The Edward Snowden Affair (23 page)

Appelbaum quickly follows with, “Does the NSA partner with other nations, like Israel?” Snowden replies it does but undoubtedly knew it was a leaning question. Appelbaum then asks if the NSA aided in the creation of Stuxnet. Stuxnet was a fabled state-of-the-art computer virus which infected Iran’s nuclear facilities. Its origin was long believed to have been a joint effort between Israel and the United States. Stuxnet was discovered because of poor programming. It inadvertently spread beyond its intended target and extended globally, infecting Iran, Indonesia, India, Azerbaijan, America and Pakistan.
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It was later duplicated and sold on the black market.
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Snowden simply replies, “NSA and Israel co-wrote it.”

Able to finally get answers to lingering personal questions, Appelbaum continues down the same geopolitical vein. As Snowden responds, he mentions in passing the existence of the “Five Eye Partners” before divulging the true lifespan of recorded data. Referring to Tempora he states, “Right now the buffer [information storage unit] can hold three days of traffic, but that’s being improved. Three days may not sound like much, but remember that that’s not metadata. ‘Full-take’ means it doesn’t miss anything, and ingests the entirety of each circuit’s capacity.” His disclosure counters both America and Britain’s reassurances that all retrieved data is first filtered and subsequently anonymized prior to being recorded. Reinforcing the contents of the revealed XKeyscore training slide two days prior, Snowden adds that if an analyst requests data, because it has been highlighted, it is stored “forever and ever, regardless of policy.” He reports that the NSA’s objective is to store all metadata permanently because live data’s “content isn’t as valuable as metadata because you can either re-fetch content based on the metadata or, if not, simply task all future communications of interest for permanent collection since the metadata tells you what out of their data stream you actually want.” In the event someone’s is targeted, Snowden states the person is “just owned.” He adds, “An analyst will get a daily (or scheduled based on exfiltration summary) report on what changed on the system, PCAPS [“packets of capture” or units of collected data] of leftover data that wasn’t understood by the automated dissectors, and so forth. It’s up to the analyst to do whatever they want at that point—the target’s machine doesn’t belong to them anymore, it belongs to the US government.” Given Snowden’s description, this is probably akin to EvilOlive’s real-time tip alerting capabilities.

Toward the end of the interview, Snowden presents what he views as the only viable solution to the privacy problem because, in his words, those who are accountable will never be made to answer. He tells Appelbaum, “Laws are meant for you, not for them.” Snowden states that civil liberty groups should push the corroborating companies to include privacy clauses in their contracts. For those that refuse, they are free to be “punished by consumers in the market.”

The interview’s publication served several purposes. It implicated Germany in the previously reported domestic surveillance. The discussion outlined how America could have possibly pulled the European Union’s puppet strings to bring down Morales’ flight. As always, it exposed new confidential information. Yet this is the first time Snowden offers solutions to the problem. Seibert, the German representative who a little over a week prior proclaimed that the NSA’s German spying was reminiscent of the Cold War, did not deny or even seek rhetorical neutrality regarding Snowden’s claims. Instead he blatantly confessed and admitted government compliance: “The BND [Bundesnachrichtendienst or German foreign intelligence agency] has been co-operating for decades with partner agencies, including the NSA. We can only protect our citizens if we cooperate. This cooperation is following rules and laws very strictly and is subject to parliamentary control.”
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The German populace did not approve. An opinion poll conducted a few weeks before showed half of Germany considered Snowden a hero, and 35 percent of the country’s population said it would be willing to hide him in their homes.
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The latter is a telling historical metaphor revealing how a large minority of Germans viewed America’s hunt for the NSA whistleblower.

The same day, Poitras released seven more minutes of interview footage.
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The audience is met by a black screen before “SNOWDEN” appears in the center of the frame; immediately below it, “Interview Part 2.” The letters fade out as viewers are greeted by the familiar sounds of waves lapping upon the banks of Victoria Harbor. In the lower, left corner of the screen, “Excerpts of interview with Edward Snowden” fades in and is followed by “HONG KONG June 6, 2013” before a return and then “GLENN GREENWALD, interviewer” rests upon “LAURA POITRAS, filmmaker.”

Snowden’s face suddenly appears, and the camera aggressively closes in on it. He looks the same as before. It is obvious this is a continuation of the same interview the world flocked to see almost a month before. Poitras is a masterful filmmaker. The documentary plays a similar role as the Appelbaum interview because Poitras chose footage that reflects what the world and Snowden had experienced the preceding month.

The interview begins with Greenwald asking Snowden what he believes the U.S. government’s response to his actions will be. He correctly estimates Washington would proclaim he’s “violated the Espionage Act. They’re going to say, I’ve aided our enemies [ … ].” Greenwald then puts to Snowden whether he entered the intelligence community with the intention of becoming a mole or to undermine the U.S. government. Snowden laughs before pausing to recollect. He reminds his audience that after the invasion of Iraq, he enlisted in the Army because he “believed in the goodness of what we [the U.S.] were doing. I believed in the nobility of our intentions to free oppressed people overseas.” He relays that his perspective changed after having been exposed to “true information,” information that “had not been propagandized in the media.” Snowden announces, “We [the U.S. government] were actually involved in misleading the public and misleading all publics, not just the American public, in order to create a certain mindset in the global consciousness, and I was actually a victim of that. America is a fundamentally a good country. We have good people with good values who want to do the right thing, but the structures of power that exist are working to their own ends to extend their capability at the expense of the freedom of all publics.”

Whereas the initial whistleblowing reports where meant to catch the American public’s attention, more recent revelations panned back to include “all publics.” It is clear Snowden meant what he typed during the June 17 online chat: “This country is worth dying for,” but due to his experiences in U.S. intelligence, his concern became more cosmopolitan. Though some could argue that his American disclosures were aimed at harming America, he chose to also extract foreign data to show non-U.S. citizens their governments were also engaging in similar practices. At worst, he could be labeled a misanthrope, but with each theft, he made himself more vulnerable to being caught.

Though audiences were hard-pressed to believe the claim in June, Poitras lets Snowden repeat, “There are literally no ingress or egress points anywhere in the continental United States where communications can enter or exit without being monitored and collected and analyzed.” He lists the most important excised files as being, “The Verizon document,” because “it literally lays out they’re [members of the intelligence community] using an authority that was intended to be used to seek warrants against individuals and they’re applying it to the whole of society by basically subverting a corporate partnership through major telecommunications providers and they’re getting everyone’s calls, everyone’s call records and everyone’s internet traffic as well.” He then lists Boundless Informant. He pauses before labeling it “a global auditing system for the NSA’s intercept and collection system that lets us track how much we’re collecting, where we’re collecting, by which authorities and so forth. The NSA lied about the existence of this tool to Congress and to specific congressmen in response to previous inquiries about their surveillance activities.” He then adds PRISM, “which is a demonstration of how the U.S. government co-opts U.S. corporate power to its own ends. Companies like Google, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft, they all get together with the NSA and provide the NSA direct access to the back ends of all of the systems you use to communicate, to store data, to put things in the cloud [online storage sites], and even to just send birthday wishes and keep a record of your life. And they give NSA direct access that they don’t need to oversee so they can’t be held liable for it. I think that’s a dangerous capability for anybody to have but particularly an organization that’s demonstrated time and time again that they’ll work to shield themselves from oversight.”

Poitras has Snowden reiterate his motives for action before closing the interview: “I don’t want to live in a world where everything that I say, everything I do, everyone I talk to, every expression of creativity or love or friendship is recorded. And that’s not something I’m willing to support, it’s not something I’m willing to build, and it’s not something I’m willing to live under. So I think anyone who opposes that sort of world has an obligation to act in the way they can. Now I’ve watched and waited and tried to do my job in the most policy-driven way I could, which is to wait and allow [ … ] our leadership, our figures, to sort of correct the excesses of government when we go too far. But as I’ve watched, I’ve seen that’s not occurring. In fact, we’re compounding the excesses of prior governments and making it worse and more invasive, and no one is really standing to stop it.”

The declaration that his motive was to take a personal stand and to set an example is one which the world had yet to hear. Snowden reveals that his initial goal was to clear his conscience and avoid hypocrisy by no longer supporting what he believed was unjustifiable. Snowden ceased being complicit in the mechanisms which he deemed were responsible for exploiting personal freedoms and removed himself from the advantages which that society offered.

The same day, the
O Globo
team was left by Greenwald to report, “NSA and CIA have maintained staff in Brasilia to collect satellite data.”
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Guided by a document dated 2002 which was leaked by Snowden, the Brazilian newspaper relays that 75 “monitoring stations” are jointly controlled throughout the world by both the CIA and NSA. Sixty-five are in various world capitals, some on military outposts, and five are located in Central and Latin America: Colombia, Venezuela, Panama, Mexico and Brazil. Two are specifically cited as residing in New Delhi and Misawa, Japan. (A subsequent report would reveal two more reside in Vienna and Frankfurt.)
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The code name for such operations is “Stateroom.”
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Like Snowden, the “Special Collection Service” agents assigned to these outposts are given diplomatic covers by their American embassies. The agents’ mission is to collect foreign satellite collection information or “FORNSAT.” This is to be done using established “alliances with private companies, owners, or operators.”

A September 2010 document shows the Brazilian Consulate in Washington and the South American nation’s U.N. offices in New York were American targets. As with the Cryptofax in the EU Embassy in Washington, Dropmire had been implanted in private digital networks, and other physical alterations were made to computer systems in Brazil. At this time, “Highlands” was the code name for digital signal collection, computer screen captures were dubbed “Vagrant” (a screen capture or “screencap” is a single-frame picture of what appears on a computer monitor), and “Lifesaver” designated the copying of disk drives. All three methods were utilized to extract Brazilian data.

Greenwald returned the next day. “U.S. spies spread through Latin America”
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appeared July 9 in
O Globo
. It opens by declaring that the U.S. spying that takes place in Brazil is not exclusive to the South American country. Classified documents reveal that, again, the NSA is not engaging in counterintelligence to solely determine military activity, intent and capability abroad. In February 2013 American intelligence was preoccupied with “oil” in Venezuela and Mexico’s “energy.”

From 2008 to at least March 2013, U.S. intelligence’s foremost southern concerns after Brazil were Colombia and Mexico. They were followed by Venezuela, Argentina, Ecuador, Panama, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Honduras, Paraguay, Chile, Peru and El Salvador respectively. During February 2013, the NSA gleaned its information from these nations using Boundless Informant and PRISM, the latter of which had been actively recording data from undersea fiber-optic cables as far back as 2007. Boundless Informant was used to chart how many domestic partnerships were being exploited by Fairview. In one case, telephone calls, faxes and emails were obtained through “Steelknight,” the code name for a regional private satellite operator. Colombia, Venezuela and Ecuador were monitored using XKeyscore during 2008.

Officials from various Latin American countries condemned the reports, which were epitomized by Gilberto Carvalho, aide to President Rousseff, stating a “very hard” response was in order, lest the American government “trample all over us tomorrow.”
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Argentina’s leader announced, “[These reports are] [m]ore than revelations, these are confirmations of what we thought was happening.” In anticipation of the Mercosur summit, when numerous Central and Latin American countries would meet at the end of the week to discuss free-trade agreements, President Kirchner expressed the hope that summit members would consent to issuing a strong, unified response and demand an explanation from the U.S. government.
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Brazil’s U.S. ambassador, Thomas Shannon, reportedly informed Brazil’s communications minister, Paulo Bernardo, that America does not conduct Brazilian surveillance and was not working with the nation’s communication providers.
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Shannon’s response unequivocally implicated private South American business owners. Whereas Greenwald’s findings in “U.S. spied on millions of e-mails and calls of Brazilians” suggest U.S. intelligence might have been tapping into foreign communications without the companies’ consent, the ambassador’s pronouncement clarified
The Guardian’s
“NSA and CIA have maintained staff in Brasilia to collect satellite data” use of the term “alliances.” American intelligence’s relationship with “private companies, owners, or operators” was literal and not the NSA’s euphemism for covert surveillance. It would later be revealed that Shannon (with the implication that all U.S. ambassadors) worked closely with the NSA.