The Edward Snowden Affair (6 page)

Thomas Andrews Drake is the son of a World War II veteran and the secretary of famed American novelist Pearl S. Buck.
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His first encounter with U.S. intelligence was as an airborne voice processing specialist for the Air Force from 1979 to 1989.
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In civilian terms, he listened to communications as he flew reconnaissance over the Eastern bloc of Germany.
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From there he would meet Bill Clinton during his presidency when Drake worked at the National Military Joint Intelligence Center for the U.S. Navy.
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A lifelong academe, he then did contract work for the NSA evaluating software before being hired by the agency in SIGINT.
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His first day with the NSA was September 11, 2001.
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Within three years, he had been promoted from technical director of software engineering implementation to process portfolio manager. His rising star was shot down after he reported to Congress the NSA’s post9/11 surveillance programs were wasteful and ineffective. Because he told Capitol Hill what the NSA was doing, Drake was reassigned to a professorship at the National Defense University where he would eventually become chair, yet in 2008 he was forced to resign from the NSA.
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Drake’s contention was that then-NSA director General Michael Hayden had chosen a program called “Trailblazer” over another, titled “ThinThread.” Both programs were designed to contend with monitoring the new and exponentially expanding World Wide Web and the advent and increased use of cell phones. Drake was part of a small but well-versed minority that believed ThinThread might have been able to detect and stop the 9/11 attacks had it not been discontinued three weeks prior (some reports claim it was never implemented). Remarkably Trailblazer was still theoretical on September 11, whereas ThinThread had been fully operational since the beginning of the year.
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Drake and his coalition outlined that ThinThread was more effective in processing gross amounts of data, and unlike Trailblazer, it was mindful of Americans’ pocketbooks and Fourth Amendment privacy rights.
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ThinThread cost $3 million; Trailblazer had a $1.2 billion price tag.
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Following government protocol, Drake worked his way up the administrative grievance ladder. He appealed to his superiors, the NSA inspector general, the Defense Department inspector general, then the House and Senate. As a last resort, Drake—along with the Republican’s staff expert on NSA’s budget for the House Intelligence Committee, Diane Roark, and the lead designers of ThinThread, William Binney, Ed Loomis and J. Kirk Wiebe—presented a book-length complaint to the Department of Defense in 2002. Roark even went as far as contacting Dick Cheney’s attorney, David Addington.
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What Roark didn’t know was Addington had been the pen behind the Bush administration’s warrantless wiretapping program.
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Though the Defense Department would eventually internally acknowledge that Drake and Co. had been correct in their assessment, the wasteful, ineffective and invasive programs continued.

There are three motivating factors that permitted the flawed system to persist. One, the government was reluctant to end any security project for fear of appearing unpatriotic. Two, the intelligence agency wanted the illicit data. These two are not mutually exclusive, because any politician labeled unpatriotic during this time risked reelection, and the biggest political donors were corporations who had a vested interest in personal data for marketing and advertising purposes. Three, Hayden was a lieutenant general closing in on retirement. He had only been director of the NSA for a few years and wanted to make a name for himself. He was made a full general a year before retiring in 2006.

Having played by the rules and even getting those responsible to admit fault yet unable to induce them to change their ways, Drake decided to go to the press. Between February 2006 and November 2007,
The Baltimore Sun
published a series of exposés on various aspects of the NSA, including the Trailblazer program.

Eight months later, the FBI stormed the homes of every author of the Department of Defense report except Drake. Binney, having been caught in the shower and still fully nude, was held at gunpoint.
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The FBI was hoping it could elicit through intimidation incriminating evidence against Drake.
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Not a single person was charged, but various items including computers and personal records were confiscated. Then in November, the FBI arrived at Drake’s home.
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He was charged under the Espionage Act. A team of attorneys led by Steven Tyrrell worked on the case. The goal was to indict all involved. Two years into the investigation, Tyrell was replaced by William Welch,
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who dropped all efforts to implicate co-conspirators and focused solely upon Drake. The government wanted to make a single and very harsh example.

Drake was brought up on multiple offenses by three divisions within the Department of Justice, the FBI and the NSA. The most serious was “Willful Retention of National Defense Information.” This referred to five documents found inside Drake’s residence.
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All materials had been declassified. A kangaroo court ensued. Led by Welch, the prosecution sought to withhold exhibits, restrict cross-examinations, bar jurors from reading evidence and prohibit the defense from incorporating whistleblower argumentation.

Then on May 22, 2011, the television program
60 Minutes
aired an exposé about Drake’s circumstance.
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Eighteen days later, all charges were dropped.

Snowden learned three lessons from Drake.
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Playing by the rules and keeping questionable information in-house accomplishes one thing: personal persecution. The intelligence community as well as the American government demanded absolute conformity and cohesion, and nothing was left up to debate. Two, because The Drake Report had already revealed what Snowden had to say yet no one paid attention, he needed a new format.
The Baltimore Sun
’s sources had been kept anonymous. It allowed the government to imply and explicitly state there was no manner or method to validate what it considered exaggerated and fabricated claims, and any supplemental documentation could be and was forged or had been taken out of context. It did not matter that Drake would later reveal himself as the source of the leaks; the government had already successfully executed damage control. It had convinced the American public everything was in order and the people responsible were disgruntled workers crying sour grapes because their project had not been chosen. If the story had ended here, Snowden might have left the intelligence community and said nothing. He would have viewed any effort to make matters known as futile and personally dangerous. Yet the third lesson made all the difference. Snowden had witnessed the impact the media could have on such affairs.

Snowden realized a disclosure of classified information required three things in order to raise the necessary eyebrows: a face so that credentials could not be doubted, documentation for support and the proper venue. He approached the selection of media channels through which he would filter thousands upon thousands of classified government intelligence documents in much the same manner he had extracted the purloined data, with great patience and meticulousness.

If a person wanted to bring an issue to the public’s attention, most would seek the largest possible audience so it would have the greatest potential impact. However, the two largest news outlets were not an option for Snowden. Neither the news station with the greatest number of viewers, Fox News, nor the daily newspaper with the most readers,
The Wall Street Journal
, would have been sympathetic to Snowden’s information due to their conservative platforms. Snowden was also sociologically astute enough to know he needed to legitimize and humanize the information with a face but knew an exclusively televised premier of the story would trivialize many of the pertinent details in favor of sensationalism and the opportunity for sound bites. His next, and best, venue was
The Wall Street Journal’s
rival,
The New York Times
. There was only one problem. Snowden didn’t trust the
Times
.

James Risen and Eric Lichtblau wrote a story about the NSA’s warrantless wiretapping program for the
Times
in November 2004.
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It did not appear until December 2005 because the White House had caught wind of it. The Bush administration had requested it not be published during the election year on grounds that it might jeopardize ongoing investigations. When the article finally premiered, the
Times
obliged the government’s request to omit various portions of the original report. Risen and Lichblau won the Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting the following year. The day after the exposé made headlines, the
Times
Executive Editor, Bill Keller, admitted this was not the first occasion the newspaper had withheld a story due to federal pressure.
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When asked by the
Times
on August 13 why he hadn’t brought his information to the famed periodical, Snowden was polite but honest, “After 9/11, many of the most important news outlets in America abdicated their role as a check to power—the journalistic responsibility to challenge the excesses of government—for fear of being seen as unpatriotic and punished in the market during a period of heightened nationalism. From a business perspective, this was the obvious strategy, but what benefited the institutions ended up costing the public dearly. The major outlets are still only beginning to recover from this cold period.”
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Snowden needed sympathetic ears whose owners had a strong, if not impeccable, track record for journalistic integrity. Though it wouldn’t be obvious for several months, he also wanted people who lived in strategic locations: Europe and South America. Ironically the newspaper with the second-largest distribution in the nation provided him with his second contact after his first refused to respond. On August 8, 2012, the
Times
ran a doc-op piece on William Binney by filmmaker Laura Poitras.
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Born in 1964 and raised in Boston, Poitras studied at the San Francisco Art Institute under experimental filmmaker Ernie Gehr, whose 1970
Serene Velocity
is preserved in the United States National Film Registry.
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She received a graduate degree from The New School for Public Engagement in 1996. It wasn’t
Flag Wars
, her first feature-length documentary which examines gentrification in America, which would garner the government’s attention, but her sophomore effort,
My Country, My Country
. Ostensibly
My Country, My Country
is a portrait of Dr. Riyadh al-Adhadh and his work as a doctor and Sunni political candidate. The heart of the film is the daily life of American soldiers and those living in occupied Iraq. Though her narrative would merit an Academy Award nomination, it would also place Poitras on the Department of Homeland Security’s watch list. Her “threat rating” is the highest the agency assigns, 400 out of 400.
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Instead of allowing herself to be spooked, Poitras sallied forth. Her next documentary,
The Oath
, is a tale divided between Salim Ahmed Hamdan and Nasser al-Bahri, one of Osama bin Laden’s drivers and bodyguards respectively. It was shot on location in Yemen and Cuba. The documentary is as much an exposé on the two individuals as it is a critical look into where a portion of the production was filmed, Guantánamo Bay.
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In 2012, Poitras was awarded the most coveted, prestigious award for artists after the Nobel Prize, a MacArthur Fellowship.
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Snowden saw something not just in Poitras’ subject matter but in her perseverance and refusal to be intimidated. Homeland Security’s fetish for Poitras has manifested in what appears to be the hobby of border detainment. Beginning in Vienna in 2006,
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she has been held in transit over 40 times. Her cameras, phones, notes, baggage and computers are perpetually seized without a warrant and delayed return. It is a sticky legal situation. The government claims since such altercations take place at international zones, constitutional rights aren’t applicable. During an interrogation in Newark, she was instructed to quit taking notes lest she be handcuffed because her pen could be construed as a weapon. Given the government’s reaction to Poitras, there is little doubt it is metaphorically right. She complied. What would appear to be a flippant request, she then asked for a crayon.
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Not only does this follow United States interrogation protocol but implied how she perceived the proceedings. Chilling in its historical import, her airplane tickets are imprinted with “SSSS,” Secondary Security Screening Selection. This signals to security the ticket holder is to be detained upon arrival.
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To accelerate her perpetually delayed alighting time, Poitras started having fellow passengers check her bags. Unfortunately Homeland Security recently became privy to this technique. This method of baggage evasion would later backfire on one of her colleagues reporting on Snowden. Poitras became so exhausted by the perpetual harassment, she took an apartment in East Berlin in order to do her work in peace.
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Though Poitras was the first journalist to connect with Snowden, she was the last of the trio to speak about her experiences of communicating with the then-mysterious voice behind the screen.
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In January 2013, three months before he would start working for his last NSA contactor, Snowden contacted Poitras anonymously and asked for her encryption key.
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There are two types of email encryption: symmetrical and asymmetrical. The easiest way to understand the difference is to imagine a box. Within the box is a rotating partition. It also has locks on the front and back. In symmetric encryption, one key opens both sides and the divider can be freely rotated from either side, exposing the box’s contents to anyone who has access. A person who puts something in the box can also take it out of the box. With asymmetric encryption, the two locks are different and require two different keys. Also, when something is placed in the box, the sender must rotate the partition, which then locks into place. The person who made the deposit can open the box again but cannot retrieve whatever was originally put inside. Only the individual with the other key can. Symmetric encryption is understandably faster but less secure than asymmetrical encoding.