Current Events Thread

“I, sitting at my desk, certainly had the authorities to wiretap anyone, from you or your accountant, to a federal judge or even the President, if I had a personal e-mail,” Edward Snowden told the Guardian. Snowden is twenty-nine; he had worked in a technical capacity for the C.I.A. and then, by way of his employer, Booz Allen Hamilton, as a contractor for the N.S.A. He is the reason our country has, in the last week, been having a conversation on privacy and the limits of domestic surveillance. That was overdue, and one wishes it had been prompted by self-examination on the part of the Obama Administration or real oversight by Congress. But both failed, and it came in the form of Snowden handing highly classified documents—a lot of them—to journalists.

He did so, he said, because he had seen “abuses”—the framework for an “architecture of oppression”—and had come to “realize that these things have to be decided by the public, not someone who is hired by the government.” Snowden, of course, is someone hired by the government, and will be asked why he thought the decision to expose secrets was his. He offered, in his interview, several answers: one is that the normal processes were broken. The second was that he is willing to come out in the open himself. Saturday night, the N.S.A. asked for a criminal investigation into the leaks. As we learn more about him, in the next days, those answers are worth evaluating seriously.

Snowden is now holed up in Hong Kong, in a hotel room where, according to the Guardian, he stuffs pillows against the doors and “puts a large red hood over his head and laptop when entering his passwords.” The interview has the bylines of Glenn Greenwald, Ewen MacAskill, and Laura Poitras. Poitras was also a co-author, with Barton Gellman, of a report in the Washington Post based on documents Snowden provided; and Gellman and Aaron Blake posted their own piece with Snowden later Sunday. [Update: Sunday night, Gellman posted a piece on his interactions with Snowden, who had used the code name Verax.]

So far, the leaks have revealed that the N.S.A. is collecting records from Verizon Business (and, it emerged, from any number of other companies) for every phone call placed in the United States; that, with a program called Prism and some degree of coöperation from technology companies like Google, Facebook, Yahoo, and Apple, it is looking at the private data of both foreigners it targeted and—“incidentally”—Americans a degree or even two removed from them; that another program, called Boundless Informant, processed billions of pieces of domestic data each month, and many times that from abroad. We also learned that James Clapper, the Director of National Intelligence, flat-out lied to the Senate when he said that the N.S.A. did not “wittingly” collect any sort of data on millions of Americans. And we were reminded of how disappointing President Obama can be. These were all things the public deserved to know.
Snowden never actually questions the good will of the people he worked with at the N.S.A.; he grants them (as we might grant Obama) their belief that they are working in the interests of the United States—that there is no ideology of oppression. Each step is modest, and does start with the goal of looking for foreign threats. But they collect data wherever and however they can. All of the talk about not specifically targeting Americans should not be reassuring: “The NSA specifically targets the communications of everyone. It ingests them by default. It collects them in its system and it filters them and analyzes them and it measures them and it stores them for a period of time.”

And why should this bother us? Snowden:

It’s getting to the point, you don’t have to have done anything wrong. You simply have to eventually fall under suspicion from somebody, even by a wrong call, and then they could use this system to go back in time and scrutinize every decision you’ve ever made, every friend you’ve ever discussed something with, and attack you on that basis, to sort of derive suspicion from an innocent life and paint anyone in the context of a wrongdoer.
As he must know, that scrutiny will now be applied to him.

The Guardian reported that Snowden made about two hundred thousand dollars a year and lived in Hawaii, where he had a girlfriend who, he says, didn’t know where he was going or why or when he left for Hong Kong. He had started at the N.S.A. without a high-school diploma, moving along with community-college classes, time in the Army, and technical skill, the Guardian said. (This is somewhat surprising.) In the video, he seems comfortable in his own skin—he will strike some as too at ease, or even pleased. His affect is not that of a haunted informant in the dark corner of a bar. He is the cheeriest major leaker one is likely to come across. That may just accentuate what he is leaving behind by coming forward. (The Guardian said that he got tears in his eyes when discussing the effect this all will have on his family.)

And Snowden is self-aware enough to talk, in the interview, about his own privilege, in two distinct senses of the word. One has to do with his privileges on the job:

When you’re in positions of privileged access, like a systems administrator for these sort of intelligence community agencies, you’re exposed to a lot more information on a broader scale than the average employee. And because of that, you see things that may be disturbing.
The other is social: “You live a privileged life. You’re living in Hawaii, in paradise, you’re making a ton of money. What would it take to make you leave everything behind?” He talked about living “comfortably” but “unfreely.” (The dystopia he seems to be obsessing about is less “1984” than “Brave New World.”)

Again, he portrayed the niceness of the current custodians as one of the dangers. We were protected, he said, only by “policies,” and not by law: “It’s only going to get worse, until eventually there comes a time when policies change,” and “a new leader will be elected, they’ll flip the switch.” He used a phrase that has come up before: “turnkey tyranny.”

Speaking of tyranny after having fled America for a hotel at the edge of China—the logic won’t be entirely self-explanatory. The Guardian asked Snowden why he chose Hong Kong, which is a Special Administrative Region of China, and does have its own way of doing things—“one country, two systems”—but not at all full autonomy. Did he want to defect? He said he didn’t. We aren’t at war with China, he said, so he wasn’t running to “the enemy”; he put value in Hong Kong’s tradition of free speech. He told Gellman that “I intend to ask for asylum from any countries that believe in free speech and oppose the victimization of global privacy.” (Aaron Blake pointed out that Hong Kong does have an extradition treaty with the United States.) That may prove to be a harder position to maintain than he would like. Skyscrapers and bookstores are good signs, but they can be deceptive. (It’s also possible that he just wants to complicate the plot.) He talked about the prospect of being rendered by the C.I.A.—“or they could pay off the Triads.” He was, he told both publications, careful about the documents he chose. Had he set out to harm America, he said, there was worse he could do: “I had access to the full rosters of everyone working at the N.S.A., the entire intelligence community and undercover assets around the world.” He also mentioned the money he could have made selling private or corporate information.

The part about undercover assets—and Snowden’s reasons for mentioning his knowledge—will cause many people to pause, properly so. We recognize those as secrets. How many people with a private contractors’ job and a password have the privilege of knowing the names of our spies? (“I’m just another guy,” he told the Guardian.) Sometimes this is a matter of too much classification, rather than too little: if you make everything secret, people need clearances they shouldn’t have just to do their jobs.

But the records of our private lives—whom we called when, where we got lost or fell in love, and what we wrote in late-night e-mails—are secrets, too; of a different scale, not a different species. The prosecutors and politicians who asked how this man had access to one kind of secret should also ask about the other. What are government’s proper privileges? How we respond to the vast assembly of information on Edward Snowden’s computer, or Bradley Manning’s for that matter, is a test. Do we think that the answer is to collect and collect, classify and classify, and then hunt wildly and angrily when a guy in his twenties walks away with more than he should? Or are we ready to talk about our secrets?