only criminal charges. Snowden “leaked information about top-secret
U.S. surveillance programs and is still wanted by Washington on espionage
charges,” the Post reported, adding, “the 39 year old Snowden considers himself
a whistleblower.” The Post, one might conclude, no longer does. Glenn
Greenwald, Snowden’s collaborator-turned-Tucker Carlson mainstay, tweeted it
was “extra weird” for the Post to “malign their own source.”
Perhaps even weirder is the
odd fate of Snowden’s archive, unmentioned by the Post, Greenwald, and the
savants of Twitter. The trove of documents that Snowden stole from internal NSA
networks in 2013 contains the keys to the kingdom of U.S. national security: an
estimated million–plus documents about how a secretive agency, with annual
budget north of $10 billion, intercepts electronic signals from
every time zone (and high in the atmosphere) for the sake of surveillance,
collection, decryption, and deception programs that protect and advance U.S.
national defense and foreign policy goals.
The continuing existence of
this archive beyond the control of cleared U.S. officials infuriates Snowden’s
critics, who insist he is a criminal, not a whistleblower. It is an
article of faith on Twitter that Snowden works for Putin’s government and gave—or was forced to
surrender—a copy of his purloined papers to Russian intelligence. Snowden
denies that, saying he gave his only copy to filmmaker Laura Poitras and
Greenwald, then writing for the Guardian newspaper, in Hong Kong in 2013 before
he ever set foot in Moscow, a claim his critics have often challenged but never
refuted. Likewise, allegations that Snowden had spied for China, raised by Vice President Dick Cheney and
other critics, were never substantiated.
The U.S. government’s criminal charges against Snowden, filed in 2013 and
unsealed in 2016, do not allege he made contact with a foreign intelligence
service. The criminal complaint indicates the U.S. government had three years
to investigate Snowden’s possible foreign ties and found no proof. And, if
there was any classified evidence even hinting that Russia’s Foreign
Intelligence Service (SVR) or China’s Ministry of State Security (MSS)
had obtained Snowden’s archive from him, you would think that Snowden’s many
critics in the U.S. intelligence community would either declassify it or, well,
leak it. That hasn’t happened. For security purposes, U.S. officials have to
assume that U.S. adversaries have obtained the archive. That assumption is not
a verified fact.
Corroborating exactly how
Snowden damaged U.S. intelligence capabilities is also difficult. A top secret
Defense Intelligence Agency assessment in 2014 called the damage “staggering.”
A heavily redacted version of the report provided to the Guardian from a Freedom of Information Act request called
the damage “grave” but lacked any substantiating details.
In response to a Twitter
query about Clapper’s charge that Snowden compromised legitimate foreign
intelligence activities, former FBI analyst and Defense
Intelligence Agency staffer Patricia Ravalgi, replied:
“I worked on one of the
damage assessments. Clapper is correct. But unfortunately what he damaged,
operations that had to be revamped, renamed- remains classified. I wish more
could be revealed so that people would know the truth. But it was extensive.”
I assume what Ravalgi
(a SpyTalk contributing writer) says is true, but without
public verification it’s impossible for the average citizen to know if the
damage was more to the American people’s safety, or to NSA’s pride.
Missing
Absent in the latest
fusillades aimed at Snowden, meanwhile, has been any mention of the three
Americans who are known to still control copies of the Snowden archive:
the controversial Greenwald, the artist Poitras, and former Washington
Post reporter Bart Gellman, leader of the team that won the Pulitzer Prize for
its coverage of NSA surveillance based on Snowden’s leak. (The New York Times
and The Guardian are also known to have at least partial copies of the Snowden
archive.)
In March 2019, Greenwald tweeted, “Laura and I and others have
full copies.” When I spoke recently with Poitras, she declined to
comment. Greenwald did not respond to a request for comment. Gellman told
me his copy remains in “cold storage.”
These
three have the goods that inflame national security mandarins and Twitterati
alike. They are not eager to talk about it, not the least because the
journalists find themselves in the ironic position of responsibly protecting
some of NSA’s most sensitive secrets.
Fiasco
Once
upon a time, Greenwald and Poitras were determined to share the Snowden archive
widely in service of their ideological goals: exposing, demystifying and
denouncing the American surveillance state and national security system. With
funding from eBay billionaire and philanthropist Pierre Omidyar, they (along
with progressive investigative reporter Jeremy Scahill) established
First Look Media and launched The Intercept, an online publication dedicated to
investigative reporting in national security. They even set up their own
private SCIF (Secure Compartmented Information Facility) in midtown Manhattan
to protect classified documents they obtained. Following an elaborate security
protocol developed by a nine-person research department, reporters from The
Intercept and others could get access to records about the inner workings of
the NSA, the vast enterprise whose acronym, Beltway wags once joked, stood for
“No Such Agency.”
One
former First Look employee recalled that the Intercept’s SCIF, located on the
19th floor of a building at 5th Avenue and 16th Street in New York City,
featured double doors that could only be opened by two different people with
keys.
“You had to leave your phone outside the room,” the employee
said, “Inside the room were desks and computers that could only be turned by
two different operators. You needed permission to burn anything from the
archive to an air-gapped computer. There were many passwords.”
The
security was supposed to serve the mission of dissemination.
“We
sought to fulfill [Snowden’s] two principal requests for how the
materials should be handled,” Greenwald explained in a 2016 Intercept post, “that they be released
in conjunction with careful reporting that puts the documents in context and
makes them digestible to the public, and that the welfare and reputations of
innocent people be safeguarded.”
The Intercept generated a steady stream of reporting about NSA
that was less sensational than the initial stories Greenwald and Gellman wrote
about NSA’s mass surveillance programs but revelatory nonetheless about the way
NSA functioned, from listening posts in Afghanistan and Iraq to the inside
jokes of the office newsletter, SID Today.
And
then things began to fall apart.
In May 2018, Reality Winner, an NSA translator, sent The
Intercept a copy of a classified report on Russian efforts to hack U.S.
electoral systems in 2016. Despite their ballyhooed dedication to
information protection, the Intercept’s editors fumbled their handling of
Winner’s document, which allowed federal investigators to trace it back to her
and arrest her before her revelation had even been published.
The
fiasco bred staff dissension. As Greenwald drifted away from the Intercept’s
high-brow leftism in favor of Tucker Carlson’s trust fund anti-elitism,
Intercept editor Betsy Reed lost interest in the Snowden archive as a source of
stories. In March 2019, she shuttered First Look’s SCIF, citing other
editorial priorities.
Not
only was outside access to the Snowden archive ended, the laid-off employees
had to sign non-disclosure agreements prohibiting them from talking about
their work. The NDAs effectively shrouded Snowden’ archive in a new layer of
unofficial secrecy, imposed not by the government but by a left-wing
publication wielding NDA’s—a favorite tool of former President Donald Trump,
sexual predators and tobacco companies. Weird indeed.
When Poitras complained to management (and the details wound up
in the Daily Beast), she was fired. Poitras called Reed’s decision to close the Snowden SCIF as
“devastating betrayal of the organization’s founding principles.”
Poitras
stressed that while The Intercept had punted on the documents, “the Snowden
Archive still exists, and there is still more to report … “
“There
is a vast amount of information that hasn’t been reported of enormous
contemporary and historical significance,” Poitras added. “The Snowden Archive
contains a history of the Iraq war, the rise of the surveillance state, the
global structure of the U.S. empire etc.”
Greenwald
tweeted he was looking for another institutional sponsor, but he apparently
never found one. In October 2020, he quit The Intercept with a blast at its
editorial policies. He, too, seems to have lost interest in the Snowden archive.
Greenwald did not respond to a request for comment.
‘Cold Storage’
Poitras
is tight lipped today about The Intercept. She referred SpyTalk to a
2021 interview where she said, “This was a real betrayal of Ed
and the many people who put so much effort into creating a secure
infrastructure.” Joining The Intercept and First Look Media in 2014, she added,
was “her biggest regret.”
“What the Intercept did was a travesty,” former Intercept writer
Dan Froomkin told SpyTalk.
“The whole point of the news organization was to expose the secrets of the
surveillance state and to do so by creating best practices in data privacy and
whistleblower protection. All those things are gone.”
Gellman
says he feels conflicted about the archive.
“I
have wondered whether I should be making this stuff available to the public,
and I don’t think I should,” he told SpyTalk.
“Maybe down the road. But there are certainly things in there I don’t feel
comfortable making public. The sensitivity of some of it diminishes with time,
but names and photos of people doing clandestine work doesn’t go stale.”
I asked Gellman about Clapper’s complaint that Snowden “exposed
so much else that damaged foreign intelligence capabilities that had nothing to
do with so-called domestic surveillance.”
Snowden’s critics “way overstate the case,” he replied. “Their
definition of domestic surveillance is very narrow. A lot of surveillance done
overseas had big impacts on American users. That was just collateral damage to
them. ‘Incidental collection.’ They were aiming for Boris and Natasha’s phone
calls, and they got Joe and Mary’s too. But their rules allowed them to keep
that information. So then they had this great big bucket [of data] on
Americans. Because the information was lawfully collected—there was no American
target—they felt entitled to keep it as long as they like. It was a form of
indirect surveillance.”
“Yes,
there is stuff in there that tells you how they do what they do,” Gellman went
on. “One portion of what NSA does is absolutely pure foreign intelligence
surveillance. Most Americans would say, ‘Go get' em. That’s what you’re paid to
do.’ Snowden didn’t want to decide if that sort of thing should be public. He
wanted me to see the files in a raw form so I could decide. I still don’t want
to publish those things, even all these years later.”
Froomkin, who gained access to the archive to report a story for the Intercept, said, “There’s a lot of stuff
in there that should never see the light of day. There’s no journalistic reason
to report on it. …Some of the files I saw, I didn’t want to see.”
Gellman
agrees with Poitras that the Snowden archive would be “really valuable for
constructive research,” but he added “the opsec [operational security] needed
to share it with anyone else is too hard to deal with. I just put the whole
thing in cold storage. I feel bad about that.”
Ironies
and regrets abound about the fate of the Snowden archive, starting with the
fact that today some of the NSA’s most sensitive secrets are being protected by
a bodyguard of NSA critics. The Washington Post has virtually disowned the
Pulitzer awarded it for its reporting on Snowden’s revelations. Glenn
Greenwald is now a regular on a Fox News show that champions Trump and
Hungarian autocrat Viktor Orban. And Laura Poitrous regrets ever teaming up
with The Intercept.
The
news organization was “founded to protect sources and whistleblowers and hold
the powerful accountable,” Poitras said in a 2021 interview, “...and then didn’t apply its founding principles
to itself.”
Nine
years after Snowden’s massive leak exploded on the world—not just revealing the
NSA’s intelligence overreach but radically rocking the lives of all
involved—the remainder of his archive has returned its original status:
off-limits.
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