I've just been re-reading Edward Lucas' wonderful book The Snowden Operation: Inside the West's Greatest Intelligence Disaster.
As I've noted, Lucas cites me in his footnotes, and what a great thing! And I have my own much longer book on this subject as many know.
You can read my short Amazon review of his book here -- five stars!
Here's the thing -- Lucas' book is short (75 pages) and very well organized to do what it needs to do, which is to influence the debate in Washington. I hope it will have a tremendous impact there.
It's funny to think that in our time, the man who caused the worst intelligence disaster in history -- and yes, I believe it to be exactly that -- has the name "Snowden" that means "cloudiness" or "obfuscation" or "con" and the man exposing this -- Lucas -- has a name that means "shining" or "light" (like luch in Russian or "ray").
That might sound overly dramatic, but don't forget I characterize this situation in the end of my own book as a war in cyberspace, like the war in heaven.
"Ours is a High and Lonely Destiny"
Indeed, getting outside my own book world, in which I've been intensely involved for months, I still feel as if I'm reading liner notes for a kind of later installment of Out of the Silent Planet or That Hideous Strength. And Edward Lucas is just the man to know what I mean -- I think there probably wasn't a soul on Twitter in my follower streams who could instantly respond to a quote I made once discussing these hackers, "Ours is a high and lonely destiny" -- which summed up the arrogance of the scientist in That Hideous Strength. Indeed, he went me one better, recalling (as I had forgotten, despite numerous of re-reads of the book) that Uncle Andrew in the Magician's Nephew also said exactly the same thing. It epitomizes that haughty certitude, that resigned belief in the mission undertaken on behalf of lesser mortals who can't even understand why their "rights" need fighting for (John Perry Barlow invoked that sort of language with me).
It's Edward Snowden all over -- he claims that he is actually NSA Best Worker No. 1 for really embracing what its true meaning should be, and he claims to be doing the job of Congress, the courts, and the president all in one -- because he's that brilliant, and that much of a genius.
Such a believer in his scientific "high and lonely destiny" -- the logical positivist, against whom C.S. Lewis railed in his day (and it is still relevant today as the computer scientist) believes he is higher than Natural Law. And indeed, that is the quintessential geek of our time -- believing in the autonomous realm of the Internet as a world of code, not law, and a world in which he, as coder, is a superior being not bound by the laws of earth.
Two Cultures
I was glad that Edward Lucas picked up my various finds about the anti-NSA movement long in motion in the anarchist hackers' movement and various "finds" I have made in the Snowden story, but I'm most proud of his picking up on the perversion of language that takes place. He noticed my essay "When Thinking Styles Collide" (about the reversal in our time of C.P. Snow's "Two Cultures") which he said exemplified the mindset of the Snowdenistas.
I actually worked very hard on that essay, rewriting in dozens of times, and tried the New York Times, Washington Post, New Republic and other outlets to publish it. I was ignored. I never even got a comment. I wrote personally to Leon Wieseltier because I thought surely he, with all his essays on "scientism" might get it. He ignored me. The entire SOPA/PIPA/CISPA thing was ignored by people who should have understand what it meant -- a takeover of this kind of thinking.
Had their been 10 times more pushback against it, we might never had Snowden; Snowden is a direct outcome of the forces against SOPA/CISPA winning; they quite literally recruited and bankrolled a Snowden. While that essay is about copyright and the hypocrisy of geeks who can't abide encrption when it comes as digital rights management to protect intellectual property, but can insist on the exact same encryption for "privacy"; who can block malware sites, sometimes mistakenly or maliciously (a favourite trick of geeks who hate your website is to get it reported as a malware site) they found it "broke" the Internet to block piracy sites. Sheer double standards.
Lucas quoted my statement about how geeks think with this binary mentality and "don't understand how a bill becomes a law and don't believe in the process". And he gets it perfectly, writing:
Once a bad law is on the books, they believe, it will operate like bad software: mechanically, like a guillotine. So: 'unless every single edge-case, hypothetical, problem is identified, spelled out, and remedied, nothing can stand."
That is not the way that a modern law-governed society works. Imperfections and hard cases abound. The art of politics and administration is balancing constraints and anomalies...That world is messay and sometimes murky. To the self-righteous and impatient it may seem impossible to change. But for all its faults, it is capable of correction.
Even Evgeny Morozov gets this problem, and that's why he, too, calls for a deliberate imperfectionism in governance because too much correctness could be oppressive.
My hope is that after his baptism by fire on reddit -- where the perversion of meaning and the geek binary thinking are all horridly on display in literalism and idiocy abounding -- that Lucas will write more knowledgeably for his next book which I believe is about cybersecurity. I really hope he will intellectually grapple with the challenge of our time: that it isn't that machines took over, or robots won; it's that men dumbed themselves down and made themselves like machines in their thinking in order to code them -- and we will all suffer for it.
Snowden Debate in Washington
Lucas' book is perfect for Washington and I hope it will get lots of readership there (and I know it is getting some in the right places but whether these messages will hit home, only time will tell).
To get accepted into the establishment debate now, you have to concede three things:
o you have to say that Clapper lied
o you have to say that Snowden started an important national conversation
o you have to show disdain for some of what seems like overreach from the NSA
I won't do any of these things, because I have no wish to be in the establishment conversation. But then...unlike Lucas, I'm not a journalist for one of the most important magazines of Europe, read by most intellectuals in America who want a critical coverage of their country and the world, but one that is not so far afield as to disavow capitalism or demand revolution -- which so many magazines do now. I am just a blogger on this subject, and I think the entire conversation should be about something else. The way the conversation of the political elite is going now, it works something like this:
o this bad thing happened, but it was ultimately really a good thing
o have a commission
o implement various recommendations like curbing or even ending metadata collection
o rein in those sinister intelligence people
But I think the narrative is completely different:
o this really terrible thing happened because it was planned and executed as part of a far longer and larger war of anarchists who yes, were enlisted or were coopted by Russia
o it really is harmful to us and plays into the hands of evil powers in the world like Russia, China, Iran
o it isn't really about leaking or the substance of the documents, but about who gets to encrypt, and who gets to decrypt
o the arms race is on now by professors, geeks and anarchist hackers to code invincible encryption, outside the reach of law-enforcement, and this will have terrible political and legal consequences
o all kinds of bad forces in the world will also take advantage of this invincibility to cause havoc
o we will be playing catch-up, for ever unless some really powerful forces get together now and stop this latest round of the encryption wars, but even if they do, it will only be temporary.
As you can see, these couldn't be more starkly different scenarios, but let's leave aside my vision, which I think no one seems to share or even understand, and perhaps is too stark and futuristic, and go to the more classic stages of grief that the US Administration is going through, and what Edward Lucas can do to help.
Within the context of Obama's crony commission, and then the forces for greater moderation or even conservative prudence, Lucas' book then has many cautionary tales and warnings and convincing arguments.
Why Didn't Obama Catch Snowden?
Let's start with a phrase that Lucas almost drops in passing, but that goes to the heart of the matter with the Obama Administration: they acted with "deplorable slowness" once Snowden got to Hong Kong, as Lucas narrates.
Nobody has pointed that out. I hadn't even really thought about it until it was pointed out. Indeed, why did Obama wait an entire weeks to do anything about this fugitive? My God, Snowden checked into a hotel under his own name May 20, used his credit card under his own name, and met with journalists and leaked his own name on June 9. Why did it take 11 days to issue the extradition and then another two more to pull the passport?! What the hell is up with that?
There is so much more to be asked there. The answers range from conspiracy theories like "Is Obama breaking up the intelligence community with this kind of sabotage?" to more normal questions like "did the US see that it would actually save them embarassment if Snowden just fled to Russia, rather than having to try to bring him back to try in America, to the uproar engineered by Greenwald and co.?"
But beyond the questions of how the affair was disastrously handled -- starting with the contracting culture that engendered it (1/3 of all the 1.4 million persons with the top secret classification are contract workers, we learn from this book) -- what Lucas is really great at providing is the history of espionage and where Snowden fits in.
Kremlin "Active Measures" and the History of Espionage
This is a great complement for my work, since I included none of this, unless you count the Chaos Computer Club hackers who colluded with the KGB, which is in the context of describing the anti-NSA anarchist movement going on for decades.
It's always funny to me in a way to discover people who are looking at the Soviet Union and its patterns from another end of the telescope, so to speak. Everything I learned about the KGB, tradecraft, methods, I learned in the field as a human rights activist, seeing how these methods were used on people in the dissident movement. Their persecutors' thinking and methods like "active measures" or "agents of influence" were things I could see playing out in front of me as ways and means, even before I knew these things had terms.
It's funny when I come across someone like John Schindler, a man in his 40s, who seems too young to have possibly had any deep understanding of the Soviet Union, since it passed while he was in high school. Lucas, too, who is 6 years younger than me, is a bit too young to have lived as an adult through the worst of the Andropovshchina. But of course, you don't need to have lived through a historical epoch to understand it, nor to have experienced its actors directly in all their nastiness, to "get it" -- if you are sincere, and intellectually curious.
For me, when I think of the KGB, I think of agents deliberately coming and stepping on the back of my heels as they followed me, as if to vividly illustrate what it means to follow somebody "po pyatkam." I think of the shock of coming into the banya with a colleague, and finding a third towel and robe was laid out for us because the attendant assumes that person following is actually with us. It was that cigarette in the toilet bowl when you return to your hotel room -- and you don't smoke. It's the samizdat book that disappears -- and then returns from your briefcase as you sit in a restaurant. It's the strip-search at the border. It's a policeman demanding your passport and saying KTO VY BUDETE in that weird Russian phrase (literally, who will you be? i.e. who might you be?) It's the vicious nastiness of the Soviet Peace Committee abroad at peace meetings, arguing down the dissident exiles who try to stand up to them. It's KGB psychiatrists trying to talk people out of their concern for psychiatric abuse by telling them that nothing they do will ever matter and they will only hurt the dissident patients whose cases they raise.
It sort of surprises me that someone has studied this as a system, and put names and terms to it, and then taught it as a class in school -- and people have learned it. Great! I was only able to "reverse engineer" it, so to speak. But not enough people are taught or get it, evidently... Lucas was lucky that he had some early, formative experiences (which we learn from his other book, Deception) such as the horror of discovering that writing to the Yugoslav Embassy might blow back and harm a Yugoslav emigre rooming at his house. Lucas was also out there with the placards protesting martial law in Poland just as I was in New York.
Snowdenistas are like Peaceniks
In his chapter 4, "History Lessons," Lucas makes a brilliant analogy which I'm kicking myself for not thinking up -- the peace movement. I was active in the US and European peace movement, as it happened, and was good friends with Edward Thompson of END -- another Ed. Lucas gets it exactly right in explaining how the Soviets manipulated the Western peace groups -- not always literally with "Moscow Gold." They didn't have to. They could just nudge this one or play to the vanity of the other one or ensure the next one had a platform at this or that world conference -- and the job would get done. CND was a mass movement; END, which I allied with, was like a tiny sect in comparison, even though I think it had an outsize intellectual influence on the movements West and East. It was very, very hard to get people to criticize the Soviets' SS20s too. Very few groups did. Those were the groups I worked with when I defended the independent peace groups throughout Eastern Europe and the USSR when I worked at Helsinki Watch.
As Lucas writes about that era, "the Soviet KGB were delighted with divisive and distracting effects the 'peace' movement was having in the West."
I recall the "expertise" solicited by the Soviet court in Tomsk in 1983, where Alexander Shatravka (my ex-husband), then an activist in the independent peace movement, was tried for circulating the group's manifesto calling for disarmament East and West. This "expertise" was written by Tomsk University professors (to their shame, surely). They wrote that the Moscow Trust Group's appeal (which Shatravka had participated in) would "damage the reputation of the Soviet Union in the eyes of those forces in the Western peace movements which can be used by us in the struggle for disarmament."
Used. When perestroika and glasnost arrived, and the 20th Century and Peace journal of the old Soviet Peace Committee was taken over by Gleb Pavlovsky (himself a complicated figure who has mainly tended to serve the Kremlin), that Tomsk document was published as an example of proof of how the Soviet government deliberately, methodically tried to control Western movements -- and was even prepared to jail people they thought were going to far with that peace message at home. It was brilliant.
And that's EXACTLY what we're seeing now with the privacy and transparency movement (which is really the anarchy and revolutionary encryption movement). There's a kind of gloss where it's all supposed to be "for peace," but it isn't, really. It's for war.
Lucas writes of those old 1980s movements (Ken Livingston of CND, an avowed communist comes to mind -- and frankly then-CND operative Catherine Ashton who is now in charge of the EU's foreign relations, comrades!) -- that they "see their own countries' flaws with blinding clarity, and ignore those of the repressive regimes elsewhere." They "manifest a corrosive mistrust for their political leaders" explains -- and nothing government says counts anymore. Too true, too true.
Echelon
Then Lucas takes us through something called the Echelon affair which I had only half-known and forgotten -- espionage has just not been my area of study in all these years, although of course I read John Le Carre, and of course I read the memoirs of defectors like Shevchenko and Mitrokhin.
It was John Schindler who said that the leaking of Echelon system of collecting information was an "active measure" by Russian intelligence "aimed at stoking distrust between America and its European allies." It may very well have been. He's in a position to know.
And as Schindler points out, Snowden didn't go to the inspector general, attorney general, or Congressional committees on intelligence -- as Lucas highlights --- begging the question of his insistence on "whistleblower's" status.
Lucas walks through a plausible scenario staged by his other Ed involving first his publication of just the public interest documents, and then his case for possible pardon or public interest defense on that basis -- and then his switch to really damaging documents that he had no business leaking if he were really sincere about being a mere civil rights advocate.
HOW did that happen? Did the Russians demand a quid pro quo?
THAT is where I hope the message will start to sink in for folks in Washington. To give them half a Snowden, if you will, if they simply can't part with Snowden and what he means for them - but then to show where he "went too far" and where they have to stop at the other half of Snowden.
Lucas explains that intelligence operatives follow a formula called Money Ideology Coercion Ego (MICE). Obviously, that last one, "Ego," is where our Ed now in Moscow fits right in. His vanity is a low-hanging fruit for the FSB to stroke and stroke.
Lucas cites Schindler again here, that Snowden was "intelligent, highly naive and totally uninformed." I just don't know. While he may not fully grasp the evils of Russia, he's hardly naive in his very calculated and shrewd play in the crypto wars -- indeed, that's what I keep saying this is really what it's all about.
With his knowledge of how espionage systems work, Lucas also asks a lot of excellent probing questions about why Snowden moved around as he did. Was he afraid of a repeated polygraph tests? "It might reveal that he was hanging out with WikiLeaks sympathisers, for example -- which would mean a speedy end to his carer," says Lucas. Yet here is a guy who was said by a purported co-worker who spoke to Forbes' Andy Greenberg that he wore an EFF hoodie to work and openly critiqued the system. Really? And the superiors let that past?
Lucas outlines a theory of how Russian intelligence could have micro-managed the hackers they also had ties to into dealing with Snowden. As he explains:
The example of the peace movement shows that given the right initial direction and a favourable propaganda environment, political movements in the West can serve the Kremlin's purpose without hands-on control.
Bingo. In much shorter and more concise form, Lucas gets at what I was trying to say in 4 times the number of pages.
Lucas cites Craig Pirrong's blog on Hawaii and the connections there, as I do. But Pirrong has one quite shaky element in his hypothesis that Snowden first contacted Appelbaum before he contacted the others. It's premised merely on the notion that "like attracts to like" - hacker goes to hacker first. But Snowden himself says he first contacted Poitras because he saw her video with Binney -- which I call her "recruitment advertorial". Of course it's possible that Ed is lying, and in fact he and Jake are old pals and met at some geeky meet-up in India or some other country -- and believe me I've looked, and find some intriguing connections.
But they just can't be proven. Appelbaum's pre-emptive video expressing concerns about the discovery of the Hawaii convergence is an indirect admission of sorts, but not the smoking gun needed to clinch the charges. It's an area where journalists and law-enforcement should be looking -- and I'm not sure they are.
On the Russian front, Lucas provides a helpful reminder that Kucherena is among the founders of the Institute of Democracy ande Cooperation, a pro-Kremlin propaganda outfit. Why, that's based right here in New York. Has anyone examined that? I didn't even mention it in my book among the many honorific titles Kucherena has -- but it's worth probing.
Lucas concludes with a message that even those who think Snowden accomplished something can live with:
The recklessness, damage, narcissism, and self-righteousness of the Snowden camp do not invalidate all their aims. A debate on the collection and warehousing of meta-data was overdue.
This data is collected and scrutinised -- metadata can break privacy: if you know who called a suicide prevention helpline, or an HIV testing service, or a phone-sex line, and from where and when, the content of the calls matter less than the circumstances, says Lucas.
Except...I really don't think that's the case. I realize quite a few are claiming it's the case, even some who are critical of Snowden. But no one has found a case of an innocent person who's HIV testing was wrongfully snooped such as to harass them for their views. There might be a terrorist suspect whose HIV testing was looked at, but that would be legitimate -- unless there's a belief that they get to have private lives protected by civil rights forever, and we never get to head off something like the Boston bombing.
Did Clapper Lie?
So, while he may consider himself more of a hawk in his own context, in the US, Lucas fits in to what the liberal consensus is on Snowden now by exonerating Thomas Drake and saying Clapper "may not have been fully frank" (better than saying he "lied," but still different than saying he was thrown by a cunning rhetorician with a radical agenda, Ron Wyden.)
"Does the NSA collect any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of America?" asked Wyden - the same senator who fought SOPA and CISPA (which, in my view, should have been passed and which might have regulated a lot of the problems of Internet companies vacuuming up data which is at the root of the Snowden adventure for the public.)
"The question, was, in a sense, a trap, aimed at bouncing Clappter into revealing more than he wanted," replies Lucas. Indeed. But then he endorses Clapper's mea culpa -- "As loath as I am to give any credit for what's happened, which is egregious, I think it's clear that some of the conversations that this has generated, some of the debate, actually probably needed to happen."
Well, I don't think so. Conversations that happen due to cunning radical agendas and cloaked anarchist movements seeking maximum encryption shouldn't be dignified with national conversations, they should be called out for the manipulations they are.
The Abominable Snowden
In the end, Lucas comes down close to where I am, however, by saying:
Nothing evinced so far justifies the catastrophic damage that the Snowden leaks have done to national security -- the worst diaster in the history of American and British intelligence.
It looks far more likely that he was trying to cripple the NSA and its allies, and to hurt America's standing in the world. Taking a huge cache of documents, and in a way that largely defies description, analysis or mitigation, is not the action of a patriotic whistleblower. It is the behaviour of a saboteur.
I couldn't agree more. A saboteur. And that is how Congress and the president and the courts need to look at this: deliberate sabotage, in the service of a radical agenda, helped by a radical movement, that has been exploited by Russia. We don't need to prove the hand of Moscow or Moscow gold in this affair to act -- and act cautiously and prudently.
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