Vanity Fair's May 2014 edition issue has an "exclusive" story about Edward Snowden -- but you will have to buy the hard copy at the newsstands to read the whole thing. I did -- only to find someone had ripped out most of the story after I fought through the perfume ads to get to it. I had to spend another $5 -- but let me say that the lovely scents, even Jo Malone Peony & Blush Suede do not disguise the stench of this story.
There's really nothing sensational here at all - because it's not an interview with Snowden. Snowden had "input" into the story -- as the editors euphemistically ended up putting it -- which means they sent questions to "his lawyer" (i.e. legal cheer-leader from the ACLU) Ben Wizner, and the questions were likely massaged furthered and then carefully/partially answered by Ed, or some facsimile thereof. There are something like six direct quotes from Snowden, none of them on major issues at all, which present "new news" from him.
If anything, Vanity Fair's authors have shamelessly plagiarized Luke Harding's book, The Snowden Files which I've also been reading, to the point where really, he should sue them. It's awful. Of course, Harding himself doesn't have a lot of original material, either, as he didn't get interviews with Snowden or even Glenn Greenwald, let alone Laura Poitras or Sarah Harrison, either. In fairness, Harding drew on the Guardian's reporting which -- whatever you think of the Guardian -- and I think terribly of them -- has really done the most reporting on Snowden. Of course, when you had two of your journalists on him from the start, that isn't hard to do. Although it's gotten harder.
Even so, for those of us really closely following the story (and as you know I've written an entire book on Snowden, Privacy for Me and Not for Thee), there's some very important new items here that open up some interesting discussions. But as I see it, these interesting bits bear the marks and dents of instrumentation -- they've been handled and inserted for purposes that I think even these copy-pasta journos who put together the story don't understand.
In order to understand this issue, let me start by explaining my own hypothesis, which is that Snowden was recruited by the anarcho-hackers movement (the networks of WikiLeaks, Chaos Computer Club, Tor, etc.) and that this movement in turn is manipulated/compromised by Russian intelligence. Jacob Appelbaum of Tor openly calls for defectors of the NSA to join the "bright side" with the anarcho encrypters in December 2012; right before his speech Snowden contacted Appelbaum's long-time colleague Laura Poitras, a radical film-maker. Both Poitras and Appelbaum work closely with Electronic Frontier Foundation which founded and funded the Fund for Freedom of the Press, which is the entity bankrolling the whole Snowdenista enterprise -- where Poitras is now on the board and Appelbaum on the staff.
A long-time obsession of EFF litigators was the Verizon and AT&T meta-data issue, and they had failed repeatedly to get the US government to turn over the secret FISA court orders that enabled the NSA to get this material. It's a wonky subject that few outside of this hothouse sect of "Internet freedom fighters" ever followed, even though they tried mightily to turn it into a "human rights issue" -- which didn't work until they had Snowden as their propaganda star. I believe Greenwald's and Bart Gellman's selection of this topic of Verizon metadata and the other topic of Internet companies and the PRISM slides comes with this obsession (and Spencer Ackerman's obsession as well) and that this was the prize they wanted out of a fugitive. So I think they gave Snowden a wish list, and they gave it to him before he went to work for Booz, Allen, Hamilton where he had greater access, and I think he went there on that mission, as part of winning over this gang to his own greater megalomaniacal cause of taking down the NSA a la Assange taking down the State Department with Cablegate.
This recruitment and this wish-list handover may not have been done in some crude way; these people are cunning lawyers and they know how to work under the radar. But I think through cut-outs and various subterfuges this mission got accomplished. As I said in my book, think about it: if you were going to run a story on Day One of your exposure of the NSA, why would you pick a technically complicated, wonky topic like meta-data collection or the convoluted ways in which social media is siphoned -- especially when you have no cases of individual people one can point to as actual victims?
A topic, BTW, which Gellman got wrong in the Washington Post, and had to walk back and post corrections to. If you had all these documents from Snowden, why wouldn't you start with something like "the government spies on my email" or "the government is in my Yahoo web cams" which are much, much more popular, mass-appeal topics than something called "meta-data" or slides showing diagrams of servers.
And the answer is: because that's what these freaks were obsessed with themselves and that was their Holy Grail. This was a geeks' leak.
The issue of Greenwald's nudging of Snowden to find certain things is of course one that he hotly denies, and we don't know that it's him or one of the others, or if he is ultimately really telling the truth. But *that* these people have a very felt need to make sure this narrative never stands out for everyone is a fact -- they've tried to explain away every clue related to EFF and a prior relationship to Snowden that they can. There's the obvious issue of the stickers from EFF and Tor on Snowden's lap-top, and the funny way in which twice, EFF sought to pre-emptively cut off speculation about how those got there. You have an organization whose very board members and association with Assange are direct and go back before Snowden surfaced, so it's hard to make it look different than it looks like: collusion. But as I said, these people aren't stupid, and they want to make sure to get rid of any of these lines of questioning.
So let's look next at what happens with first Luke Harding's book, and then the Vanity Fair piece -- keeping in mind that no one -- except me, in my blog and then my book - has ever asked questions about the funny way in which the Verizon metadata story came first -- and its pre-history of obsession on this topic from EFF, Spencer Ackerman (I'm adding him in now that Harding has stressed the butterflies and unicorns that this meant to him), Jacob Appelbaum and others.
Snowden himself has never discussed how he came to this topic, why he led with this topic, why this topic came first -- as opposed to the hundreds of other topics he had his hands on, from crowd-appealing topics like "the NSA is in my World of Warcraft!" to exotic topics like "the NSA has undermined RSA encryption standards to create backdoors."
In Luke Harding's book, here's how the issue is described, in the chapter titled "Scoop!" where Greenwald, Poitras, Ackerman, and Janice Gibson, editor of the American edition of the Guardian, meet first in the Guardian office, then go out to eat at Ed's Lobster House in the Soho neighborhood of New York City.
Gibson briefed him on the PRISM slides, and the secret court order compelling Verizon to hand over the phone records of all of its US cutsomers. Ackerman grasped his head in his hands and began rocking up and down, muttering, 'Oh fuck! Oh fuck!' before recovering his composure.
He was excited that his long-held suspicions were correct: the Obama administration was secretly continuing and even expanding Bush-era surveillance practices. Ackerman asked Gibson if the words STELLAR WIND meant anything to her. It did.
"Birds sang. Butterflies fluttered," he recalls dreamily. "It was everything I had been trying to find for seven years.' He went on: 'I thought this white whale was coming to the tip of my harpoon. It turned out there was a pod of stories."The implicatoins were massive. The Verizon secret court order was dated 25 April 2013. It forced one of the US's largest telecoms providers to hand over to the NSA the telephone records of millions of its US customers. Verizon was passing on private details on an 'ongoing daily basis'. It was giving the NSA information on all calls in its systems, both inside the US and between the US and other countries. It was sensational apparent proof that the NSA was a dragnet collecting the records of milions of US citizens, regardless of whether they had committed any crime or been involved in terrorism.
The document was from the Foreign Intelligence Survaillance Act [FISA] court. Signed by Judge Roger Vinson, it gave the US administraiton unlimited authority to suck up telephone metadata for a 90-day period. The period ended on 19 July. 'It was the most exciting thing I have ever seen. No one who is not authorised has seen a FISA court order,' Ackerman says. 'In my most fevered and conspiratorial imaginings, I didn't they [the government] would be doing something like this.' Was the three-month request a one-off? Were there other similar orders? There was no answer to that. Snowden had provided one recent document. But the suspicion was that the NSA compelled other major mobile phone networks to share their data in the same way.
Leave aside the issues of how tendentiously the NSA program and the very concept of metadata are explained here -- this is part of the "faith issue" regarding whether you believe metadata is privacy-busting surveillance or not (I don't).
But focus on how badly Ackerman, formerly of Wired, who worked with editor Kevin Poulsen, a hacker who had done some time in jail, at the "Danger Room" column, wanted these meta-data court orders. Ackerman had literally arrived at the Guardian just in time for this story, following Greenwald -- who arrived just in time for it, too, only earlier, after he'd already been in touch with Snowden. Ackerman's obsession matched EFF's lawyers, as he indicates later in a piece on their court case, and they were obviously in touch. (James Bamford, who broke the Snowden story years before Snowden did but got ignored, also wrote about the significance of the Verizon metadata court order for Wired in June 2013.)
BTW, was Ackerman ever in touch with Snowden before he appeared in Hong Kong? We don't know. He is more of a geek than Greenwald, certainly, and wouldn't have had the difficulties Greenwald had in communication via encryption with Snowden. He also has family in Hawaii.
In any event, that's their story -- and note its two main facets: a) the Verizon document just seems to surface on its own from Snowden, without any particular legend attached to it or explanation as to how Snowden came to get interested in it or get it at all; b) Ackerman had a keen interest in it.
Now let's look at the version of this same story told by Vanity Fair:
During his short time at Booz, Snowden was downloading documents until the last minute. In late April, for instance, he discovered a court order granting the NSA access to certain phone-call information at Verizon, the giant telecom company. The order, signed April 25 and entered into the NSA computer system April 29, touched on a special interest of Snowden's: the issue of legal standing -- the fact that lawsuits against the government on surveillance issues kept getting thrown out of court because no one would prove that they were specifically being surveilled.
On Friday May 17, Mills left for a week of sailing with friends. Snowden told her he was going on a business trip and probably wouldn't be home when she returned. He told his bosses at Booz Allen that he needed to take a medical leave because of his epilepsy. He downloaded the last of his documents from the NSA server, loaded them into one last thumb drive, and left work.
The next day he walked into Honolulu International Airport alone.
As far as I know, that particular story of Ed's last day of work, its date (May 17) and that last thumb drive, have never been told. We've all looked at his girlfriend's diary, but the coincidence of her going away just as he needed to make a get-away hasn't been so striking before. He doesn't tell her the epilepsy story as she wouldn't have bought it; he likely had his epilepsy under control already with medications. But since he travelled for his jobs frequently, she would accept it.
But what really stands out about this story? Ed's own agency on the Verizon meta data court order. HE is the one to be keenly interested and to look for it and get it -- and it had literally just been date-stamped April 25 and been uploaded April 29 just in time for him to get it before he left. These are things that have never come out before, he has never mentioned it -- and that's where I see the "tool marks". He is injecting this into the narrative now so that he can reinforce the idea that the journalists are not the ones giving him ideas. What was their obsession, both as individuals and organizationally as EFF's litigation, is now put on Ed -- he is the one to think to look for it.
Now, sure, it's possible that anyone who goes about tackling the NSA will come up with this issue -- one thinks of Marcy Wheeler, for example (@emptywheel). But then...why didn't Snowden mention this story of his last grabs and his own personal interest in this document before? Why are we only getting this story nearly a year later?
Again, it's my belief that this is part of a construction of the narrative to exonerate journalists from any charges that they gave him assignments -- and therefore they could look guilty of complicity in espionage, instead of being able to endlessly hide behind the Supreme Court protections for journalists who report on stolen classified documents.
What always struck me about these first stories is how badly Snowden mangled them, techie-wise. He could have headed off the problems Gellman ran into when all the major tech magazines and Big IT firms cried "foul" over the claims of "direct access." There are two possible explanations for why this happened -- a) Snowden had a cynical, anarchist view of the claims of Big IT and treated their disavowals of "direct access" as lies; b) Snowden didn't understand this particular area of NSA's work with companies like Google or Facebook because it wasn't his area of expertise at the Agency -- his job was to help people avoid being hacked by the Chinese.
It's my belief that Snowden was guided in viewing this FISA document as "the most important" by the lawyer-blogger Greenwald and the others; at any event, even if he had some grasp of these issues before, he has never told the story this way.
And that he is only now telling the story this way is patently obvious, because the copy-pasters at Vanity Fair tell this story differently than Luke Harding, even though they copy Luke elsewhere (instead of Greenwald himself, for example, going with Harding's dates for their first real-life meetings, and not Greenwald's changing versions of the dates.)
When I see the dates "April 29th" and "expire July 19th," I also wonder if this gave impetus to Snowden to flee, or whether he was advised by the others that having the document "hot" while it was still in effect would be far more effective than exposing it after it expired and the NSA could always say it was only in the past and they wouldn't do it again. Snowden safely fled and on 16 July, the Russian government accepted his application for asylum. (That still wasn't getting formally the grant of asylum, but since none other than Putin himself had offered Snowden to apply for asylum in Russia on June 11, it was a done deal.)
Not everyone will be persuaded that this is a find, but you'll have to agree that whenever the stories are told differently, or suddenly something new is injected into the Snowden narrative, there are reasons and we should pay attention. Can you think of a better reason as to why Snowden is suddenly claiming he's the one who thought of, found, and retrieved the fresh April 29th FISA court order -- when he's never mentioned this before?
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