Pay Any Price (39 page)

Supporters say Einstein 3 needs to be able to roam the Internet to protect government networks before attacks occur, while critics say that its technology is derived from the NSA and is similar to spy technology used by authoritarian regimes to monitor Internet use. Either way, there has been little public debate in Congress about the privacy concerns raised by Einstein 3, Perfect Citizen, or any other cyber programs; instead, money has continued to pour into cybersecurity at a record pace with few questions asked.

Documents leaked by Snowden now make it plain that, for the NSA, there is little real difference between cybersecurity and domestic surveillance. Both rely on broad access to Internet metadata and both intrude on the digital privacy of American citizens to achieve their objectives. But because the concept of cybersecurity has gained such widespread public acceptance, the NSA's involvement has proved far less controversial than its role in domestic spying.

The intense campaign to ramp up cybersecurity and pour money and resources into mysterious new programs, while limiting online privacy, sounds eerily similar to the debate after 9/11 over security versus civil liberty, in which security always won. In Harvard Law School's
National Security Journal,
Jerry Brito and Tate Watkins, technology experts at George Mason University, warned that the cyber threat is being hyped by government officials seeking greater power and by outside contractors seeking more money. “A cyber-industrial complex is emerging, much like the military-industrial complex of the Cold War,” they wrote. “This complex may serve not only to supply cyber security solutions to the federal government, but to drum up demand for those solutions as well.”

Mike McConnell, the former director of national intelligence at the end of the Bush administration, provides a case in point. After he left office, McConnell became a senior executive for Booz Allen Hamilton, one of the top three contractors in defense cybersecurity, according to data compiled by Bloomberg Government in 2012. While at Booz Allen, McConnell has used the media platform provided by his status as a former director of national intelligence to publicly argue that much more needs to be done to protect the nation from cyberattacks. In one op-ed, he argued that cyberwar “mirrors the nuclear challenge in terms of the potential economic and psychological effects.”

But a fact rarely mentioned in the rush to grant the NSA more power over cybersecurity—and greater access to the Internet—is that the NSA is now one of the world's leaders in the use of offensive cyberattacks. The NSA has been behind some of the most sophisticated and damaging cyberattacks ever mounted, including the Stuxnet and Flame viruses that targeted the Iranian nuclear program.

But when the
New York Times
reported the fact that the NSA was behind Stuxnet in 2012, the government reacted in a depressingly familiar fashion. It launched a leak investigation, one that this time turned on Obama's inner circle.

One day in the summer of 2007, my wife, Penny, called me to say that a FedEx envelope had arrived at our home.

It was from the Justice Department. Inside was a starkly worded letter from a federal prosecutor notifying me that the Justice Department and the FBI were conducting a criminal investigation into my 2006 book,
State of War: The Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration.
The letter stated that the government was investigating the “unauthorized disclosure of classified information” in my book. The letter demanded my cooperation.

The letter was sent to satisfy the requirements of the Justice Department's internal guidelines that lay out how prosecutors should proceed before issuing subpoenas to journalists to testify in criminal cases. The letter was essentially a warning from the Justice Department. Cooperate now, or a subpoena will follow.

I didn't cooperate, and in January 2008, I was subpoenaed by the Justice Department to testify before a federal grand jury in Alexandria, Virginia, in the government's leak investigation into my book.

I again refused to cooperate, and my lawyers and I moved to quash the subpoena.

That was the start of my marathon legal battle waged first against the Bush administration and later against the Obama administration.

As my legal battle against the government dragged on year after year, eventually making its way to the Supreme Court in 2014, I became convinced that I was fighting to protect press freedom in the post-9/11 age. But in the process, I discovered that I was no longer merely a journalist and author covering the war on terror. I had joined the many people whose lives had been upended by its excesses.

 

Undeniably,
State of War
had a huge impact—in some ways even before its publication in January 2006.

As an investigative reporter for the
New York Times
covering intelligence and national security, I have covered the war on terror ever since 9/11. In 2004, I discovered my biggest story of the post-9/11 age.

In October 2004, Eric Lichtblau and I wrote a story for the
Times
that disclosed the existence of the National Security Agency's warrantless wiretapping program. The story showed that President George W. Bush had secretly directed the NSA to engage in domestic spying on a massive scale, skirting the post-Watergate law Congress had enacted thirty years earlier to curb the intelligence community's domestic abuses. The NSA program was the biggest secret in the U.S. government, and many of our sources believed it was illegal, and possibly unconstitutional.

The story was explosive, and the Bush administration was frantic to kill it. Top officials at the White House, the NSA, and the CIA pushed back hard.

The White House launched an intense lobbying campaign designed to convince Bill Keller, then the executive editor of the
Times,
and Phil Taubman, then the paper's Washington bureau chief, that the story would severely damage national security. Senior government officials, including then NSA director Michael Hayden, argued that the NSA program was the “crown jewel” in America's war on terror.

That October, in the face of the mounting White House pressure, Lichtblau and I, along with our primary editor, Rebecca Corbett, met in New York with Keller to try to convince him to run the story. But Keller, accepting the government's national security arguments, killed the story about two weeks before the 2004 presidential election between George W. Bush and John Kerry.

Immediately after Bush's reelection, Lichtblau and I convinced Keller and Taubman to let us try again to get the story in the paper. In November and December 2004, we did more reporting and more rewriting, while Corbett did more reediting. There were more discussions with the government.

In mid-December 2004, we turned the story in again, and Lichtblau and I, along with Corbett, again argued to run it. But the story was killed once more.

The NSA story had now been killed twice by the
Times,
and the decision this time seemed to be final.

I was frustrated and deeply concerned that the truth about the war on terror was being covered up. Before the invasion of Iraq, my stories that revealed that CIA analysts had doubts about the prewar intelligence on Iraq were held, cut, and buried deep inside the
Times,
even as stories by other reporters loudly proclaiming the purported existence of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction were garnering banner headlines on page one. I decided I wasn't going to let that happen again.

In late December 2004, just after the NSA story was killed a second time, I took a leave from the
Times
to write a book about the war on terror. I decided to include the NSA story in my book, along with another story that the
Times
had killed at the request of the White House about a botched CIA operation involving a harebrained scheme to give nuclear weapons blueprints to Iran.

Because we had worked on the NSA story together, I told Eric Lichtblau that I was planning to include the story in my book. He approved.

After my manuscript was completed in the late summer of 2005, I told the editors at the
Times
that I was planning to include both the NSA story and the story about the CIA's botched Iran program in my book.

They were furious. For several weeks, the editors refused to reconsider running the NSA story, which, of the two stories, was freshest in their minds and which became the focus of our tense internal negotiations.

Finally, the editors agreed to reconsider. Months of additional meetings between the editors and top government officials followed. Finally, after an Oval Office meeting between President Bush and Arthur Sulzberger, Jr., the publisher of the
Times,
the NSA story was published in December 2005. It ran about two weeks before the publication of
State of War.
The
Times
story sparked a firestorm of protest against the White House and the NSA.

Meanwhile, top White House officials launched a last-minute effort to block the publication of
State of War,
according to the recent memoir of the CIA's former acting general counsel. But after its release in early January 2006, it triggered a huge national debate, not only about the NSA program but also a wide range of other intelligence abuses detailed in the book. I now believe that
State of War
played a significant role in the history of the post-9/11 era, because it was the first book to really force Americans to seriously reconsider the basic tenets of the war on terror.

But the twin controversies surrounding the
Times
NSA story and
State of War
also prompted Bush to order the Justice Department and the FBI to launch a pair of criminal leak investigations.

Immediately after our NSA story ran in the
Times,
Bush ordered the first leak investigation to find out who had talked to me and Lichtblau for our story. After
State of War
was published, the government launched a second leak investigation into the book as well. It was this second investigation into
State of War
that ultimately led to my prolonged legal battle with the government.

In 2009, when the new Obama administration continued the government's legal campaign against me, I realized, in a very personal way, that the war on terror had become a bipartisan enterprise. America was now locked into an endless war, and its perverse and unintended consequences were spreading.

And so my answer—both to the government's long campaign against me and to this endless war—is this new book,
Pay Any Price.

Pay Any Price
is my answer to how best to challenge the government's draconian efforts to crack down on aggressive investigative reporting and suppress the truth in the name of ceaseless war.

My answer is to keep writing, because I believe that if journalists ever stop uncovering abuses of power, and ever stop publishing stories about those abuses, we will lose our democracy.

—
JAMES RISEN

 

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