Surveillance disclosures[edit]
Main article: Global surveillance disclosures (2013–present)
Size and scope of disclosures[edit]
The exact size of Snowden's disclosure is unknown,[92] but Australian officials have estimated 15,000 or more Australian intelligence files[93] and British officials estimate at least 58,000 British intelligence files were included.[94] NSA Director Keith Alexander initially estimated that Snowden had copied anywhere from 50,000 to 200,000 NSA documents.[95] Later estimates provided by U.S. officials were in the order of 1.7 million,[96] a number that originally came from Department of Defense talking points.[97] In July 2014, The Washington Post reported on a cache previously provided by Snowden from domestic NSA operations consisting of "roughly 160,000 intercepted e-mail and instant-message conversations, some of them hundreds of pages long, and 7,900 documents taken from more than 11,000 online accounts."[98] A U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency report declassified in June 2015 said that Snowden took 900,000 Department of Defense files, more than he downloaded from the NSA.[97]
Potential impact on U.S. national security[edit]
In March 2014, Army General Martin Dempsey, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told the House Armed Services Committee, "The vast majority of the documents that Snowden ... exfiltrated from our highest levels of security ... had nothing to do with exposing government oversight of domestic activities. The vast majority of those were related to our military capabilities, operations, tactics, techniques, and procedures."[99] When asked in a May 2014 interview to quantify the number of documents Snowden stole, retired NSA director Keith Alexander said there was no accurate way of counting what he took, but Snowden may have downloaded more than a million documents.[100] The September 15, 2016, HPSCI report[91] estimated the number of downloaded documents at 1.5 million.
In a 2013 Associated Press interview, Glenn Greenwald stated:
"In order to take documents with him that proved that what he was saying was true he had to take ones that included very sensitive, detailed blueprints of how the NSA does what they do."[101]
Thus the Snowden documents allegedly contained sensitive NSA blueprints detailing how the NSA operates, and which would allow someone who read them to evade or even duplicate NSA surveillance. Further, a July 20, 2015 New York Times article[102] reported that the terror group Islamic State (ISIS or ISIL) had studied revelations from Snowden, about how the United States gathered information on militants, the main result is that the group's top leaders used couriers or encrypted channels to avoid being tracked or monitoring of their communications by Western analysts.
According to Snowden, he did not indiscriminately turn over documents to journalists, stating that "I carefully evaluated every single document I disclosed to ensure that each was legitimately in the public interest. There are all sorts of documents that would have made a big impact that I didn't turn over"[10] and that "I have to screen everything before releasing it to journalists ... If I have time to go through this information, I would like to make it available to journalists in each country."[60] Despite these measures, the improper redaction of a document by The New York Times resulted in the exposure of intelligence activity against al-Qaeda.[103]
In June 2014, the NSA's recently installed director, U.S. Navy Admiral Michael S. Rogers, said that while some terrorist groups had altered their communications to avoid surveillance techniques revealed by Snowden, the damage done was not significant enough to conclude that "the sky is falling."[104] Nevertheless, in February 2015, Rogers said that Snowden's disclosures had a material impact on the NSA's detection and evaluation of terrorist activities worldwide.[105]
On June 14, 2015, the London Sunday Times reported that Russian and Chinese intelligence services had decrypted more than 1 million classified files in the Snowden cache, forcing the UK's MI6 intelligence agency to move agents out of live operations in hostile countries. Sir David Omand, a former director of the UK's GCHQ intelligence gathering agency, described it as a huge strategic setback that was harming Britain, America, and their NATO allies. The Sunday Times said it was not clear whether Russia and China stole Snowden's data or whether Snowden voluntarily handed it over to remain at liberty in Hong Kong and Moscow.[106][107] In April 2015, the Henry Jackson Society, a British neoconservative think tank, published a report claiming that Snowden's intelligence leaks negatively impacted Britain's ability to fight terrorism and organized crime.[108] Gus Hosein, executive director of Privacy International, criticized the report for, in his opinion, presuming that the public became concerned about privacy only after Snowden's disclosures.[109]
Release of NSA documents[edit]
Snowden's decision to leak NSA documents developed gradually following his March 2007 posting as a technician to the Geneva CIA station.[110] Snowden later made contact with Glenn Greenwald, a journalist working at The Guardian.[111] He contacted Greenwald anonymously as "Cincinnatus"[112][113] and said he had sensitive documents that he would like to share.[114] Greenwald found the measures that the source asked him to take to secure their communications, such as encrypting email, too annoying to employ. Snowden then contacted documentary filmmaker Laura Poitras in January 2013.[115] According to Poitras, Snowden chose to contact her after seeing her New York Times article about NSA whistleblower William Binney.[116] What originally attracted Snowden to Greenwald and Poitras was a Salon article written by Greenwald detailing how Poitras's controversial films had made her a target of the government.[114]
Greenwald began working with Snowden in either February[117] or April 2013, after Poitras asked Greenwald to meet her in New York City, at which point Snowden began providing documents to them.[111] Barton Gellman, writing for The Washington Post, says his first direct contact was on May 16, 2013.[118] According to Gellman, Snowden approached Greenwald after the Post declined to guarantee publication within 72 hours of all 41 PowerPoint slides that Snowden had leaked exposing the PRISM electronic data mining program, and to publish online an encrypted code allowing Snowden to later prove that he was the source.[118]
Snowden communicated using encrypted email,[115] and going by the codename "Verax". He asked not to be quoted at length for fear of identification by stylometry.[118]
According to Gellman, before their first meeting in person, Snowden wrote, "I understand that I will be made to suffer for my actions and that the return of this information to the public marks my end."[118] Snowden also told Gellman that until the articles were published, the journalists working with him would also be at mortal risk from the United States Intelligence Community "if they think you are the single point of failure that could stop this disclosure and make them the sole owner of this information."[118]
In May 2013, Snowden was permitted temporary leave from his position at the NSA in Hawaii, on the pretext of receiving treatment for his epilepsy.[10] In mid-May, Snowden gave an electronic interview to Poitras and Jacob Appelbaum which was published weeks later by Der Spiegel.[119]
After disclosing the copied documents, Snowden promised that nothing would stop subsequent disclosures. In June 2013, he said, "All I can say right now is the US government is not going to be able to cover this up by jailing or murdering me. Truth is coming, and it cannot be stopped."[120]
Publication[edit]
On May 20, 2013, Snowden flew to Hong Kong,[121] where he was staying when the initial articles based on the leaked documents were published,[122] beginning with The Guardian on June 5.[123] Greenwald later said Snowden disclosed 9,000 to 10,000 documents.[124]
Within months, documents had been obtained and published by media outlets worldwide, most notably The Guardian (Britain), Der Spiegel (Germany), The Washington Post and The New York Times (U.S.), O Globo (Brazil), Le Monde (France), and similar outlets in Sweden, Canada, Italy, Netherlands, Norway, Spain, and Australia.[125] In 2014, NBC broke its first story based on the leaked documents.[126] In February 2014, for reporting based on Snowden's leaks, journalists Glenn Greenwald, Laura Poitras, Barton Gellman and The Guardian′s Ewen MacAskill were honored as co-recipients of the 2013 George Polk Award, which they dedicated to Snowden.[127] The NSA reporting by these journalists also earned The Guardian and The Washington Post the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service[128] for exposing the "widespread surveillance" and for helping to spark a "huge public debate about the extent of the government's spying". The Guardian's chief editor, Alan Rusbridger, credited Snowden for having performed a public service.[129]
Revelations[edit]
Main article: Global surveillance disclosures (2013–present)
See also: PRISM (surveillance program) § Responses to disclosures
Slide from an NSA presentation on "Google Cloud Exploitation" from its MUSCULAR program;[130] the sketch shows where the "Public Internet" meets the internal "Google Cloud" where user data resides.[131]
Data visualization of U.S. intelligence black budget (2013)
The ongoing publication of leaked documents has revealed previously unknown details of a global surveillance apparatus run by the United States' NSA[132] in close cooperation with three of its four Five Eyes partners:
Australia's ASD,[133] the UK's GCHQ,[134] and Canada's CSEC.
PRISM: a clandestine surveillance program under which the NSA collects user data from companies like Microsoft, Google, Apple, Yahoo, Facebook and YouTube
On June 5, 2013, media reports documenting the existence and functions of classified surveillance programs and their scope began and continued throughout the entire year. The first program to be revealed was PRISM, which allows for court-approved direct access to Americans' Google and Yahoo accounts, reported from both The Washington Post and The Guardian published one hour apart.[130][136][137] Barton Gellman of The Washington Post was the first journalist to report on Snowden's documents. He said the U.S. government urged him not to specify by name which companies were involved, but Gellman decided that to name them "would make it real to Americans."[138] Reports also revealed details of Tempora, a secret British surveillance program run by the NSA's British partner, GCHQ.[139] The initial reports included details about NSA call database, Boundless Informant, and of a secret court order requiring Verizon to hand the NSA millions of Americans' phone records daily,[140] the surveillance of French citizens' phone and Internet records, and those of "high-profile individuals from the world of business or politics."[141][142][143] XKeyscore, an analytical tool that allows for collection of "almost anything done on the internet," was described by The Guardian as a program that shed light on one of Snowden's most controversial statements: "I, sitting at my desk [could] wiretap anyone, from you or your accountant, to a federal judge or even the president, if I had a personal email."[144]
The NSA's top-secret black budget, obtained from Snowden by The Washington Post, exposed the successes and failures of the 16 spy agencies comprising the U.S. intelligence community,[145] and revealed that the NSA was paying U.S. private tech companies for clandestine access to their communications networks.[146] The agencies were allotted $52 billion for the 2013 fiscal year.[147]
It was revealed that the NSA was harvesting millions of email and instant messaging contact lists,[148] searching email content,[149] tracking and mapping the location of cell phones,[150] undermining attempts at encryption via Bullrun[151][152] and that the agency was using cookies to piggyback on the same tools used by Internet advertisers "to pinpoint targets for government hacking and to bolster surveillance."[153] The NSA was shown to be secretly accessing Yahoo and Google data centers to collect information from hundreds of millions of account holders worldwide by tapping undersea cables using the MUSCULAR surveillance program.[130][131]
The NSA, the CIA and GCHQ spied on users of Second Life, Xbox Live and World of Warcraft, and attempted to recruit would-be informants from the sites, according to documents revealed in December 2013.[154][155] Leaked documents showed NSA agents also spied on their own "love interests," a practice NSA employees termed LOVEINT.[156][157] The NSA was shown to be tracking the online sexual activity of people they termed "radicalizers" in order to discredit them.[158] Following the revelation of Blackpearl, a program targeting private networks, the NSA was accused of extending beyond its primary mission of national security. The agency's intelligence-gathering operations had targeted, among others, oil giant Petrobras, Brazil's largest company.[159] The NSA and the GCHQ were also shown to be surveilling charities including UNICEF and Médecins du Monde, as well as allies such as European Commissioner Joaquín Almunia and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.[160]
In October 2013, Glenn Greenwald said "the most shocking and significant stories are the ones we are still working on, and have yet to publish."[161] In November, The Guardian's editor-in-chief Alan Rusbridger said that only one percent of the documents had been published.[162] In December, Australia's Minister for Defence David Johnston said his government assumed the worst was yet to come.[163]
By October 2013, Snowden's disclosures had created tensions[164][165] between the U.S. and some of its close allies after they revealed that the U.S. had spied on Brazil, France, Mexico,[166] Britain,[167] China,[168] Germany,[169] and Spain,[170] as well as 35 world leaders,[171] most notably German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who said "spying among friends" was unacceptable[172][173] and compared the NSA with the Stasi.[174] Leaked documents published by Der Spiegel in 2014 appeared to show that the NSA had targeted 122 high-ranking leaders.[175]
An NSA mission statement titled "SIGINT Strategy 2012-2016" affirmed that the NSA had plans for the continued expansion of surveillance activities. Their stated goal was to "dramatically increase mastery of the global network" and to acquire adversaries' data from "anyone, anytime, anywhere."[176] Leaked slides revealed in Greenwald's book No Place to Hide, released in May 2014, showed that the NSA's stated objective was to "Collect it All," "Process it All," "Exploit it All," "Partner it All," "Sniff it All" and "Know it All."[177]
Snowden said in a January 2014 interview with German television that the NSA does not limit its data collection to national security issues, accusing the agency of conducting industrial espionage. Using the example of German company Siemens, he said, "If there's information at Siemens that's beneficial to US national interests—even if it doesn't have anything to do with national security—then they'll take that information nevertheless."[178] In the wake of Snowden's revelations and in response to an inquiry from the Left Party, Germany's domestic security agency Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz (BfV) investigated and found no concrete evidence that the U.S. conducted economic or industrial espionage in Germany.[179]
In February 2014, during testimony to the European Union, Snowden said of the remaining undisclosed programs, "I will leave the public interest determinations as to which of these may be safely disclosed to responsible journalists in coordination with government stakeholders."[180]
In March 2014, documents disclosed by Glenn Greenwald writing for The Intercept showed the NSA, in cooperation with the GCHQ, has plans to infect millions of computers with malware using a program called TURBINE.[181] Revelations included information about QUANTUMHAND, a program through which the NSA set up a fake Facebook server to intercept connections.[181]
According to a report in The Washington Post in July 2014, relying on information furnished by Snowden, 90% of those placed under surveillance in the U.S. are ordinary Americans and are not the intended targets. The newspaper said it had examined documents including emails, message texts, and online accounts that support the claim.[182]
In an August 2014 interview, Snowden for the first time disclosed a cyberwarfare program in the works, codenamed MonsterMind, that would automate the detection of a foreign cyberattack as it began and automatically fire back. "These attacks can be spoofed," said Snowden. "You could have someone sitting in China, for example, making it appear that one of these attacks is originating in Russia. And then we end up shooting back at a Russian hospital. What happens next?"[28]
Motivations[edit]
Snowden speaks about the NSA leaks, in Hong Kong, filmed by Laura Poitras.
Snowden first contemplated leaking confidential documents around 2008 but held back, partly because he believed the newly elected Barack Obama might introduce reforms.[4] After the disclosures, his identity was made public by The Guardian at his request on June 9, 2013.[117] "I do not want to live in a world where everything I do and say is recorded," he said. "My sole motive is to inform the public as to that which is done in their name and that which is done against them."[121]
Snowden said he wanted to "embolden others to step forward" by demonstrating that "they can win."[118] He also said that the system for reporting problems did not work. "You have to report wrongdoing to those most responsible for it." He cited a lack of whistleblower protection for government contractors, the use of the Espionage Act of 1917 to prosecute leakers and the belief that had he used internal mechanisms to "sound the alarm," his revelations "would have been buried forever."[110][183]
In December 2013, upon learning that a U.S. federal judge had ruled the collection of U.S. phone metadata conducted by the NSA as likely unconstitutional, Snowden said, "I acted on my belief that the NSA's mass surveillance programs would not withstand a constitutional challenge, and that the American public deserved a chance to see these issues determined by open courts ... today, a secret program authorized by a secret court was, when exposed to the light of day, found to violate Americans' rights."[184]
In January 2014, Snowden said his "breaking point" was "seeing the Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, directly lie under oath to Congress."[57] This referred to testimony on March 12, 2013—three months after Snowden first sought to share thousands of NSA documents with Greenwald,[111] and nine months after the NSA says Snowden made his first illegal downloads during the summer of 2012[4]—in which Clapper denied to the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence that the NSA wittingly collects data on millions of Americans.[185] Snowden said, "There's no saving an intelligence community that believes it can lie to the public and the legislators who need to be able to trust it and regulate its actions. Seeing that really meant for me there was no going back. Beyond that, it was the creeping realization that no one else was going to do this. The public had a right to know about these programs."[186] In March 2014, Snowden said he had reported policy or legal issues related to spying programs to more than ten officials, but as a contractor had no legal avenue to pursue further whistleblowing.[84]
New Zealand[edit]
Snowden made a number of claims about the Government Communications Security Bureau (GCSB) of New Zealand. He accused the agency of conducting surveillance on New Zealand citizens and engaging in espionage between 2008 and 2016, when John Key served as the Prime Minister of New Zealand.[187][188]
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