The Edward Snowden Affair (22 page)

Washington’s comparatively complacent response was odd. Perhaps the Capitol realized it had overstepped its bounds and created asylum offers which might not have otherwise been made. Maybe the U.S. government had slowly come to understand that Snowden did not intend to leave Russia. But if history is any guide, Washington was exhibiting humility because it believed that Snowden was trapped and it was only a matter of time before the U.S. could convince the former Soviet Union to hand him over.

For Snowden to arrive in any of the receptive countries, he would have to transverse American and U.N. airspace if traveling by commercial jet. When en route to Latin and South America, Russia’s Aeroflot airline passes through Cuba and other nations with extradition treaties with the U.S.
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In spite of this, Snowden now qualified for unquestioned safe passage. America is a signatory on UDHR. In principle the U.S. is obligated to recognize asylees from all countries, especially participating UDHR nations. Nicaragua, Venezuela and Ecuador are also UDHR signatories. If he had not been granted asylum, the United States would have the right to ask any U.N. member to land Snowden’s plane once it entered their territory. Since he was granted asylum by another UDHR nation and not charged with a crime outside of the U.S., the other United Nations members had no right or cause to detain him. As the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees makes clear, “As such it [principle of non-refoulement or the returning of the persecuted to the persecutor] is binding in all States, regardless of whether they have acceded to the 1951 [Refugee] Convention or 1967 Protocol [Relating to the Status of Refugees]. A refugee seeking protection must not be prevented from entering a country as this would amount to refoulement.”
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A commercial flight also has the international right to fly over and refuel as needed, whereas government and private aircraft must request permission to enter each country’s airspace and land. But as the world witnessed, international politics trumps theoretical law.
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Washington was violating international law and justifying it by stating its own legislation had been broken. The irony of the situation was not lost on the press.
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The U.S. government desperately chased an individual whose alleged crimes were committed under the same reasoning.

It was clear Snowden’s safety could not be guaranteed even if Maduro sent a government aircraft to pick him up. Snowden’s only viable option would be to take a private airplane with the fuel capacity to travel directly from Moscow to its western destination while avoiding American or allied airspace along the way. The Bombardier Global 8000 can travel 7,900 miles. It is geographically possible to bypass hostile zones by flying north from Moscow to the Barents Sea, alongside Norway then between Britain and Iceland on the Norwegian Sea. Snowden could arrive safely after carefully navigating through Caribbean territory. Barring prevailing headwinds, even Bolivia resting on the western coast of South America is within Snowden’s hypothetical flight range.
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But neither Olafur Sigurvinsson nor WikiLeaks began scrambling to get Snowden to long-term safety. No official announcement was immediately released or plans put in place to relocate the whistleblower. Snowden remained hidden from public sight. He was where he wanted to be and couldn’t have planned it better. It had been sheer luck Morales and Maduro had voiced support for Snowden while they were in Moscow. He now had a legitimate reason to stay in Russia.

MacAskill had been working alongside Greenwald in his home in Rio de Janeiro when the Dropmire report premiered.
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The synchronicity of the
Der Spiegel
EU article thematically matching MacAskill’s editorial was the obvious product of Poitras and
The Guardian
team being in steady communication. But Greenwald had not left Hong Kong merely to seek refuge. Like Poitras, he was delivering classified data to the country which it applied: Brazil. After waiting for the headlines to clear, Greenwald led another succession of classified exposés.

Arriving on the coattails of Latin America’s discontent with the U.S., on the Saturday afternoon that Morales told the world he would accept Snowden, Greenwald published “U.S. spied on millions of e-mails and calls of Brazilians”
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and “U.S. expands the surveillance apparatus continuously”
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in
O Globo
, a Portuguese-language newspaper based out of Rio de Janeiro. Greenwald speaks fluent Portuguese.
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Referencing confidential U.S. intelligence documents, in his first article Greenwald announces that by January 2013 the NSA had monitored 2.3 billion Brazilian calls. The number was just below those that American intelligence had domestically surveilled. The Brazilian surveillance is reported to be “constant and [of] large scale.” The NSA accomplishes this using an internal labor force of 35,200 employees and “strategic partnerships” with more than 80 of the “largest global corporations.” However, the relationship between America’s clandestine agency and foreign communication firms is not as benign or mutual as the term “partnerships” implies.

When U.S. intelligence found international data lacking, the NSA began using its domestic “partnerships” to gain greater access to foreign information. American intelligence exploits the U.S.-foreign business alliances by “bridging” them: “The partners operate in the U.S., but do not have access to information passing [through] networks of a nation, and for corporate relationships, provide exclusive access to the other [telecommunications companies and service providers’ internet].”

The agency collects the data using a program called Fairview and includes a “corporate portfolio” filled with foreign assignments’ code names: “Darkthunder,” “Steelflauta,” “Monkeyrocket,” “Shiftingshadow,” “Orangecrush,” “Yachtshop,” “Orangeblossom,” “Silverzephyr,” “Bluezephyr,” “Cobaltfalcon,” among others. It is unclear whether the foreign communication providers are complicit in, or even aware of, the data release.

Having regained his journalistic stride, Greenwald’s disclosure of Fairview provides a better understanding of how the NSA is able to obtain its monumental amount of foreign data. He also answers one of the lingering questions from the PRISM debate. It was now understood that the previously revealed Chinese and German intercepts were not the sole product of hacking but of the U.S. government forcing its domestic providers to allow American intelligence to “bridge over” into foreign communication systems. This undoubtedly breaches the U.S. communication providers’ confidentiality agreements with its foreign partners and also subtly implies that other nations may also be exploiting their domestic telecom and Internet firms’ U.S. relations, especially interactions involving the other Four Eyes and “friendly governments.”

“U.S. expands the surveillance apparatus continuously” serves as a teaser rather than a comprehensive exposé. Greenwald begins by reviewing the director of national intelligence’s contradictory claims regarding American surveillance then makes passing reference to Boundless Informant before revealing XKeyscore.

Greenwald’s treatment of XKeyscore is peculiar. It is cursory and not immediately seconded by another publication’s reporting. In almost all previous instances in which he issues an exclusive about a particular top secret surveillance program, he explores it at length. But Greenwald teases his audience by merely relaying that XKeyscore is software that uses over 700 servers worldwide to spy on a surplus of 150 countries. The program has the ability to log onto and track a target in real-time as the individual moves across the Internet. He does not go into greater detail about how the program functions or provide any data showing its effectiveness. However, an included XKeyscore training slide asks, “My target uses Google Maps to scope target locations—can I use this information to determine his email address? What about the web searches—do any stand out and look suspicious?” The tutorial outlines, “XKEYSCORE extracts and databases these events including all web-based searches which can be retrospectively queried.” It emphasizes that the NSA retains data because “retrospectively” appears in red.
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Greenwald was not content to let the Brazilian populace merely read about American surveillance. He had also gone to the Brazilian television network Rede Globo with a handful of previously unseen classified slides tucked under his arm. After America’s ABC network, Rede Globo has the largest annual revenue of any broadcast company in the world.
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Hot on the heels of the twin
O Globo
articles, an eight-minute exposé aired the next day,
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Sunday, July 7. Audiences learned that “Brazil became a strategic focus of the U.S. ‘Big Brother’ because the data that transits through here is less protected than the same data in other countries.” The additional slides deal with the NSA programs Fairview and Boundless Informant. They show the South American country was surveilled in 2012 because of the amount of Internet traffic which was being directed to Pakistan and North Korea.
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There is an incongruity in reports that follow Greenwald’s articles. Brazil’s television program
Fantastico
announced
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that the purported 2.3 Brazilian and three million American pieces of retrieved data were cumulative totals amassed over a 10year period.
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This contradicts Greenwald’s initial Guardian statement that the Boundless Informant slides were displaying monthly accumulations.
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Considering the advanced technology and the fact Greenwald was consulting with Snowden in Hong Kong while drafting his June exposé, it is more likely the original statistic is correct. This is reinforced by the proportional figures found in Poitras’ examination of the NSA’s German surveillance.

Predictably, Greenwald’s Fairview exposé automatically brought into question the nature of U.S. communication providers’ relationships with their foreign associates, but it was Brazil’s response that made headlines. The nation’s president, Dilma Rousseff, called an emergency cabinet meeting as soon as the reports were made public. On Monday she issued a statement through her foreign affairs minister, Antonio Patriota: “The Brazilian government has asked for clarifications through the US embassy in Brasília and the Brazilian embassy in Washington.” Brazil was politically astute. It refused to wait for Washington to address the grievance. Though a member, Brazil did not bother asking the U.N. to investigate. Instead it demanded regulations be put in place “to impede abuses and protect the privacy” of people worldwide. In the meantime, the South American nation instigated a full internal investigation of its own. Federal police and the national Brazilian Telecommunication Agency looked into exactly how the data was being accessed. They suspected that satellites signals were being intercepted but also examined the transatlantic cables connecting the country to the outside world. Brazil questioned domestic communication providers in their possible role in the matter.
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The U.S. stated it would not publicly comment on the reports, and its responses to Brazil would be limited.
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Poitras left Berlin the day after she revealed that the NSA was spying on Germany. She met Greenwald and MacAskill in Rio de Janeiro on July 1 and continued working on her interview footage.
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As Greenwald had a few days prior, she was about to present her own doubleheader of classified disclosures.

Shortly before Snowden left Hawaii, Poitras was still unsure about the authenticity of the person she was having anonymous discussions with over the Internet. She wanted to confirm Snowden was who he said he was. She enlisted the aid of Jacob Appelbaum. Though neither party was aware of who they were speaking to at the time, Snowden undoubtedly knew of Appelbaum’s work.

Appelbaum is probably one of Snowden’s few IT peers. He is a Internet security innovator and famed hacker. A proponent of online privacy, Appelbaum has traveled the world engaging audiences in talks about the latest advances in Internet safety. He is a consultant for the online anonymity venture the Tor Project and has worked for Greenpeace and the radical environmental group Rainforest Action Network. In 2005 he snuck past the National Guard and set up wireless Internet so victims of Hurricane Katrina could register for FEMA housing. Like Poitras, he has been repeatedly detained at airports and had his personal possessions confiscated. After Appelbaum spoke on behalf of Assange and WikiLeaks at the 2010 HOPE Conference,
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the Justice Department requisitioned the contents of his Twitter accounts. Cleverly the social network petitioned the court system to unseal the request. This allowed the company to place the order’s contents and demands online.
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Because of consistent American security harassment, Appelbaum resides in Berlin, which is perhaps where he met Poitras (or through her interaction with Assange).
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He had provided one of the questions during Snowden’s June 17 online Q & A session.
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After Appelbaum had revealed his identity to Snowden, the whistleblower gave him and Poitras permission to publish the contents of the interview when they felt it appropriate. The media had saturated the public with basic IT and intelligence jargon since June 5, and the average reader could now follow the otherwise technical conversation. On July 8 using
Der Spiegel
as the venue, Poitras allowed Snowden to vicariously and retroactively address the current state of world affairs.
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Shortly into the interview and due in part to geographical self-interest, Appelbaum bluntly inquires whether the German government or authorities were privy to the NSA’s domestic spying. “Yes, of course,” Snowden responds. “We’re in bed together with the Germans the same as with most other Western countries. For example, we tip them off when someone we want is flying through their airports (that we for example, have learned from the cell phone of a suspected hacker’s girlfriend in a totally unrelated third country) and they hand them over to us. They don’t ask to justify how we know something, and vice versa, to insulate their political leaders from the backlash of knowing how grievously they’re violating global privacy.” Snowden makes it retrospectively clear the European Union was colluding with the U.S. when Morales’ airplane was forced down in Vienna. Obviously France, Spain, Portugal and Austria’s actions were the product of American pressure, U.N. obligation and—as Snowden mentions—the desire to not question how Washington “knew” Snowden was onboard the Bolivian aircraft.