The Edward Snowden Affair (39 page)

The ability for intelligence agencies to use cell phones to spy on their owners is the result of the evolution of cellular technology. Cellular communication had gone from the basic cell phone which was only able to make and receive calls, to the “feature phone” that had the capability to receive texts and emails (and, later in its development, take pictures), to the smartphone which is a handheld computer. Poitras reports that half of mobile subscribers in Germany, over two-thirds of the British and 50 percent of Americans who own a cell phone—130 million—have smartphones. The three main types of smartphones are Apple’s iPhone, Google’s Android and the independently owned Canadian BlackBerry.

In early 2013 smartphones surpassed feature phone sales.
¹³²
Because of smartphones’ popularity, prevalence and capability, the NSA had found its long-awaited surveillance Mecca. An NSA presentation asks the analyst, “Does your target have a smartphone?” and lists spying techniques which can be used to exploit iPhones. The NSA has the ability to monitor 38 features and four operating systems of the Apple product. This includes a phone’s texting, voicemail, photos, Facebook and Yahoo messenger features. The agency can tell where a smartphone owner has been, is, and plans to be through a user’s Google Earth searches, GPS and mapping programs. The NSA acknowledges the process is made even easier because most users don’t know these features have been activated. In most cases, the factory default for these programs is set to initiate when the phone is turned on for the first time.

This is not a new discovery. In late 2011 a systems administrator named Trevor Eckhart found that software designed by Carrier IQ was programmed to record dialed numbers (even if they are not transmitted), texts, Internet searches and keystrokes. The information was then relayed to the phone’s provider which, by law, would be available to the NSA. Contrary to telecoms’ denials, statistics suggest Carrier IQ’s product was installed on virtually every smartphone. Andrew Coward, a Carrier IQ marketing manager, confirmed the report.
¹³³
Nine days later, the company adamantly refuted Coward’s statement. Echkart was presented a cease-and-desist letter. When the Electronic Frontier Foundation offered the computer technician legal assistance, Carrier IQ suddenly backed down.
¹³⁴

Poitras reports that additional classified data shows family photos, images of war zones and group pictures of friends that the NSA had stolen from smartphones. One picture is a self-portrait by a former foreign government official. Poitras suggests it is pornographic. U.S. intelligence can even tell where pictures were taken. A photo’s GPS is inserted into the code of every picture captured by a smartphone as an Exif tag.

However, as witnessed in Snowden’s precaution of having Greenwald, Poitras, Harrison and Russian attorneys remove the batteries and place their phones in the refrigerator, merely disabling these features is futile. Cell phones are designed to run at a low frequency even when they are turned off. This is perhaps one of the reasons why many models of smartphones have imbedded, or built-in, power sources. American intelligence calls the covert espionage capability “The Find.” It was first utilized in 2004 and uses a type of spyware which is installed when a person innocently agrees to download a product update.
¹³⁵
It was discovered in 2009 when a design flaw in the spyware crashed servers.
¹³⁶
But Snowden wasn’t merely attempting to keep his location a secret. He didn’t want U.S. intelligence hearing what he had to say. The ability for authorities to remotely listen to conversations even when a phone is turned off was revealed in a 2006 court ruling.
¹³⁷

Even the smartphone which is marketed on its reputation for security has been compromised by the NSA. Poitras includes a screenshot of an instructional slide titled, “Your target is using a BlackBerry? Now what?” It contains a BlackBerry’s decrypted email from a Mexican government agency. Because of its security features, BlackBerry was once the preferred cell phone for government employees. Now less than half of federal workers use the product.

Poitras states that users make it even simpler for the NSA to spy. Because most smartphone owners have their phones programmed to “synch” or relay all of the phone’s data to their personal computer, the NSA has two outlets to retrieve information. But the particulars are not important because a three-frame overview
¹³⁸
labeled “Top Secret” and titled, “iPhone Location Services” reveals the NSA’s attitude, approach and capabilities.

The first slide, which bears the caption, “Who knew in 1984 … ,” contains two pictures from Ridley Scott’s iconographic Apple commercial which aired during that year’s Super Bowl. The advertisement is an adaptation of a scene from George Orwell’s classic 1949 dystopian tale,
Nineteen Eighty Four
. It is thematically relevant because Orwell presents a totalitarian state which is under constant and absolute government surveillance. The next slide shows former Apple co-founder and CEO Steven Jobs presenting the latest iPhone to audiences. The caption continues from the first slide, “ … that this would be big brother … .” This is referring to the cell phone and not Jobs. Big Brother is the metaphor for the omnipresent eye in Orwell’s novel. The last slide houses two pictures: an enthralled, dancing customer who has just purchased an iPhone and a person with “iPhone 4” painted on his cheek. The caption finishes the sentence, “ … and the zombies would be paying customers?”

“Who knew in 1984 that this would be big brother, and the zombies would be paying customers?” The individuals in the final slide do not appear to be terrorists.

The NSA had turned the people’s phones against them. The intelligence agency even mocks the fact that the watched are, through their own taxes, paying the watchers to spy on them. The “zombies” don’t even own the legal rights to the phones which are tracking their every move and thought. When a cell phone’s contract is paid off, the phone’s owner receives an “unlock code” which is essentially the digital deed to the device. Only after the code is entered, thereby “rooting” the phone, can a person have complete control over the machine’s programming. (In January 2013, Congress made it illegal to unlock a cell phone without the provider’s consent.)
¹³⁹
Until then, because the phone is property of the manufacturer, the company decides which programs are mandatory. Obama’s reassurance on August 9 that skeptics of federal oversight can rely on private industry to develop and provide privacy measures was insulting to all but the most uninitiated. The businesses offering the technology were issued court orders and paid millions of dollars to obtain and surrender user data to the government. The communications providers and U.S. government have little worry that the masses will one day control their phones. Long before most smartphone owners pay off their contact, they are hungry for the latest technology and freely enter into another agreement. Until then, the phone as well as the data within it is property of the provider.

As the last slide states, the irony is that the government didn’t have to convince or coerce its citizens that surveillance was necessary. Nor did it have to spend money to do so. The watched have shown they are willing and eager to hand over their rights and hundreds of thousands of dollars for what is essentially government surveillance tools disguised as an all-in-one phone, computer and personal manager. There are even biometric apps that users can download free of charge. They monitor sleep patterns, recognize fingerprints and track walking and running rates. Most smartphones come equipped with voice recognition software. Moreover, smartphone clients are not only allowing themselves to be freely surveilled, they are working for American intelligence. With Exif tags, the NSA is able to create a layout of the inside of a building, business or home without having to place bugs or implants within the facility because smartphone users are unconsciously acting as undercover spy agents each time they take a picture.

The U.S. government had been watching its citizens since the advent of the telegram, but only recently has it been able to do so with near-absolute precision, accuracy and mind-numbing ease. Though it was inevitable, it had been predictable. Since the time of the wired cable, each step of technology afforded the U.S. government greater and greater surveillance opportunities. From the widespread use of the telephone to the advent of the Internet, federal spies clipped the heels of technology as it moved toward the panopticon. The NSA is correct, 1984 is now.

^#
All material from
The Wall Street Journal
is based on secondary sources. The publication refused to provide primary documentation.

–Benjamin Franklin,
Memoirs
¹

D
OES THE
U.S.
GOVERNMENT INTENTIONALLY
, exclusively spy on innocent Americans?

Former intelligence workers, the press and foreign governments claim it does; the White House, NSA and American corporations swear it does not. Everyone has an opinion but one thing is obvious. The intelligence community has the necessary ingredients. It possesses both capability and initiative. The next stage of surveillance, biometrics, is no longer science fiction. The newest wave of technology isn’t sauntering up the porch steps and preparing to ring the doorbell. People are holding it in their hands. The newest incarnation of iPhones offer fingerprint identification. Most every smartphone comes equipped with voice recognition. (The iPhone’s program title even sounds like an intelligence code name: “Siri.”) People can freely download sleep analysis software. The newest gaming consoles house environmental scanners which detect motion, tracks players’ heart rates and conduct motion-pattern analysis, which reads and creates a physiological fingerprint of an individual’s unique body movements and mannerisms. As novelist John Lanchester noted, “Members of the security establishment always want more abilities, more tools, more powers for themselves and fewer rights for us. They never say ‘thanks a lot, we’re good from here, we have everything we need.’”
²
Governments across the globe continue to put immense amounts of time, labor and taxpayer money into creating a comprehensive Big Brother program and they intend to make the electronic panopticon a reality by any means necessary. As the joint encryption exposés make clear, private industry’s compliance with government surveillance will be achieved through willful participation, court order, social engineering or outright theft. Those in power have also proven they are willing to go to great lengths to keep people from seeing what lies behind the lead-lined surveillance curtain.

Some argue America is on the brink of an all-seeing electronic eye, that the surveillance state has already arrived, and Tony Scott’s 1998 action thriller
Enemy of the State
is now a domestic drama. Lanchester observed a surveillance state—like a police state—is not one where there are watchmen on every corner. It is a world in which the spies are free to do whatever they want.
³
Surveillance laws are drawn so broadly almost anything is permitted. In Snowden’s terms, the aperture is very, very wide. Through the gerrymandering of language and the aid of a hidden court’s covert rulings, incidental collection is not viewed as illicit since it is not “direct” spying on Americans; investigations are green lit without “factual predication” because the U.S. government never bothered installing the same system of checks and balances found in local courts; any communication involving a foreigner is considered fair game, as is collected data since only metadata is protected by law; no “reasonable expectations” exist for the privacy of communication records; surveillance is permitted if it can be argued an American is
likely
to receive, not terrorist, but foreign intelligence; any data an analyst can categorize as “suspicious stuff” is pursued; the permissible contact chaining limit leaves less than a 15 percent chance a random U.S. citizen has not been monitored; all while U.S. intelligence has designated the terms “exercise,” “prevention,” “response,” “metro,” “forest fire,” “recall,” “power,” “smart,” “ice,” “help,” “pork,” “cancelled,” “recovery” and “watch” as dangerous and cause for immediate review.
⁴
U.S. intelligence has abandoned using a spy dragnet on its citizens; on paper, it now has the legal license to cloak the entire country in a surveillance blanket.

Many hope the worst has past. The world stared into the surveillance abyss when it learned Boundless Informant’s existence had been hidden from Congress, the FISC ruled against another program which had been in operation for months before the court was aware it even existed and millions of dollars of the Black Budget are unaccounted in the congressional record. It is natural to wonder what else is going on that only the watchers know about. The nation shook when White House Press Secretary Jay Carney tried legitimizing illicit international espionage by declaring, “As a matter of policy, we have made clear that we do what other nations do, which is gather foreign intelligence.”
⁵
The “everyone is jumping off a bridge” approach to political decision-making left the American populace crossing its fingers, praying Washington doesn’t adopt the same line of reasoning when debating the topic of Syrian genocide.