March on Oct. 28, 2013 in Washington, DC organized by Stop Watching Us coalition was sparsely attended, but got saturation RT.com and other adversarial media coverage that tried to keep the momentum of outrage advocacy going. Photo by asterix611.
It's easy to feel as if there is a windstorm of positive, even hero-worshipping media coverage of Edward Snowden, the hacker and fugitive former NSA contractor who fled to Russia.
Given that the adversarial hero-journalists covering Snowden's actual leaks have a tremendous amount of social media mindshare -- Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras of course, Bart Gellman, James Risen and others (although curiously Ewan MacCaskill has dropped out completely) -- it's hard to peer past the scrim.
But four stories that have come out in the last week begin (at last) to ask real questions about the Swowden narrative that a few of us mainly in the Russian field simply haven't bought from the very beginning.
1. The first story was by Steven Lee Meyers of the New York Times, In Shadows, Hint of a Life and Even a Job for Snowden. Meyers carves out his own coverage despite the magnetic force of James Risen personal interview with Snowden -- Risen, himself fighting off a government lawsuit for refusing to confirm a source in a case involving government leaks about Iran, has totally bought the Snowden line.
Meyers went to work as a real reporter should -- as I've been suggesting they all do -- and asked questions and established a narrative outside the Snowden Brotherhood's magic circle.
He pointed out that Snowden has to move around at night, and under close guard. This is "for his own good," as we've been told elsewhere, but so often, those adoring Snowden fail to point out the obvious -- that Snowden is guarded and watched, which means that he is not free and that he's under surveillance.
Meyers doesn't speculate about Snowden's "daily" chats with Greenwald may be bugged or intercepted, but Greenwald, Gellman and others making the claim that there is "zero" chance the Russians have intel from Snowden have to consider that. It's not only about whether he has files or they've seized them.
o Meyers also is a rare journalist to speak critically of Sarah Harrison -- most either ignore her, or you get credulous dupes like Jessylyn Radaceck saying that she is by Snowden's side to ensure that nothing he has or knows is leaked so that we can "be sure" that the Russians don't have anything.
Accompanying him is Sarah Harrison, a British activist working with WikiLeaks. With far less attention, she appears to have found herself trapped in the same furtive limbo of temporary asylum that the Russian government granted Mr. Snowden three months ago: safe from prosecution, perhaps, but far from living freely, or at least openly.
Meyers could have gotten bonus points from me if he had simply asked -- or even reported unanswered! -- the question of WHAT KIND of visa Harrison has based on an invitation FROM WHOM which is central to understanding this story. Sadly, he didn't, but maybe he'll pick up on that.
Meyers has also gone to the trouble to ask a *Russian* expert about the KGB's heirs, the FSB and other intelligence agencies, instead of asking, oh, a disgruntled ex-NSA official and 9/11 truther to comment on the veracity of Verax's claims.
Andrei Soldatov, a journalist who has written extensively about the security services, said that the F.S.B., the domestic successor to the Soviet-era intelligence service, clearly controlled the circumstances of Mr. Snowden’s life now, protecting him and also circumscribing his activities, even if not directly controlling him.
“He’s actually surrounded by these people,” said Mr. Soldatov, who, with Irina Borogan, wrote a history of the new Russian security services, “The New Nobility.”
I'll bet. And Soldatov should know. Not because he has seen Snowden, but because he knows how the system works based on many other cases. He thinks the two pictures released by Life News are are propaganda efforts to make it seem like Snowden is leading a normal, happy life in exile.
But speaking of truthers, Meyers does in fact interview Ray McGovern, the ex official, and here's what he gets:
“He’s free, but he’s not completely free,” said Ray McGovern, a former C.I.A. official and a member of the Sam Adams Associates for Integrity in Intelligence, which met with Mr. Snowden three weeks ago in his only verified public appearance since he received asylum on July 31. Even those who attended were not exactly sure where the meeting took place, having been driven in a van with darkened windows.
When you've lost the Treason Convention (as the four ex officials call themselves), I guess you have to say the facade is crumbling. McGovern has to admit he's not completely free and he's evidently the source for the information that they don't even know where they met him, because they were taken in a KGB or mafia style ride with tinted windows -- like abducted journalists. Awful.
Meyers tried to confirm where Snowden could be working -- he is said to be starting a job this week -- and Yandex and mail.ru said it was not at their businesses, and Vkontakte refused to comment. Earlier Pavel Durov had offered Snowden a job. It might make sense to get Snowden deeper into Russia and out of Moscow where there are a lot of foreigners and move him to St. Petersburg, where Durov has his headquarters in the Dom Knigi building.
Meyers also went to the trouble to confirm WikiLeaks remaining key role in the Snowden affair:
It was through Ms. Harrison and WikiLeaks that the members of the Sam Adams Associates organized their meeting with Mr. Snowden — possibly, though not certainly, here in Moscow — to present an award to him for his leaks.
Bet all their ways were paid, too, along with the banquet hall -- unless some fancy Russian official or oligarch or somebody supplied that.
Meyers also asked about Internet connections -- good eye! -- so that we can come out of the Greenwald haze around this:
It seems clear that he has access to the Internet, said Mr. McGovern, the former C.I.A. official, because Mr. Snowden was “thoroughly informed” about the debate he had started, including testimony by officials on Capitol Hill trying to explain the operations that his disclosures have unveiled. “He’s in touch with folks through Sarah Harrison,” Mr. McGovern said.
I'll bet he is.
2. The second piece is yet another piece by Michael Kelly, who has been one of the few reporters in fact outside the Greenwald haze from the beginning, even if he has been too reliant on Joshua Foust.
Kelly's latest says It's Now Clear Snowden's Life is Dictated by Russian Intelligence. The only thing marring this story is the claim that Kucherena is employed on the staff of the FSB. He seems to have gotten this from Foust or the two are tag-teaming this, but actually we only know that Kucherena is on the public council of the FSB which is an unpaid volunteer position that is part of Putin's simulation of civil society.
I've brought this to his attention a number of times and received no answer so I'm going to conclude that either he didn't see it or doesn't care OR that either he or Foust obtained some inside intel on this from US officials, who may have discovered in their own sleuthing that Kucherena has a rank in the FSB or really is on the staff or who knows. Just not seeing it, however.
Kelly also goes through the story of the seeming contradictions in Greenwald's and Snowden's stories:
In October he told the Times that "a zero percent chance the Russians or Chinese have received any documents," referring to the stolen trove of classified NSA documents that he took from Hawaii to Hong Kong.
The information includes not only the "blueprints of the NSA" but also 30,000 documents that do "not deal with NSA surveillance but primarily with standard intelligence about other countries’ military capabilities, including weapons systems," according to a report in the Washington Post.
Snowden claimed to the Times that he gave all of the classified documents to journalists he met in Hong Kong, but there are several holes in that assertion. One of those journalists, Glenn Greenwald, has said that he believes Snowden held back some documents, saying Snowden " was clear he did not want to give to journalists things he did not think should be published ."
And following Snowden outing himself on June 9 and subsequently parting with the journalists, he leaked specific IP addresses in China and Hong Kong the NSA was hacking to the South China Morning Post. He also told SCMP: " If I have time to go through this information, I would like to make it available to journalists in each country to make their own assessment."
He also points out that Snowden obviously has a lot of information in his head, even if he doesn't have files on him. I personally don't think the "contradictions" here are substantiated enough to constitute a smoking gun, but I'm all for pushing them, just as I push my leads which are more about the hackers and their past and present agenda.
3. But the story that really makes new arguments and puts quite a crack in the marble is this one by Kurt Eichenwald, How Snowden Escalated Cyber War.
Central to the Greenwald contrived fable around Snowden is that he "did no damage" and was only attempting to gain privacy for the American people. Yet the troubling persistence of leaks that only serve to undermine the US relations with its allies, and help Russia gain more traction in the world, tend to undercut that claim.
Eichenwald reminds us of the story of how Snowden leaked the IP addresses that the US hacked in retaliation against China's own hacks against us -- which of course objectively aids the enemy and can't be said to be in any "public interest."
But bluntly he spells out that Snowden "may have killed the only shot" after reining in Chinese hacking which causes us enormous business losses.
The administration's attempt to curb China's assault on American business and government was crippled - perhaps forever, experts say - by a then-unknown National Security Agency contractor named Edward Snowden.
Snowden's clandestine efforts to disclose thousands of classified documents about NSA surveillance emerged as the push against Chinese hacking intensified. He reached out to reporters after the public revelations about China's surveillance of the Times's computers and the years of hacking by Unit 61398 into networks used by American businesses and government agencies. On May 24, in an email from Hong Kong, Snowden informed a Washington Post reporter to whom he had given documents that the paper had 72 hours to publish them or he would take them elsewhere; had the Post complied, its story about American computer spying would have run on the day Donilon landed in Beijing to push for Chinese hacking to be on the agenda for the presidential summit.
Interesting, that -- and it gets worse:
The first report based on Snowden's documents finally appeared in The Guardian on June 5, two days before the Obama-Xi meeting, revealing the existence of a top-secret NSA program that swept up untold amounts of data on phone calls and Internet activity. When Obama raised the topic of hacking, administration officials say, Xi again denied that China engaged in such actions, then cited The Guardian report as proof that America should not be lecturing Beijing about abusive surveillance.
And for all those moral equivicators out there, starting with Snowden himself who doesn't think Chinese is an enemy despite what they do to us:
The activities of the two sides, however, are vastly different in scope and intent. The United States engages in widespread electronic espionage, but that classified information cannot legally be handed over to private industry. China is using its surveillance to steal trade secrets, harm international competitors and undermine American businesses
He reports on some frank pessimism about ever fixing this -- or other problems from Snowden -- even trying to persuade Europeans of the Chinese hacking danger:
"I don't think that point is going to win the day with Angela Merkel anymore,'' says Jason Healey, director of the Cyber Statecraft Initiative at the Atlantic Council, a national security think tank in Washington. "Certainly no one cares anymore about our whining about Chinese espionage. The time we had for making the case on that is long gone. Internationally, I don't see how we recover.''
Then there was this odd bit:
Some security industry and former intelligence officials say they originally believed Snowden's apparent outrage at espionage by governments might lead him to expose activities by the Chinese, who use their hacking skills not only for economic competition but to track and damage dissidents overseas and monitor their citizens. There was good reason to believe Snowden had plenty of details about Beijing's activities - he has publicly stated that as an NSA contractor he targeted Chinese operations and taught a course on Chinese cyber counterintelligence. And while he says he turned over his computerized files of NSA documents to journalists in Hong Kong, he boasts that he is so familiar with Chinese hacking techniques that there is no chance the government there can gain access to his classified material.
Narcissist extraordinaire -- you see that in the Poitras film where the slender and slight Snowden, with his voice deepened to impress girls, tells us with hearty knowier-than-thou certitude that the American and Chinese peoples aren't enemies because we trade. Well, sure, but not without a lot of qualms about everything to food safety and Chinese labor conditions not to mention the debt.
The piece is grim, as it spells out a sense of futility and despair in businesses coping with these hacks:
"I don't know what the tipping point is, but a parasite can always kill the host,'' says Jeffrey Caton, president of Kepler Strategies, a consulting firm on aerospace, cyberspace, and national security issues. "The long-term effects could be stagnation in research and development, or eventually companies going out of business in the U.S."
Now, though, with the world raging about the NSA secrets exposed by Snowden, the threat to American companies by Chinese hacking is being ignored once again, opening up the possibility that the threat that for so many years raised so much concern behind closed doors in Washington could now grow more destructive than ever.
"It certainly seems that China is in a position to act with far more impunity because the United States and other nations are distracted by the NSA spying scandal,'' Healey says. "The American private sector was already having it bad before. Now it is only going to get worse."
4. Then there's this odd piece in which for the first time, Dmitry Peskov, Putin's spokesman, makes it seem as if they can't predict what Snowden may do, and that they don't control him. That's likely at odds with the actual situation of control they do have, but the heightened activity around getting Snowden to Germany, including with the Red Army Faction lawyer from Germany, Greenwald's pleas, and other German appeals -- not to mention Snowden's own request -- seems to indicate that the Russians may be "done" with him.
Peskov says Snowden is "free to meet with anyone" -- to open up the channel for him to cooperate with certain Germans.
But he said "Snowden is not allowed to damage US interests" -- a reference to that weird condition Putin put on Snowden went he accepted asylum -- "as strange as it may sound coming from my lips," as he put it. Yeah. It does.
The European media reported late last week about the US special services’ large-scale tapping of telephone numbers and email surveillance of both rank-and-file Europeans and the key EU leaders. The reporters quoted classified information that they had allegedly got from Snowden. The German publications Der Spiegel and Die Welt specifically said that the US intelligence services had hacked the German Chancellor’s mobile phone.It was not from Russia that the German media received that information, the Russian President’s press secretary Dmitry Peskov told the Kommersantdaily. Snowden is not allowed to violate the Russian President’s condition. But Edward Snowden has been officially granted temporary asylum in Russia, so he is free to meet anyone, Peskov added.
That's an interesting pre-emptive statement. The information on the hacking of Merkel's phone was indeed thin. What did she talk about? We never learn. Which phone was it, her party phone or work phone? When did this start?
It indicates that either Peskov wants to keep the West guessing that Russia might be mixing in its own leaks and making them appear as Snowden's, or else afraid of the blowblack that they themselves could get from their desired interlocutors and gas purchasers in Europe if they feel that Russia is helping to cause all the damage now not only to the US, but the EU.
It's got that "you've gone too far" feeling to it. It's not the NSA that has "gone too far," as Kerry says, but Russia, in exploiting this entire situation.
At this point, there are wheels within wheels -- we can't tell if any of the parties are exploiting Snowden to make strategic leaks under cover of his original leak -- leaks and counter-leaks and counter-counter-leaks.
In any event, the good news is that more media is appearing to question the Snowden hero saga. That's all a good thing.
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