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July 12 - July 28, 2016
The lesson for me was clear: national security officials do not like the light. They act abusively and thuggishly only when they believe they are safe, in the dark. Secrecy is the linchpin of abuse of power, we discovered, its enabling force. Transparency is the only real antidote.
but only through OTR (off-the-record) chat, an encrypted instrument for talking online securely.
program called PRISM, which allowed the NSA to collect private communications from the world’s largest Internet companies, including Facebook, Google, Yahoo!, and Skype.
“I want to spark a worldwide debate about privacy, Internet freedom, and the dangers of state surveillance,” he said. “I’m not afraid of what will happen to me. I’ve accepted that my life will likely be over from my doing this. I’m at peace with that. I know it’s the right thing to do.”
I kept apologizing for my lack of proficiency, for having to take hours of his time to teach me the most basic aspects of secure communication.
“I don’t think we should talk about this on the phone, and definitely not by Skype,” she wisely said, and she proposed that I get on a plane to New York immediately so that we could discuss the story in person.
Worrying how naive the author is about security considering prior revelations. Skype was listed in one document!
Five Eyes—the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand—have inflicted upon the world a system of secret, pervasive surveillance from which there is no refuge. They protect their domestic systems from the oversight of citizenry through classification and lies, and shield themselves from outrage in the event of leaks by overemphasizing limited protections they choose to grant the governed.…
had never seen a FISA court order before. Almost nobody had. The court is one of the most secretive institutions in the government. All of its rulings are automatically designated top secret, and only a small handful of people are authorized to access its decisions.
The source had given us clear proof that NSA officials had lied to Congress, directly and repeatedly, about the agency’s activities. For years, various senators had asked the NSA for a rough estimate of how many Americans were having their calls and emails intercepted. The officials insisted they were unable to answer because they did not and could not maintain such data:
but citizenship carries with it a duty to first police one’s own government before seeking to correct others.
any future investigations ruled out on the principle that holding those who abuse power to account is against the national interest,
you seek to help, join the open source community and fight to keep the spirit of the press alive and the Internet free. I have been to the darkest corners of government, and what they fear is light.
“The true measurement of a person’s worth isn’t what they say they believe in, but what they do in defense of those beliefs,”
Above all else, they invariably give great weight to official claims, even when those claims are patently false or deceitful. It was that fear-driven, obsequious journalism that led the Times, the Post, and many other outlets to refuse to use the word “torture” in their reporting on Bush interrogation techniques, even though they freely used that word to describe the exact same tactics when used by other governments around the world.
suggested that we try Cryptocat, a recently released program designed to impede state surveillance that became our primary means of communication throughout my time in Hong Kong.
it was revealed that the Obama Justice Department had obtained a court order to read through the emails and telephone records of reporters and editors from the Associated Press to find their source for a story.
Journalists had noted for several years that the Obama administration was waging unprecedented attacks on journalism.
The documents left no doubt that the NSA was equally involved in economic espionage, diplomatic spying, and suspicionless surveillance aimed at entire populations.
Meanwhile, the STORMBREW program, conducted in “close partnership with the FBI,” gives the NSA access to Internet and telephone traffic that enters the United States at various “choke points” on US soil. It exploits the fact that the vast majority of the world’s Internet traffic at some point flows through the US communications infrastructure—a residual by-product of the central role that the United States had played in developing the network.
Most famously, his archive included the PRISM documents, which detailed secret agreements between the NSA and the world’s largest Internet companies—Facebook, Yahoo!, Apple, Google—as well as extensive efforts by Microsoft to provide the agency with access to its communications platforms such as Outlook.
best seen in the documents relating to Microsoft, which reveal the company’s vigorous efforts to give the NSA access to several of its most used online services, including SkyDrive, Skype, and Outlook.com.
“We believe it’s important that you have control over who can and cannot access your personal data in the cloud,” Microsoft’s SkyDrive website proclaims. Yet as an NSA document details, Microsoft spent “many months” working to provide the government with easier access to that data:
In late 2011, Microsoft purchased Skype, the Internet-based telephone and chat service with over 663 million registered users. At the time of its purchase, Microsoft assured users that “Skype is committed to respecting your privacy and the confidentiality of your personal data, traffic, and communications content.” But in fact, this data, too, was readily available to the government.
In addition to such sweeping surveillance, though, the NSA also carries out what it calls Computer Network Exploitation (CNE), placing malware in individual computers to surveil their users. When the agency succeeds in inserting such malware, it is able, in NSA terminology, to “own” the computer: to view every keystroke entered and every screen viewed.
The Five Eyes relationship is so close that member governments place the NSA’s desires above the privacy of their own citizens. The Guardian reported on one 2007 memo, for instance, describing an agreement “that allowed the agency to ‘unmask’ and hold on to personal data about Britons that had previously been off limits.” Additionally, the rules were changed in 2007 “to allow the NSA to analyse and retain any British citizens’ mobile phone and fax numbers, emails and IP addresses swept up by its dragnet.”
details how the United States takes the unusual step of routinely sharing with Israel raw intelligence containing the communications of American citizens. Among the data furnished to Israel are “unevaluated and unminimized transcripts, gists, facsimiles, telex, voice, and Digital Network Intelligence metadata and content.”
But the third tier also includes countries ranging from the generally friendly to neutral, such as Brazil, Mexico, Argentina, Indonesia, Kenya, and South Africa.
The NSA is the definitive rogue agency: empowered to do whatever it wants with very little control, transparency, or accountability.
Much of the Snowden archive revealed what can only be called economic espionage: eavesdropping and email interception aimed at the Brazilian oil giant Petrobras, economic conferences in Latin America, energy companies in Venezuela and Mexico, and spying by the NSA’s allies—including Canada, Norway, and Sweden—on the Brazilian Ministry of Mines and Energy and energy companies
One remarkable document presented by the NSA and the GCHQ detailed numerous surveillance targets that were plainly economic in nature: Petrobras, the SWIFT banking system, the Russian oil company Gazprom, and the Russian airline Aeroflot.
For years, President Obama and his top officials vehemently denounced China for using its surveillance capabilities for economic advantage while insisting that the United States and its allies never do any such thing.
Further evidence of the NSA’s economic interest appears in a PRISM document showing a “sampling” of the “Reporting Topics” for the week of February 2–8, 2013. A list of the types of information gathered from various countries clearly includes economic and financial categories, among them “energy,” “trade,” and “oil”:
More remarkable is the fact that in country after country, revelations that the NSA was spying on hundreds of millions of their citizens produced little more than muted objections from their political leadership. True indignation came gushing forward only once those leaders understood that they, and not just their citizens, had been targeted as well.
In addition to foreign leaders, the United States has also, for example, spied extensively on international organizations such as the United Nations to gain diplomatic advantage. One April 2013 briefing from SSO is typical, noting how the agency used its programs to obtain the UN secretary general’s talking points prior to his meeting with President Obama:
The NSA routinely receives—or intercepts—routers, servers, and other computer network devices being exported from the United States before they are delivered to the international customers. The agency then implants backdoor surveillance tools, repackages the devices with a factory seal, and sends them on. The NSA thus gains access to entire networks and all their users. The document gleefully observes that some “SIGINT tradecraft … is very hands-on (literally!)”:
Among other devices, the agency intercepts and tampers with routers and servers manufactured by Cisco to direct large amounts of Internet traffic back to the NSA’s repositories. (There is no evidence in the documents that Cisco is aware of, or condoned, these interceptions.)
Warning the world about Chinese surveillance could have been one of the motives behind the US government’s claims that Chinese devices cannot be trusted. But an equally important motive seems to have been preventing Chinese devices from supplanting American-made ones, which would have limited the NSA’s own reach.
when someone buys a Chinese device instead of an American one, the NSA loses a crucial means of spying on a great many communication activities.
He notes that US dominance over the Internet has given the country substantial power and influence, and has also generated vast profit:
The Internet has long been heralded as an unprecedented instrument of democratization and liberalization, even emancipation. But in the eyes of the US government, this global network and other types of communications technology threaten to undermine American power.
When the United States is able to know everything that everyone is doing, saying, thinking, and planning—its own citizens, foreign populations, international corporations, other government leaders—its power over those factions is maximized. That’s doubly true if the government operates at ever greater levels of secrecy. The secrecy creates a one-way mirror: the US government sees what everyone else in the world does, including its own population, while no one sees its own actions.
Perhaps the most famous formulation of what privacy means and why it is so universally and supremely desired was offered by US Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis in the 1928 case Olmstead v. U.S.: “The right to be left alone [is] the most comprehensive of rights, and the right most valued by a free people.”
In 1984, citizens were not necessarily monitored at all times; in fact, they had no idea whether they were ever actually being monitored. But the state had the capability to watch them at any time. It was the uncertainty and possibility of ubiquitous surveillance that served to keep everyone in line:
The para-militarization of domestic police forces was on full display in American cities, as police officers brought out weapons seen on the streets of Baghdad to quell legally assembled and largely peaceful protesters. The strategy was to put people in fear of attending marches and protests, and it generally worked.
Bernstein’s observations were eerily echoed in a report released by PEN America in November 2013 entitled Chilling Effects: NSA Surveillance Drives U.S. Writers to Self-Censor.
It is true that surveillance can at times promote what some may consider desirable behavior. One study found that rowdiness in Swedish soccer stadiums—fans throwing bottles and lighters onto the field—declined by 65 percent after the introduction of security cameras. And public health literature on hand washing has repeatedly confirmed that the way to increase the likelihood of someone washing his or her hands is to put someone nearby.
The evidence shows that assurances that surveillance is only targeted at those who “have done something wrong” should provide little comfort, since a state will reflexively view any challenge to its power as wrongdoing.
American Muslims routinely describe the effect of spying on their lives: each new person who shows up at a mosque is regarded with suspicion as an FBI informant; friends and family stifle their conversations for fear of being monitored and out of awareness that any expressed view deemed hostile to America can be used as a pretext for investigation or even prosecution.
Fearmongering is a favored tactic by authorities precisely because fear so persuasively rationalizes an expansion of power and curtailment of rights. Since the beginning of the War on Terror, Americans have frequently been told that they must relinquish their core political rights if they are to have any hope of avoiding catastrophe.
Democracy requires accountability and consent of the governed, which is only possible if citizens know what is being done in their name.
