How America Lost Its Secrets Read online

  It was remarkable that even in such an “open culture,” Snowden’s CryptoParty, Tor station, and other anti-NSA activities could go unremarked upon. After all, ten or so NSA workers attended the first party, and it is not unlikely that many of them recognized him as their co-worker. If so, they knew (as did Sandvik and Mills) that the Tor advocate “Cincinnatus” was Snowden. He had also not been shy in contacting notable enemies of the NSA via e-mail, such as Jacob Appelbaum, Parker Higgins, and Asher Wolf. If anyone, including the security staff of the NSA, had been on the lookout for dissident intelligence workers, this well-advertised gathering and its organizer might have been of interest.

  In 2014, I asked a former top NSA executive whether such activities on behalf of Tor by an NSA employee would arouse the attention of the NSA’s own “Q” counterespionage unit. He answered, “Snowden was not an NSA employee.” Because Snowden was a contract employee of Dell’s residing in the United States, the NSA could not legally monitor his private activities or intercept his communication. To do so would require a court-approved FBI request. So Snowden/Cincinnatus was free to operate openly in recruiting NSA workers, hacktivists, and computer buffs for his events. Ironically, adversary intelligence services searching for disgruntled intelligence workers had no such constraints.

  CHAPTER 7

  String Puller

  It wasn’t that they put it on me as an individual—that I’m uniquely qualified [or] an angel descending from the heavens—as that they put it on someone, somewhere.

  —EDWARD SNOWDEN, Moscow, 2013

  DOWNLOADING NSA documents was not Snowden’s only rogue activity while working at the NSA for Dell in 2012. Three weeks after the CryptoParty, Snowden began anonymously contacting a high-profile journalist. He used the same alias, Cincinnatus, that he used with Sandvik and to advertise the Oahu CryptoParty. The journalist to whom he wrote on December 1, 2012, was Glenn Greenwald, the previously mentioned Rio-based columnist for The Guardian.

  Greenwald had not always been an activist journalist. He had been a litigation lawyer at the elite New York firm of Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz. He was also an entrepreneur, owning part of Master Notions, a company that, among other things, had a 50 percent financial interest in the pornographic website HJ (an acronym that originally stood for “Hairy Jock”). All did not go well with this enterprise. In 2004, Greenwald became involved in an acrimonious lawsuit with his other associates in HJ. As a result, he had a number of open legal judgments filed against him, including an $85,000 lien by the IRS.

  After resigning from his law firm in 2005, he moved to Rio de Janeiro and began a new career as a blogger for the Internet magazine Salon. He wrote fierce, and often brilliant, polemics against U.S. government surveillance and other perceived intrusions on personal privacy. The extent of his bitter antagonism toward the activities of the “surveillance state,” as he called it, was reflected in the title of his 2006 book, How Would a Patriot Act? Defending American Values from a President Run Amok. His position on surveillance was unrelenting, even when it came to the president. “By ordering illegal eavesdropping, the president had committed crimes and should be held accountable for them,” Greenwald wrote. When Barack Obama became president in 2009, Greenwald also attacked him for breaking the law by “ordering illegal eavesdropping.” Because of his opposition to Obama, he contributed money to the libertarian campaign of Ron Paul, the same candidate to whom Snowden gave money.

  In August 2012, he had transferred his provocative blog, which had amassed a following of nearly one million readers (including Snowden), from Salon to The Guardian. The British newspaper shared his powerful anti-surveillance position, having first published the WikiLeaks documents that had been illicitly leaked by Manning and published by Assange in 2010.

  Greenwald was an activist as well as a journalist. He joined the board of directors of the Freedom of the Press Foundation (eventually Runa Sandvik would join too). It had been set up expressly to funnel money to both Assange’s WikiLeaks site and the defense fund for Manning after he was arrested. Such a financial intermediary was necessary because American credit card companies were blocking money transfers to these two causes in 2012. This “blockade” was taking its toll on WikiLeaks. According to Assange, “WikiLeaks had been cut off from more than 90 percent of its finances.” The Freedom of the Press Foundation came to its rescue. John Perry Barlow, one of the songwriters for the Grateful Dead, was one of its chief financial backers. “The first serious info war is now engaged,” Barlow declared. “The field of battle is WikiLeaks.” He served with Greenwald and Poitras on its board.

  Snowden was an avid reader of Greenwald’s screeds against the government. If he were to assume the role of a modern-day Prometheus, delivering forbidden NSA secrets to the public, Greenwald would be a logical candidate to break the story. Snowden could safely assume that Greenwald would be sympathetic to exposing NSA surveillance from his many blogs, tweets, and YouTube comments on the subject. For example, on November 13, 2012, just eighteen days before Snowden contacted him, Greenwald had written a blog for The Guardian asserting that the United States was “a surveillance state run amok.” In it, echoing very closely what Snowden said at his CryptoParty, Greenwald wrote, “Any remnants of internet anonymity have been all but obliterated between the state and technology companies.” Citing a story in The Washington Post, he continued, “Every day, collection systems at the National Security Agency intercept and store 1.7 billion e-mails, phone calls and other types of communications.”

  As a result, Greenwald called for action in that blog posting, writing, “The US operates a sprawling, unaccountable Surveillance State that, in violent breach of the core guarantees of the Fourth Amendment, monitors and records virtually everything even the most law-abiding citizens do.” That same week, Snowden invited Runa Sandvik to co-host his CryptoParty.

  One problem for Snowden in reaching out to Greenwald was Greenwald’s lack of any encryption for his e-mails. Communicating with a journalist like Greenwald who famously attacked the very organization for which Snowden worked was itself a risky undertaking, especially if he wanted to pass classified NSA documents to him. If his e-mails were intercepted by the NSA in Brazil (where Greenwald lived) and where the NSA was not restricted by U.S. law, he could lose his job or even be arrested. As Cincinnatus, he told Greenwald that he needed to immediately encrypt his computer. To make his point, he cited Greenwald’s November 12, 2012, blog. In it, Greenwald noted that General David Petraeus, then the CIA director, had been caught in a sex scandal because his personal e-mails had been intercepted. Snowden wrote to Greenwald that Petraeus would not have been exposed if he had used encryption. Snowden sent Greenwald instructions on how to install the necessary encryption software and a link to a twelve-minute video on encryption (which might have been the same video he used at his CryptoParty a few weeks earlier).

  Greenwald did not manage to encrypt his computer, however, and Snowden, unwilling to deal with Greenwald through an unencrypted channel, broke off contact with him in January 2013. Even so, he did not give up his plan of using Greenwald in his enterprise. He merely sought an intermediary who used encryption.

  He chose Laura Poitras. He knew she and Greenwald were founding board members of the Freedom of the Press Foundation. Greenwald had written about her extensively. For example, he wrote an entire blog about her confrontation with the U.S. government and her plans to make a documentary about the “US Government’s increasing powers of domestic surveillance [through] its expanding covert domestic NSA activities.”

  Since 2011, Poitras had been diligently filming the construction of a massive NSA repository for data in Bluffdale, Utah. In the anti-surveillance culture, the structure had become symbolic of the powers of the NSA. In fact, it was the same NSA site that Parker Higgins photographed from a blimp in the fall of 2013 and posted on the Internet after Poitras had released her documentary about the NSA’s use of the Bluffdale repository for domestic spying.

 
; Aside from her connections with Greenwald, Poitras had other impressive credentials. Born in 1964 in Boston, she came from a wealthy family that donated large sums of money to philanthropic causes, including $20 million for research on bipolar disorders. After graduating from the New School for Public Engagement in 1996, she pursued a career as an activist filmmaker. Her focus quickly became exposing NSA surveillance. One of her short documentaries about the NSA’s domestic surveillance program was featured on the New York Times website and attracted enormous attention in 2012. As a dedicated opponent of the surveillance state, she participated in public events with William Binney, the ex-NSA whistle-blower, and Jacob Appelbaum. In April 2012, for example, she made a presentation at the Whitney Museum in New York with Binney and Appelbaum. She had become such a leading activist against the NSA by December 2012 that Appelbaum, after lauding her work, interspersed clips from her short film in his keynote address at the Chaos Computer Club convention of hacktivists in Berlin that month.

  Snowden also closely followed her rise in this world. By simply googling Poitras’s name in January 2013, he would have learned about her connections with Greenwald, Appelbaum, Binney, Assange, and other leading figures in the anti-surveillance camp. When asked later by Poitras why he had chosen her to help him, Snowden replied, “I didn’t. You chose yourself.” The problem for Snowden was anonymously drawing her into his enterprise.

  Poitras was living in Berlin in January 2013, which made her vulnerable to NSA surveillance. To get to her through an encrypted channel, Snowden chose a circuitous approach. On January 11, he wrote to Micah Lee in Berkeley, California. Given Lee’s residence in the United States, as Snowden knew, the NSA would be legally barred from monitoring his communications without a warrant. He used Lee, who was the chief technology officer at the Freedom of the Press Foundation, as the encrypted gateway to Poitras. Lee was also well-connected to others whom Snowden had contacted for his CryptoParty. Lee had been an associate of Runa Sandvik’s at Tor and was a prominent member of Noisebridge, an eclectic anti-government hackers’ commune based in Northern California, of which Appelbaum was also a member.

  To contact Lee, Snowden chose the alias Anon108. Anon is an alias frequently used by members of the Anonymous commune of hacktivists. “I’m a friend,” Snowden wrote to Lee. “I need to get information securely to Laura Poitras and her alone, but I can’t find an email gpg key for her.” The “gpg” encryption key he asked for, more commonly called a PGP key, was the so-called public key for an encryption system called Pretty Good Privacy, or, for short, PGP. This encryption system required both a public and a private key. Snowden asked Lee to provide the former one, because Poitras had the latter one. Lee wrote to Poitras about Anon108. The next day, with the approval of Poitras, Lee supplied Poitras’s public key to Snowden, or, as he knew him, Anon108.

  With it, Snowden contacted Poitras directly. He asked her as a first step to open an anonymous e-mail account using Tor software. Poitras later wrote about this initial contact, “I was at that point filming with several people who were all being targeted by the [U.S.] government.” Many of the people she was filming, including Appelbaum, Assange, Binney, and the former NSA employee Thomas Drake, could attract interest by U.S. or foreign intelligence services.

  Snowden asked Poitras to take out a new enciphering key to use exclusively for her liaison with him. It provided them both with an extra layer of protection from any surveillance by law enforcement. Presumably, she accommodated his requests because she anticipated that the anonymous person would use this encrypted channel to send her highly sensitive material.

  On January 23, Snowden wrote to Poitras under yet another alias. This time he called himself Citizen Four. He wrote, “At this stage I can offer nothing more than my word.” He then said falsely, “I am a senior government employee in the intelligence community.” She had no way of knowing at this “stage” that despite giving her his “word,” he was not who he claimed to be. He was not a “government employee,” he was not a “senior” official, and he was not a member of the “intelligence community” (which is composed of the intelligence services of the U.S. government). He would later also claim to her that he had been “a senior adviser to the CIA” and “a senior adviser to the DIA.” That was untrue, too. In January 2013, he was merely a contract employee of Dell’s working as a computer technician at the NSA base in Hawaii.

  Snowden told her in his initial e-mail that he was well acquainted with her career as an anti-surveillance activist. He said that he had read Greenwald’s account in Salon that past April, a blog in which Greenwald detailed the forty times in which Poitras was searched by U.S. authorities. The story also said that Poitras believed she was on a special watch list and under constant U.S. government surveillance. She had come under such scrutiny by U.S. authorities, it turned out, because of her documentary about American military abuses of civilians in Iraq in 2006, titled My Country, My Country. While filming it, she was at a place close to an insurgent ambush of U.S. troops in Iraq. Her presence at the ambush site led army intelligence officers to suspect (without any evidence) that she might have been tipped off by the insurgents. She firmly denied the charge, and the government never substantiated it. Even so, because of this incident, since 2006 she had been kept on a list that caused authorities to search her at airports. As a result, she took elaborate countermeasures to evade any possible surveillance of her communications.

  Snowden knew about this incident because Greenwald described it in great detail in a blog that Snowden read (as he later told Greenwald). “Poitras is now forced to take extreme steps—ones that hamper her ability to do her work,” Greenwald wrote. “She now avoids traveling with any electronic devices. She uses alternative methods to deliver the most sensitive parts of her work—raw film and interview notes—to secure locations. She spends substantial time and resources protecting her computers with encryption and password defenses. Especially when she is in the US, she avoids talking on the phone about her work, particularly to sources. And she simply will not edit her films at her home out of fear—obviously well grounded—that government agents will attempt to search and seize the raw footage.” She claimed, as she told journalists, she was the victim of “Kafkaesque government harassment.”

  Snowden was duly impressed with her concerns about government surveillance, which he agreed was ubiquitous. Indeed, he later described her as “more paranoid when it comes to electronic security than I can be.” He meant it as a compliment. Such functional paranoia or “operational security,” as Greenwald would call the precautions that she took, dovetailed with Snowden’s growing conviction that universal encryption was necessary to defeat the surveillance state. It also made her the perfect channel for Snowden to safely pass some of the classified documents he stole to Greenwald and other journalists.

  It was not difficult to get her to cooperate in his plot. He wrote, for example, “The surveillance you’ve experienced means you have been ‘selected’—a term which will mean more to you as you learn how the modern SIGINT [signals intelligence] system works.” Just as she had been “chosen” by her work to act as his conduit, according to Snowden, she had been chosen by the NSA as a target because of her work. The idea of her being “selected” by an invisible signals intelligence agency, the NSA, could only excite her longtime concerns about being watched by the government.

  “Your victimization by the NSA system means that you are well aware of the threat that [the NSA’s] unrestricted, secret abilities pose for democracies,” he continued. “I hope you understand that contacting you is extremely high risk and if you are willing to agree to the following precautions before I share more, this will not be a waste of your time.” Further playing on her concern, he asked her to confirm to him “that no one has ever had a copy of your private key and that it uses a strong pass phrase.” Such precautions were necessary because “your adversary is capable of one trillion guesses per second.” That “adversary” was, as she knew from her prev
ious film, the NSA. At this point, she knew she was entering into a dangerous liaison with an unknown party in pursuit of NSA secrets. She wondered if he might be part of a plan to entrap her or her contacts like Assange and Appelbaum, as she noted in her diary. “Is C4 a trap?” she asked herself, referring to her Citizen Four source. “Will he put me in prison?”

  To elude this “adversary,” Snowden stressed to Poitras that she would have to adopt a conspiratorial frame of mind. “If the device you store the private key and enter your pass phrase on has been hacked, it is trivial to decrypt our communications,” he explained. “If you publish the source material, I will likely be immediately implicated.” If her correspondent could be “immediately implicated,” it meant that he was a person authorized to handle these secrets. So Poitras knew, as early as January 2013, that she was creating an encrypted channel for someone with access to NSA secrets who would be incriminated by providing them to her.

  The key source for Poitras’s previously referred to short video was Binney. Like her new source, he had been authorized to handle NSA secrets. Binney had been an NSA technical director until he had retired in 2001. The NSA’s domestic surveillance program that Binney told the press about years before being interviewed in Poitras’s film was called Stellarwind. It involved data mining domestic communications and financial transactions that had been authorized by President George W. Bush in 2001 after 9/11 as commander-in-chief under the war powers given to him following the attacks. It indeed led to a major exposé on domestic spying by The New York Times in December 2005.