"Opened, There, the Box Pandora"

Jacob Appelbaum (L) and William Binney (R) and Laura Poitras (not visible) at the Whitney talk in April 2012. Photo by Audrey Penven.

There's an article out in the Brazilian press on globo.com which purports to tell more of the back story of how Laura Poitras got in touch with Edward Snowden (the following is lousy Google translated text):

In 2011, Laura - then one filmmaker already renowned by their films about abuses of American government - sought Binney.

- Called imagining that he would never speak, the NSA is the most secretive of the world - Laura recalled, last Wednesday, during a conversation in Alto da Boa Vista. - But he said he was tired of being harassed by the government. We made the film.

The piece - one eight-minute short film called "The Program" (program) - was published on the website of the "New York Times" in August 2012. The film was seen by thousands of people. Among them, Edward Snowden.

Some of this is what we've heard before, how he contacted her and she was suspicious that it was a set-up, "why me," etc.  and then he flattered her saying how he loved her film, and then piqued her interest further by dissing the NYT for not publishing stuff for a year on the NSA. (Oh, that might because they are real journalists checking facts and also not radical activists trying to smash the state so they don't deliberately try to accomplish exposure of national security.)

In June, after a week is advising lawyers and journalists, Laura Greenwald and out together in New York. As a precaution, the "Guardian" asked that a second journalist, English Ewen MacAskill, the old house, accompany them (Snowden only agreed to receive it after the third day).

Until then, neither Laura nor Greenwald had seen Snowden. More: had no idea what her name. Combined code. The three would meet in front of a restaurant. Snowden would be holding a Rubik's Cube (Toy manipulable, that all sides need to be adjusted to get the same color). Laura ask what time the restaurant would open. Snowden give an advice: the food there was bad.

Ritual executed, the three walked in silence, side by side, until the hotel where the boy, then with 29 years, was staying. Opened, there, the box Pandora.

I'll say. McCaskill was in on this too (the Guardian's reporter in DC). I've often wondered if Glenn Greenwald was specifically brought to the Guardian (he left Slate to go there) in order to do this story in particular. The timing is right.

The Brazilian story isn't THAT different (actually, nearly a copy) from what was on the New York Times site on June 10th, maybe with just a bit more detail about the nature of the encrypted emails -- or no emails at all.

So, there's Edward with the Rubik's cube -- nerdy touch, eh? And they don't ever talk on e-mail and it's all crypto-kid stuff and then it takes off.

But naturally I and others asked questions about whether this is a cover story containing various dodges and distractions, and whether there is more to it -- and how the whole springs and motives of recruitment into the anarchist underground works.

Of course, sometimes the simplest answer to a question is the truth, and maybe Edward Snowden really see the video on the New York Times website...or someplace...and decide he had to get in touch with Poitras, and it worked.

Let's note that: desperate for hipster credibility and "interactive content," the NYT puts a video by a radical film-maker who filmed US troops getting ambush after she allegedly had advance knowledge of the ambush, and then that video becomes a recruiting tool for her to attract Snowden.

Say, was that the idea all along? You know, this is one of the reasons why news agencies are careful about just publishing terrorist manifestos "as is" on their sites...

The Times didn't do investigative reporting to see if the claims about "Stellar Wind" were true or had some plausibility; they didn't subject to any scrutiny and interpretation from outside experts the mumbo-jumbo about "3D monitoring of URLs" that Binney spouts as if it is the secret of the universe cracking your privacy. They just post it as a cool thing with alien music and the deserts in Utah where our data will be stored "one hundred years" (!!!) as if Gabriel García Márquez is going to write a novel with it LOL.

I'm still going to ask the question about the tantalizing hint Snowden dropped in his Der Spiegel interview with Poitras and Appelbaum about the "suspected hacker's girlfriend" being monitored by the NSA. Naturally, answers come out in forums by anonymous people. And on Politico, someone said they knew who this was, that a "small media outlet" had "accidently revealed this" and that it wasn't from NSA metadata scraping, but manual...or something. Mkay, but the point is that Snowden raised it like a point of hurt for his tribe. Either he knew the people involved (Aaron Swartz and his exgirlfriend Quinn Nortion?) because it really is a small world of these hackers, they all go to the same MIT parties in the end; or Appelbaum planted that story with him, or WikiLeaks did, as important to "the movement" -- and possibly he was asked to research it as proof of his loyalty as I explained.

This former intelligence agent tries to reconstruct the affair and asks a lot of questions about Snowden's "helpers".

In From the Cold muses:

And here's another question for you to ponder. Why did Greenwald (a well-known, left-wing blogger and journalist) and Poitras, a celebrated documentary film maker, respond to the queries of Edwin Snowden, then an unknown defense contractor? Virtually anyone who blogs or makes films about the shadowy world of intelligence receive "over-the-transom" messages from insiders who claim to have devastating information on just about any issue or topic you can imagine. Most are cranks, and their e-mails are summarily deleted.

Yet, there was something in Snowden's initial communications that intrigued both Greenwald and Poitras, to the extent they were soon following his instructions for setting up encrypted communications, which would eventually be used to help Snowden leak state secrets and plot his escape from U.S. authorities. What was it about Edwin Snowden that brought Greenwald and Poitras into the loop--and made them willing accomplices?

Or, was their participation cleverly orchestrated by outside parties, to support the cover story of a idealistic whistle-blower, bent on exposing government wrong-doing, while attempting to evade its legal tentacles? Judging by their past actions, both Mr Greenwald and Ms. Poitras aren't exactly friends of the federal government--or American democracy. New Zeland blogger Trevor Loudon discovered that Greenwald has been a featured speaker at various socialism conferences since 2011, and Laura Poitras was present on a Baghdad rooftop just before a passing U.S. military patrol was ambushed in 2006--a rather odd coincidence that put her on the government's radar. Details from The Weekly Standard:

Yes, this is exactly how intelligence agents/spies/defectors work, needing to test bona fides, but I'll go you one better -- it's exactly how anarchist hacker movements work, too. They would be suspicious of an outsider unless he came with some token or talisman or bonded with the secret handshake or brought something useful (the bit about the suspected hacker's girlfriend having her cell phone call intercepted in a European country -- this supposedly as a "collateral" of various communications going through various hubs or something).

It doesn't seem Poitras has heard from Snowden directly since his birthday, June 21st; Glenn Greenwald's direct information seems to have dried up and he's reduced to furiously trying to fend off allegations that WikiLeaks edited Snowden's manifesto. Say, nobody seems to want to explain to me how Edward Snowden not only says "United States have" but spells center like a European -- "centre". Because an Australian is behind this or a Russian or both?

I mentioned yesterday that two can play at the dead man's switch game, because Putin may say to Greenwald or WikiLeaks that if they keep releasing stuff, Snowden will go to jail or never get to go to this "third-country asylum destination" like Venezuela.

I was thinking Anatoly Karlin, the Russophile, was the dog that hadn't barked on this story, but it turned out that on July 7 he printed a long apologia for Russian lawlessness and vicious attack on the US, as per usual. Karlin, despite all his Ph.D. education, doesn't get it about how the world works, and thinks everyone simply rolls over because he decides that the US is irrelevant. He whines that the opposition in some potential asylum destinations like Bolivia are "hardcore Atlanticists" (LOL) who might come to power, and concludes that Sikorski and Appelbaum really run everything because they're neo-cons. He simply can't acknowledge that other countries don't agree to American wishes not to let a serious destroyer of national security like this through their airspace because they're for the rule of law. Whatever their annoyances based on their myopic anti-Americanism and obliviousness to Russia's wiles, they don't see the need to favour a hacker over a state -- after all, they're states, too, that are hacked, and hey, mainly by Russia, something Karlin can never admit.

States and the international system are built on the concept of sovereignty. The US protects its sovereignty just as Russia does -- Russian is, of course, far more fierce. The system depends on reciprocity and also forceful demands for observing the norms of collaboration. If one state can undermine another just by having a hacker get free passage, the international system is undermined -- it depends on reciprocity. If a hacker were to expose Bolivia's secrets -- and you never see hackers doing this sort of thing because it's a lot harder in authoritarian countries -- then Bolivia could rightfully count on the US not to harbour this person as they would have committed a "serious non-political crime" in the definition of the Refugee Convention. If Russia were a normal country, it would work that way, too.

Says Karlin:

While it’s beyond dispute that the Europeans are complete doormats, it’s still worth noting that cautious, business-like China was eager to get rid of Snowden as quickly as feasibly possible – despite the major propaganda coup he delivered unbidden into their hands by demonstrating that computer hacking wasn’t just a one-way street between China and the US. Putin, too, is notable unenthusiastic. One can’t help but entertain dark speculations about the kind of dirt the NSA might have on him should he ever become too enthusiastic about that whole sovereign democracy thing. Counter-intuitively, it is Latin America – the land explicitly subjected to the Monroe Doctrine – that is mounting the most principled stand in support of government transparency and against Western exceptionalism and double standards.

Well, it's not beyond dispute because the Europeans are far greater partners and alliers than Ka, who speaks with a forked tongue of "our partner" America but doesn't extradite Snowden. Oh, we don't have a treaty. Oh, we'd have to trade Bout. Oh, Russia has never sent back a Western defector. Oh, Karlin is young. He doesn't remember the time they did -- Lee Harvey Oswald! Hello! Mogut zhe kogda khotyat.

Rant and rage as much as you want about the US "bullying" countries by insisting on the rule of law as the entire system of Interpol has estabilshed it, but no normal state, especially the Western democracies that are going to defend liberal democratic due process, will expect that the US is "out of line" because it demands that states return a spy.

BTW, Russia does no less when it demands -- screeches for -- the return of the notorious arms dealer Viktor Bout, as if he were a Boy Scout in the woods. Putin is upping the ante, and as I've said from the beginning, he may demand Bout to be exchanged for Snowden. Snowden is not worth that.

The Streetwise Professor has raised the interesting point that all these countries need to have their bluff called. We'll see how solid their offers are when they can stop hiding behind Russia. And it will be an interesting counterpoint to Karlin's belief that these countries are going to feel free to dis the US this bad. The reality is, Snowden will most likely remain in Russia because the op was scripted by them in the first place, and we will never get to test these theories.

USSID 18 is actually right. An intercept doesn't take place until somebody listens; until somebody puts on headphones as James Bamford cites in Poitras film -- even if he is citing it in an an effort to try to delegitimize the NSA's program. The New York Times does not appear ever to have researched this topic of "Stellar Wind" as a news story, but has only published a few hysterical op ed pieces on it.