Читать книгу Snowden's Box - Dale Maharidge - Страница 10
ОглавлениеYour worst enemy, he reflected, was your own nervous system. At any moment the tension inside you was liable to translate itself into some visible symptom.
— George Orwell, 1984, quoted in Laura’s Berlin journal
Laura’s journal, various dates:
I am battling with my nervous system. It doesn’t let me rest or sleep. Eye twitches, clenched throat, and now literally waiting to be raided …
I can hear the sound of my blood moving through my veins. Jesus, what the fuck is happening?
Jake says my friends will be targets and that I can’t protect them … [he] said I needed to follow absolutely strict security. That I am a target they would do anything to compromise.
Dale
The rest of May wasn’t measured in minutes, hours, or even days — rather, it was marked by steadily increasing levels of anxiety. The calendar says it was two weeks, but for me it was a single, excruciating unit of time. And if this was how I felt, what was Laura dealing with?
Laura arrived back in the United States on May 15. It was late at night, but she came straight to my apartment from the airport to get the box. Instead of opening it, she booked a hotel room using my computer (to avoid surveillance), then sped off in a taxi around two in the morning. For the next few days, she communicated with her source — who remained anonymous — from the hotel. The box contained data and instructions, and there was a growing sense that it involved something momentous. The source, Laura said, was treating the matter “a bit like a puzzle.” There were multiple layers protecting the data, little of which she had seen.
As she absorbed all this, Laura tried to imagine what came next. How would it all go down? “I was thinking I was going to meet a source who then would be potentially arrested after. That was my read on what was going to unfold,” she recalled later. “It was kind of going through my brain, like, ‘Am I going to be renting a car?’ All my scenarios were in the United States. Most were someplace in Maryland. I thought I might be taking a train to Baltimore.”
To lessen the tension, we turned to gallows humor. One night, Laura and I met up for drinks and dinner with a friend and longtime collaborator of hers, the cinematographer Kirsten Johnson.
“When you get sent to Guantánamo, Dale and I will take turns using your steam shower,” Kirsten said, alluding to Laura’s renovation. We then brainstormed methods of communicating by clanging on bars if we all ended up imprisoned together. Things grew more ridiculous as the night wore on. “Thanks for making me laugh so hard,” Laura wrote to both of us the next day. It was the last time I’d laugh for a while.
Soon after that, Laura insisted I begin communicating with her in a more secure manner. She gave me a USB flash drive loaded with The Amnesic Incognito Live System (Tails), a secure operating system bundled with a suite of privacy and encryption tools that funnels all of its users’ internet traffic through the anonymous Tor network. Tails doesn’t store any new data, making it practically impervious to malware. Whenever a session ends, any information it generated gets wiped away, leaving no digital traces. (Intriguingly, we’d learn later from leaked documents that the NSA considered Tails a “major” threat to intelligence gathering — a tool whose use could inflict a “loss/lack of insight to [the] majority of target communications.”)
All I had to do was plug in the USB drive that Laura gave me, turn on my computer, and wait for the connection to be routed through proxy servers. There was a tiny yellow onion in the upper-right-hand corner of the screen — a homage to Tor’s original name, The Onion Router — and when that icon turned green, it was safe to communicate.
I kept the flash drive, along with a sticky note listing both of our Jabber addresses, in a secret place.
For the next two weeks, Laura and I were in constant contact. The source, who remained nameless, finally revealed the location to meet: Hong Kong. This raised the stakes considerably, and we spent much time speculating: was the source affiliated with the CIA or the NSA? He or she seemed to span agencies, Laura said. But that was just a suspicion on her part.
I was feeling in over my head. I’m more of a narrative or cultural journalist. I had been in my share of hairy situations when covering conflict overseas and even here in the United States. This, however, was a new dimension. I feigned steadiness when offering Laura advice, but my stomach was constantly churning.
In the early hours of May 21, when Tails refused to work on my computer, Laura fell back on email. At 4:49 a.m., she wrote: “Can you get in a taxi? I really need to talk.”
I ran downstairs and flagged a cab; as the vehicle sped down Broadway, I peered out the rear window to make sure I wasn’t being followed. When I arrived at her hotel room, Laura didn’t speak. She pointed to my phone: the battery came out and the device went in the fridge. Then, eyes wide, she pointed to a file on the computer screen. It was NSA data — part of an extensive trove of documents. “It looks like the US government’s covert intelligence ‘black budget,’” she said.
When we reminisced about that day years later, it still shook her. “I remember seeing the black budget. It was the first document I opened,” Laura recalled, starting to stammer. “Fuck! This is the kind of stuff—” She drew a deep breath and trailed off.
The black budget mapped out $52.6 billion in spending on top-secret projects for fiscal year 2013. Among other plans, it outlined what officials called “offensive cyber operations”: an aggressive push by the NSA and CIA to hack foreign networks for the purpose of stealing information or committing sabotage.
After Laura showed me that document, she called up a letter stored in a file called README_FIRST. It was literary, even poetic — the words of a civic-minded person who’d clearly thought long and hard before deciding to make a startling sacrifice. This is, in part, what the source had written:
Many will malign me for failing to engage in national relativism, to look away from [our] society’s problems toward distant, external evils for which we hold neither authority nor responsibility, but citizenship carries with it a duty to first police one’s government before seeking to correct others. Here, now, at home, we suffer a government that only grudgingly allows limited oversight, and refuses accountability when crimes are committed …
I understand that I will be made to suffer for my actions, and that the return of this information to the public marks my end. I will be satisfied if the federation of secret law, unequal pardon, and irresistible executive powers that rule the world that I love are revealed for even an instant. If you seek to help, join the open source community and fight to keep the spirit of the press alive and the internet free. I have been to the darkest corners of government, and what they fear is light.
The letter was signed “Edward Joseph Snowden.” Along with the name appeared his social security number, CIA alias, and agency ID number.
Apart from learning Snowden’s identity, Laura also knew she was more vulnerable than ever. Snowden had warned her about what he called a “single point of failure.” If the federal government could stop the archive’s release, he said, they would take whatever steps necessary to do so. That had a bad sound to it, I thought, as I pondered the stunning scope of the story and the dangers it posed to Laura in particular. To mitigate the risk, she made copies of what had come in the box and put them into the hands of other people she trusted.
Distributing leaked documents widely to avoid a single point of failure is not a new strategy. Daniel Ellsberg did the same with the Pentagon Papers. “For a year and a half my greatest fear had been that the FBI would swoop down and collect all my copies of the papers,” Ellsberg wrote in his 2002 book, Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers. A problem in that pre-digital age was sheer volume. He photocopied the documents furiously, filling boxes with duplicates. Then he had to find a place to safeguard them.
“One box went to my brother in New York,” Ellsberg wrote. “Others went to friends’ attics or basements in the area; almost none of them was told what was in the box, just that they were papers I needed stored.”
Snowden, Laura said, had made it clear that he was no ordinary bureaucrat. Indeed, he insisted that this leak was bigger than the Pentagon Papers. Nothing in my career had prepared me for this moment, and, quite understandably, Laura was also feeling overwhelmed.
“I’m not a journalist!” she joked during a particularly stressful exchange.
“Yes, you are!” I replied.
“I’m just a chef!” she countered, referring to her previous career.
Laura asked me to be one of the keepers of the material. My profile as a journalist and a professor at an Ivy League school, she felt, would afford some protection. “Would you do that?”
“Sure.”
She warned of the possibility of grave risk. She wanted to be certain I understood the danger, that I knew I could say no.
“This is what we do,” I responded. “It’s why we’re journalists.”
She muttered something about that being one of the reasons why she liked me. We embraced.
Laura still had misgivings about making the trip. What if she got detained again by the TSA? She ran through the scenario with Kirsten, who recalls feeling conflicted: the details seemed sketchy, yes, and they made her worry for Laura. But she also remembers thinking, “This is smart. It has an internal logic.”
“One of the interesting things Laura and I do is we create a mirror for each other,” she explained. “We’re both risk-takers. Sometimes, she imagines the worst-case scenario, and I imagine the best-case scenario. But when we’re with each other, we see things that we might not see if we were on our own. I have nowhere near her investigative capacity, but I really do think I am perceptive, psychologically.”
Kirsten explained that she would have volunteered to take the trip with Laura, but two years earlier, she’d given birth to twins.
“I was ripped apart that I couldn’t go,” she said. “It was very clear to me that I had made a choice to be a parent and that I had an obligation, and it was immutable.”
So Laura forged on. Now she faced her next challenge: convincing a journalist to join her on a trip to Hong Kong to meet a total stranger. The most likely candidate was Greenwald. They’d already met face-to-face in April when Greenwald was visiting New York and staying at a Marriott in Yonkers. Laura had them switch tables at the hotel restaurant twice, until she was satisfied they wouldn’t be overheard, and had him take his cellphone back to his room. When Greenwald returned, she showed him a pair of emails she’d received from her source. She’d asked him to work on the story with her, and he’d agreed.
But now Greenwald was back home in Rio. That meant Laura had a trove of classified files on her hands — and no way to safely tell him about its contents.
“The problem was that he still didn’t have encryption and would not travel without more information, which I would not provide without an encrypted channel to communicate on,” Laura recalled. The situation was maddening.
Laura tried to help Greenwald set up encryption. In early May, she had Micah Lee, a technologist at the Freedom of the Press Foundation, send him a Tails USB drive with instructions via FedEx. But the package was held up in customs for ten days.
“I was desperate,” she recalled. Going to get classified files in Hong Kong alone, without the support of another journalist or the legal protection of a major media outlet — that spelled trouble. “It would have pretty much guaranteed I would probably never be able to come back to the United States, if not be arrested,” she said.
After all, she added, “I’m a lone wolf documentary filmmaker already on the terrorist watch list, with the biggest national security leak in history. This is not a good combination.”
Laura planned to film Snowden at this critical juncture, as he prepared to upend his life in the name of civil liberties. And Snowden was ready to take the hit. “My personal desire is that you paint the target directly on my back,” he wrote to her. “No one, not even my most trusted confidant, is aware of my intentions and it would not be fair for them to fall under suspicion for my actions. You may be the only one who can prevent that and that is by immediately nailing me to the cross rather than trying to protect me as a source.”
But it would all be for naught if the story wasn’t disseminated effectively. Laura knew the material Snowden wanted to leak — documents revealing widespread abuse of power — would hit hardest as a series of written news reports. “It wasn’t just a film,” she explained. “It was a print story.”
For the sake of safety and credibility, the print version would have to go through a large media organization, one with strong editorial and legal teams and a history of publishing ground-shaking investigative journalism.
Approaching the New York Times, however, was out of the question. Snowden didn’t have confidence that the newspaper would have the guts to break the story. In an earlier message to Laura, he’d written, “I don’t trust that the NYT will divulge the source document and company names until someone else does it first. Their reporters are fine, but their editors aren’t what they used to be, and are far too accommodating of power.”
He worried the editors would cave to government pressure, as they had nearly a decade before, when the Times spiked a story by James Risen and Eric Lichtblau about the NSA’s warrantless spying on Americans. The scoop was scheduled to run right before the 2004 elections, but Executive Editor Bill Keller deferred to Bush administration officials, who claimed the revelations would damage national security. Frustrated, Risen included the material in his book State of War: The Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration. Aware that the book and its payload of revelations were coming in 2006, the New York Times was spurred in 2005 to finally publish a version of the story, which went on to win a Pulitzer Prize.
Snowden didn’t want to see the New York Times sit on his disclosures for a year. To avoid getting tangled in the slow-moving bureaucracy of a large news organization, he’d decided to make direct contact with independent journalists who were passionate about exposing government overreach.
