The Financial Times online June 26, 2013 7:31 pm
Snooping concerns are not paranoia
By Robert Shrimsley
Agencies that have abused their power have a long way to go to regain the trust they now demand
The vital thing to understand is that the innocent have nothing to fear. It is important you understand this as reports of sweeping US and British intelligence surveillance programmes proliferate.
This is the argument of every democratic government as it seeks to justify a reduction of civil liberties. The innocent have nothing to fear; trust us – we’re the good guys.
But one does not need to join the hyperbole equating this surveillance with China or North Korea, or even to doubt the good intentions of the US National Security Agency or the UK’s GCHQ, to be left uneasy by such arguments. Even those who believe it helps prevent terrorist attacks ought to be wary of “the innocent have nothing to fear” line.
This argument only flies if one can trust the agencies gathering and using this information and, in the UK at least, this debate has flared up just as we are being given reason to question the most visible arm of UK security – the police service.
The innocent have nothing to fear. It would be interesting to hear the views of Duwayne Brooks on that. The main witness to the racist murder of Stephen Lawrence in 1993 – and a close friend of the victim – should not have had anything to fear. But this week we have learnt that, even as they were failing to nail the teenager’s killers, police officers were apparently gathering dirt to smear the friends and family of the murdered boy because they were criticising the police investigation. An officer went undercover among campaigners, because – obviously – anyone questioning the police must be out to undermine society. The home secretary has ordered an inquiry. The innocent have nothing to fear.
This week, it also emerged that a libellous leaflet about McDonald’s, apparently distributed by green activists in 1986 and which led to a long and costly civil trial, had been written by an undercover officer spying on the environmentalists. Two activists were left to face the music. An inquiry is under way. The innocent have nothing to fear.
Two weeks ago a police officer was arrested in connection with an incident that forced the resignation of a minister. Andrew Mitchell quit the cabinet last yearafter leaked police logs suggested he called officers “plebs”. The evidence against him is now being questioned amid claims it was falsified. An inquiry is under way. The innocent have nothing to fear.
Last year, an inquiry found police officers systematically smeared the victims of the1989 Hillsborough football disaster to cover up for their own responsibility. An inquiry has been ordered into individual officers’ culpability. The innocent are dead.
These cases may be exceptions but there are rather a lot of them and only space prevents me listing more. And why stop with the police. Recall the “shoot to kill” era when sections of the Royal Ulster Constabulary, the army and the intelligence services in Northern Ireland colluded with loyalist paramilitaries to murder republican activists and sympathisers. There have been, and continue to be, inquiries into this.
In politics, we have something known as the Wilson doctrine, banning the phone-tapping of MPs and peers. Why? Because it emerged that “rogue” elements in the intelligence service were indeed tapping MPs’ phones. Interestingly, politicians have concluded they are an exception to the “innocent have nothing to fear” doctrine.
The malign use of private data runs beyond security and police services into other civil authorities. One troubling aspect of a major health scandal is the secret psychiatric report commissioned into and used to discredit a whistleblower who raised valid doubts about the performance of a watchdog body.
In the US, history shows how the apparatus of the state is used against political opponents. Just as the FBI once turned its resources against Martin Luther King it is not hard for those in authority to convince themselves that the inconvenient or troublesome are actually more malevolent; deserving of scrutiny.
All these stories are different but the common thread is the misuse of power by the very agencies the innocent are being asked to entrust with ever more private information. Everyone has something they don’t want made public. It need not be illegal – it may just be embarrassing.
Public trust therefore requires transparency, open oversight and a clear definition of what constitutes a threat to society. The agencies of order should welcome us knowing more about their work – after all, the innocent have nothing to fear.
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Travel tips for Edward Snowden in Moscow
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Germany blasts Britain over GCHQ's secret cable trawl
Minister questions legality of mass tapping of calls and internet and demands to know extent to which Germans were targeted
GCHQ taps fibre-optic cables for secret access to world's communications
Exclusive: British spy agency collects and stores vast quantities of global email messages, Facebook posts, internet histories and calls, and shares them with NSA, latest documents from Edward Snowden reveal
Secret document detailing GCHQ's ambition to 'master the internet'
Secret document detailing GCHQ's ambition to 'master the internet'
G20 surveillance: why was Turkey targeted?
... ... ...
The subject matter is the everyday talk of financial civil servants and central bankers. The apparent motive for the eavesdropping was to give British officials the slight negotiating edge of knowing what the Turks were thinking about financial reform before they showed their hand.
So why is GCHQ bugging them if the potential gains are so marginal? The answer seems to be because it can, both technically and legally.
In 1994, the Tory government managed to insert into the Intelligence Services Act a clause that allowed electronic surveillance "in the interests of the economic wellbeing of the United Kingdom in relation to the actions or intentions of persons outside the British islands".
The argument at the time was that national security also entailed economic security. The country would want to be prepared for sudden oil price shocks, for example.
But what was created was a capability without a constraint, and a new infinite list of foreign targets to eavesdrop on, no matter how marginal the advantage gained, as the 2009 Turkish GCHQ brief demonstrates.
Being a Nato ally seems to offer little protection against covert monitoring. The only boundary GCHQ appears to recognise is membership of Five Eyes, the tight coalition of western English-speaking states that share their signals intelligence: the US, UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. When it comes to eavesdropping on a national of a "second party", as Five Eyes members are called, that government has to be informed.
Anyone outside that select group is potentially fair game. In fact, the question the Turkish G20 document leaves unanswered is: if GCHQ was actively contemplating wiretaps on mid-level treasury officials in the hope of capturing their thoughts on the regulatory architecture of global finance, who would it not spy on?
Edward Snowden: how the spy story of the age leaked out
The full story behind the scoop and why the whistleblower approached the Guardian
As he pulled a small black suitcase and carried a selection of laptop bags over his shoulders, no one would have paid much attention to Ed Snowden as he arrived at Hong Kong International Airport. But Snowden was not your average tourist or businessman. In all, he was carrying four computers that enabled him to gain access to some of the US government's most highly-classified secrets.
Today, just over three weeks later, he is the world's most famous spy, whistleblower and fugitive, responsible for the biggest intelligence breach in recent US history. News organisations around the globe have described him as "America's Most Wanted". Members of Congress have denounced him as a "defector" whose actions amount to treason and have demanded he be punished to the fullest extent of the law.
His supporters argue that his actions have opened up a much-needed debate on the balance between security and privacy in the modern world.
So is he whistleblower or traitor? That debate is still raging.
So is he whistleblower or traitor? That debate is still raging.
Snowden, aged 29, had flown to Hong Kong from Hawaii, where he had been working for the defence contractor Booz Allen Hamilton at the National Security Agency, the biggest spy surveillance organisation in the world. Since Monday morning, he has gone underground. Hong Kong-based journalists, joined by the international press, have been hunting for him. At the height of the search, reporters recruited Twitter followers to see if they could successfully identify the lighting and other hotel furnishings shown in the video in which he went public. They did: the $330-a-night Mira Hotel, on Nathan Road, the busy main shopping drag in Kowloon district.
Knowing it was only a matter of time before he was found, Snowden checked out at lunchtime on Monday. It is thought he is now in a safe house.
What happens now? The US is on the verge of pressing criminal charges against him and that would lead to extradition proceedings, with a view to bringing him back to the US for trial and eventually jail.
If America is planning to jail for life Bradley Manning, who was behind the 2010 WikiLeaks release of tens of thousands of state department memos, what retribution lies in store for Snowden, who is guilty of leaking on a much bigger scale? The documents Manning released were merely "classified". Snowden's were not only "Top Secret", but circulation was extremely limited.
For an American, the traditional home for the kind of story Snowden was planning to reveal would have been the New York Times. But during extensive interviews last week with a Guardian team, he recalled how dismayed he had been to discover the Times had a great scoop in election year 2004 – that the Bush administration, post 9/11, allowed theNSA to snoop on US citizens without warrants – but had sat on it for a year before publishing.
Glenn Greenwald. Photograph: Vincent Yu/AP
Snowden said this was a turning point for him, confirming his belief that traditional media outlets could not be trusted. He looked around for alternative journalists, those who were both anti-establishment and at home with blogging and other social media. The member of this generation that he most trusted was the Guardian commentator Glenn Greenwald.
In January, Snowden reached out to a documentary filmmaker and journalist, Laura Poitras, and they began to correspond. In mid-February, he sent an email to Greenwald, who lives in Brazil, suggesting he might want to set up a method for receiving and sending encrypted emails. He even made a YouTube video for Greenwald, to take him step-by-step through the process of encryption. Greenwald did not know the identity of the person offering the leaks and was unsure if they were genuine. He took no action. In March, in New York, he received a call from Poitras, who convinced him that he needed to take this more seriously.
Greenwald and Snowden set up a secure communications system and the first of the documents arrived, dealing with the NSA's secret Prismprogramme, which gathers up information from the world's leading technology companies.
Greenwald flew to New York to talk to Guardian editors on 31 May; the next day, he and Poitras flew to Hong Kong. (I met the two for the first time in the New York office, accompanied them to Hong Kong and joined them in interviewing Snowden over the best part of a week, and writing articles based on the leaked documents and the interviews).
Neither Greenwald nor Poitras even knew what Snowden looked like. "He had some elaborate scheme to meet," Greenwald said. Snowden told him to go to a specific location on the third floor of the hotel and ask loudly for directions to a restaurant. Greenwald assumed Snowden was lurking in the background, listening in.
They went to a room that, Greenwald recalled, contained a large fake alligator. Snowden made himself known. He had told Greenwald that "I would know it was him because he would be carrying a Rubik's Cube".
Both Greenwald and Poitras were shocked the first time they saw the 29-year-old. Greenwald said:
I had expected a 60-year-old grizzled veteran, someone in the higher echelons of the intelligence service. I thought: 'This is going to be a wasted trip.'
After an hour of listening to Snowden, Greenwald changed his mind. "I completely believed him," he said.
The interviews were conducted in Snowden's room, which overlooked Kowloon Park. Snowden and the journalists, complete with camera equipment, crammed into the tiny space. He had been there for two weeks, having meals sent up. He did not have much with him: some clothes, a book, four computers, that Rubik's Cube. He was becoming worried about the costs and especially the chance that his credit cards would be blocked.
Even though he was well-versed in surveillance techniques, he would not have been hard to find – having signed in under his own name, using his own credit cards.
The interviews, combined with the leaked documents, provided the Guardian with four scoops in quick succession, from the court ordershowing that the US government had forced the telecoms giant Verizon to hand over the phone records of millions of Americans, to the previously undisclosed programme, Prism.
The Prism story was also published independently by the Washington Post after Poitras, a freelance journalist, had earlier approached the investigative reporter Barton Gellman, who took the story to the paper. Once on the ground in Hong Kong, however, Poitras began working with the Guardian team.
On Sunday, the story shifted from the leaks to the leaker. Snowden had from the start decided against anonymity and Poitras filmed him being interviewed by Greenwald for a video that would announce his outing.
Snowden's decision to go public has mystified many. Why come out? He had, he said, seen at first hand the impact on colleagues of leak inquiries involving anonymous sources and he did not want to put his colleagues through another ordeal.
Hong Kong> Photograph: Getty Images
So what are the options available to him now? In the interviews, he praised Hong Kong as a place with a strong tradition of free speech and a working judicial system, in spite of having been returned to Chinese sovereignty. But these courts, judging by examples of past extradition cases, tend to lean towards being helpful towards the US.
Snowden would likely argue he is not guilty of a crime and claim the charges are politically motivated.
He has been hailed as a hero by some and a criminal by others. He was denigrated in columns in the New York Times and Washington Post. The Post columnist Richard Cohen, though he has never met Snowden, wrote: "He is not paranoiac; he is merely narcissistic." In the New York Times,David Brooks offered up psychological analysis, writing:
Though thoughtful, morally engaged and deeply committed to his beliefs, he appears to be a product of one of the more unfortunate trends of the age: the atomization of society, the loosening of social bonds, the apparently growing share of young men in their 20s who are living technological existences in the fuzzy land between their childhood institutions and adult family commitments.
On Sunday night, Snowden gave the last of what had been almost a week's worth of interviews. It was his final night in that hotel room: the final night before his old life gave way to a new and uncertain one. He sat on his bed, arms folded, television news on without the sound, and spoke about the debate he had started, homing in on a comment Obama had made on Friday, in response to the leaks.
"You can't have 100% security and then also have 100% privacy and zero inconvenience," the president said. Society had to make choices, he added.
Snowden challenged this, saying the problem was that the Obama administration had denied society the chance to have that discussion. He disputed that there had to be a trade-off between security and privacy, describing the very idea of a trade-off as a fundamental assault on the US constitution.
In what were to be the last words of the interview, he quoted Benjamin Franklin: "Those who surrender freedom for security will not have, nor do they deserve, either one."
Snowden recited it slowly. For him, it had a special resonance.
He has gone underground for now. But this saga is far from over.
Revelations of cold war bugging and a botched attempt to examine Khrushchev's ship have caused scandal in the past
Top 10 commentaries on the NSA leaks and whistleblower Edward Snowden
Some call Snowden a hero; others label him a traitor. Here's our compilation of the best of the debate in the US media
Edward Snowden in Hong Kong. Photograph: Bobby Yip/Reuters
David Brooks, the New York Times: 'The solitary leaker'
"But Big Brother is not the only danger facing the country. Another is the rising tide of distrust, the corrosive spread of cynicism, the fraying of the social fabric and the rise of people who are so individualistic in their outlook that they have no real understanding of how to knit others together and look after the common good. This is not a danger Snowden is addressing. In fact, he is making everything worse. For society to function well, there have to be basic levels of trust and cooperation, a respect for institutions and deference to common procedures. By deciding to unilaterally leak secret N.SA documents, Snowden has betrayed all of these things."
Jeffrey Toobin, the New Yorker: 'Edward Snowden is no hero'
"For this, some, including my colleague John Cassidy, are hailing him as a hero and a whistleblower. He is neither. He is, rather, a grandiose narcissist who deserves to be in prison … These were legally authorized programs; in the case of Verizon Business's phone records, Snowden certainly knew this, because he leaked the very court order that approved the continuation of the project. So he wasn't blowing the whistle on anything illegal; he was exposing something that failed to meet his own standards of propriety. The question, of course, is whether the government can function when all of its employees (and contractors) can take it upon themselves to sabotage the programs they don't like. That's what Snowden has done."
Matt Miller, the Washington Post: 'Edward Snowden's grandiosity'
"There are people I respect who say Snowden is a hero. I think they're dead wrong. Thinking about 'big data' is a little like imagining how things look to God (assuming God exists). God may love you personally, but she's a little too busy to worry about whether you get that raise you deserve. The National Security Agency (NSA) may have access to every bit and byte in the land, but the unfathomable river of information their algorithms must mine means no one's focusing on the text you sent to that guy in accounting."
Hector Villagra, Los Angeles Times: 'Washington's dark secrets'
"The debate we are now having about government surveillance – to ensure that the government is complying with publicly enacted laws and acting in a manner consistent with American values – has become possible only because of "unauthorized disclosures" to the media. Instead of calling for an investigation of whistle-blowers, we should be asking ask why government officials were not the ones to disclose freely how they interpreted and applied the Patriot Act."
Marcy Wheeler, emptywheeler: 'Edward Snowden is in distinguished company'
"What Snowden released on Section 215 – just a single 215 order to Verizon, without details on how this information is used – is far, far less than what DOJ and ODNI and Lisa Monaco pledged to try to release. Given that the collection is targeted on every single American indiscriminately, it won't tell the bad guys anything (except that they've been sucked into the same dragnet the rest of us have). And while it shows that FBI submits the order but the data gets delivered to NSA (which has some interesting implications), that's a source and method to game the law, not the source or method used to identify terrorists. So if Snowden committed treason, he did so doing far less than top members of our National Security establishment promised to do."
Conor Friedersdorf, the Atlantic: 'Choose one: secrecy and democracy are incompatible'
"But I regard Snowden's leak as obviously on the side of revealing a secret illegitimately kept, for reasons I lay out at length here. I'd encourage Marshall to grapple with that. Here's an initial prompt: given that attempts to challenge NSA surveillance in court have been subverted, national-security officials have blatantly lied to Congress about its nature, and the author of the legal language supposedly justifying it swears it violated the Patriot Act, why should we act as if it's as legitimate as any other policy?"
Adam Cohen, Time magazine: 'Edward Snowden: a modern-day Daniel Ellsberg, except for one key difference'
"Ellsberg is also widely regarded as a hero today because history moved his way. There is general agreement now that it was high time we pulled out of Vietnam – and that there was little real damage to national security from the release of the Pentagon Papers. The more it appears that what the NSA has been doing is wrong, the more Snowden will look like a whistle-blower. History's verdict on Snowden will turn on whether he got the balance right: whether it turned out that we were more at risk of becoming a surveillance state than we were of terrorism."
Kevin Gosztola, FireDogLake: 'US media's contempt & inability to comprehend what it means to be a whistleblower
"Not only do they ignore or disregard the fact that the government has carved out national security exceptions to protect power from disclosures that Snowden made by ensuring that he can be prosecuted, jailed and effectively silenced no matter how he makes disclosures, but they cheerlead for zealous prosecution of these individuals for periods of time that exceed the length of time they would ever advocate for torturers, war criminals or those who commit felonies in violation of laws intended to protect individual rights and liberty in the United States. Which means that when people like Edward Snowden come forward, not only do they have to fear their own government but they also have to fear their country's media and the pundits who populate the airwaves because they fully understand they will become victims of news coverage that might as well be paid propaganda produced by senior officials inside the national security state."
Steven Bucci, USA Today: 'Edward Snowden broke the law'
"Individuals don't get to decide for themselves what should be classified. If an individual knowingly has given classified material to unauthorized person, it's a grave breach of trust and law … Mr Snowden decided it was fine to break the law, and he should be called to account for it. These leaks never occur without repercussions. One hopes that any damage to the nation's security does not cause loss of life. Some Americans may lionize Snowden, but there are terrorists who surely do."
Geoffrey R Stone, Huffington Post: 'Edward Snowden: hero or traitor?'
"In the absence of such a procedure, what should Edward Snowden have done? Probably, he should have presented his concerns to senior, responsible members of Congress. But the one thing he most certainly should not have done is to decide on the basis of his own ill-informed, arrogant and amateurish judgment that he knows better than everyone else in government how best to serve the national interest. The rule of law matters, and no one gave Edward Snowden the authority to make that decision for the nation. His conduct was more than unacceptable; it was criminal."
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