As we saw in the last part the NSA was allegedly looking for conspirators in the wake of 9/11. The way they did that was to look at everybody.
Surveillance inside the US was only legal if they got a FISA. Yet, they did it anyway and explained it away by ‘operating under Presidential Power, under the Patriot Act’.
Quote – this article
Just six weeks after the September 11 attacks, a panicked Congress passed the “USA/Patriot Act,” an overnight revision of the nation’s surveillance laws that vastly expanded the government’s authority to spy on its own citizens, while simultaneously reducing checks and balances on those powers like judicial oversight, public accountability, and the ability to challenge government searches in court.
If you haven’t read the Patriot Act, I recommend the above-linked article that shows the main changes.
Even though the Patriot Act expanded the surveillance laws, it did not give them permission to spy on everybody without a FISA.
In the last part, we saw how they solved that ‘problem’ – by getting a judge at FISA to sign off that it was legal
One of the changes is this:
Records Searches: It expands the government’s ability to look at records on an individual’s activity being held by third parties. (Section 215)
As Binney says “AT&T provided 320 million records every day.”
In 2002, a technician at AT&T, Mark Klein, was one of the first to witness something. On the sixth floor, he noticed a door with no door handle. He began to investigate and discovered that the cables from the room went upstairs. On the seventh floor, AT&T handled internet traffic. What he found was something that suggested that the government copied all traffic going through AT&T.
He found that the cables he had been tracking were going through a device called a splitter. One-half was going to the normal designation. The other half was going to the secret room on the sixth floor. This means they could copy everyone’s traffic on the network.
Quote Klein
I was furious. I never signed up to work for the NSA. But I was in the late 50s and I didn’t want to lose my job. So I was stuck. And I was afraid.
He didn’t do anything until 2005 when a front page story in the New York Times revealed the government was spying.
Then he raised this allegation. No one ever confirmed it. But no one ever denied it either.
More newspapers started writing about this spying – which brought unwanted attention to the telecom companies.
At a Senate Hearing, the AT&T CEO answered every question – a lot of questions – with: “We protect the privacy of our customers and follow the law.”
One day Nick Merrill, CEO Calyx – a small web-hosting company – got a phone call from the FBI. They said they had a letter for him – which was delivered shortly after.
It wasn’t signed by a judge, and it didn’t appear to be a regular court order. The letter requested information and stated, that he was not allowed to tell anyone that he had received this letter.
Quote United States of Secrets
It was a National Security Letter, NSL. After 9/11 the Patriot Act allowed any FBI office in the country to issue NSLs without a court review and with a gag-order.
That gag order made him concerned about even going to a lawyer. But after a while, he concluded that it didn’t look legal – so he called his lawyer.
He and his lawyer offered to give the information if they would get a real warrant – which the FBI refused to do. So he decided to go to court.
The documentary informs, that the FBI had issued 56,000 NSLs at that time – and Merrill was the first to challenge the letter on Constitutional grounds.
Quote the same documentary
Until 2013 no major internet or phone company is known to have questioned the Constitutionality of a National Security Letter.
It’s unimaginable that thousands of people just obeyed!
An appeals court ruled Merril’s NSL unconstitutional and the FBI withdrew their request. They probably didn’t want it to go to the Supreme Court.
But that apparently didn’t stop the FBI from sending NSLs.
And Merrill still isn’t allowed to talk about what they requested.
In 2013 Google did challenge 19 NSLs.
Better late than never, I guess …
“My name is Edward Snowden. I used to work for the Government. Now I work for the Public.”
Edward Snowden had worked for the CIA as an analyst – and later for the NSA as a contractor.
If the Oliver Stone movie about him is correct, he was way above the average analyst, which explains why he already had the highest clearance in his late twenties.
When he worked at an NSA facility in Hawaii, he came across the Classified Inspector General Report. That report detailed the entire secret history of the PROGRAM, which we looked at in the last part.
Snowden also became aware, that the NSA received a lot of information from telecom companies like AT&T and from other ‘third-party sources’.
Quote Wikileaks
Using PRISM, the cover name for collection of user data from Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, Apple and five other U.S.-based companies, the NSA could obtain all communications to or from any specified target. The companies had no choice but to comply with the government's request for data. But the NSA could not use PRISM, which was overseen once a year by the surveillance court, for the collection of virtually all data handled by those companies. To widen its access, it teamed up with its British counterpart, Government Communications Headquarters, or GCHQ, to break into the private fiber-optic links that connected Google and Yahoo data centers around the world.
He tried to talk with his colleagues about the illegality of this – but none of them were as outraged as he was.
He then decided to be a whistleblower and downloaded thousands of top-secret files and documents before leaving for Hong Kong in May 2013.
He chose Hong Kong because he assumed that the Chinese government wouldn’t be eager to turn him over to the US.
As an ‘anonymous source,’ he contacted Glen Greenwald, a reporter on the Guardian 2012-13, Laura Poitras, an American documentary filmmaker, Barton Gellman at the Washington Post, and Luke Harding, the Guardian - via encrypted emails. He wanted to meet with them. Harding didn’t dare to go. Neither did Gellman. Poitras – who had encryption - received hundreds of documents. Greenwald also wanted to see some evidence – and after two weeks of establishing encryption, he received twenty documents.
As he says in ‘Democracy Now’, “My mind was blown.”
In June, Greenwald and Poitras traveled to the Mira Hotel in Hong Kong to meet Snowden. They were joined by MacAskill, a veteran Guardian reporter.
About the first document Snowden showed them …
Quote Greenwald – from this documentary
What this document revealed is that the NSA surveillance system is not directed at very bad people or terrorists. It’s directed at the American citizenry and other citizenries around the world, indiscriminately, in bulk.
The document also revealed that Clapper lied to Congress when he answered ‘No’ to the question: “Does the NSA collect any kind of data on millions – or hundreds of millions – of Americans?”
And let me remind you what Obama said when he ran for office in 2008
Quote:
No more ignoring the law when it’s inconvenient. That’s not who we are. We will again set an example for the world that the law is not subject to the whims of stubborn rulers.
That man has no shame! He absolutely doesn’t ‘walk the talk’.
These two men’s lies were one of the reasons Snowden decided to become a whistleblower.
On the Mira Hotel they all agreed to work fast, and MacAskill sent his first article to the Guardian. The editors called the White House and gave them four hours to comment.
At the White House, they were shocked. They called the NSA who confirmed that this was classified information.
Both the White House and the NSA called editor-in-chief Janine Gibson and tried to persuade her not to publish.
Her reply was …
Quote
Look - If you have any serious objections, objections on the grounds of national security, then tell us. Now is the moment to tell us.
And of course, they couldn’t. They just wanted to stall her.
The Guardian then published the first article.
On the Washington Post, Barton Gellman worked on another story. He contacted the NSA and told them he had something confidential to talk about.
The story concerned the NSA program called PRISM. Documents showed how nine internet companies were cooperating with the NSA.
The government asked him not to publish the names of the nine companies – and gave excuses that he disagreed on. So he published.
Quote Gellman - United States of Secrets
The PRISM program is not about metadata, it’s about content. It’s photos and videos you send. It’s the words of your emails. It’s the sounds of your voice on a Skype call. It’s all the files you have stored on a ‘cloud’. It’s content. It’s everything.
After a few days of working together, Snowden decided to reveal his identity on camera and the video was posted the next day.
In that 10-minute video he presents himself and answers questions about his motivation for sharing this information and going public to the world.
Someone searched and found, that a lamp in the picture was from the Mira Hotel in Hong Kong – and a lot of reporters jumped on the next plane.
Therefore, Snowden left the hotel and disappeared into the crowds of Hong Kong.
Back in the US, the reporters kept posting about the NSA spying on the citizens and most media followed up on the stories.
NSA was finally revealed to be lawless and out of control.
After a few days of publishing Snowden's information, he was charged in the US for violating the Espionage Act.
Quote Snowden - Washington Post
For me, in terms of personal satisfaction, the mission’s already accomplished,” he said. “I already won. As soon as the journalists were able to work, everything that I had been trying to do was validated. Because remember, I didn’t want to change society. I wanted to give society a chance to determine if it should change itself.
And society did want this to change. They demanded ‘stop the spying’.
Some, of course, painted Snowden as a traitor.
Pompeo went as far as saying “Proper outcome would be a death sentence” - from 5m41s here
Obama tried to spin the story. They had already been in the process of looking into the espionage before Snowden stole the documents, he claimed.
He appointed a panel to look into all the documents and give him an interim report in 60 days.
In the ‘Citizen Four’ documentary by Laura Poitras, Assange turns out to have been involved in Snowden’s escape from Hong Kong.
He says, from the Ecuadorian Embassy in London - from 1hour22minutes – that he had people escorting Snowden on the flight from Hong Kong. They had arranged for a private jet to take him to Ecuador or Venezuela - but the US revoked Snowden’s passport so he was stuck at the Moscow airport.
With Snowden’s tweet, we see that Assange didn’t reveal the whole story. It wasn’t just any private jet, but the President of Bolivia’s diplomatic aircraft. And the plane wasn’t just transiting in Moscow – they were ‘downed’.
After a couple of days in the airport, he applied for political asylum – which he was granted, for a year.
He has later gotten permanent asylum – and a Russian passport.
Quote this article
I’ve seen allegations about him being connected to Russia. And to China for that matter. But what they don’t talk about is, that the US rescinded his passport – so they are responsible for him being there!
Well, now Russia has given him a passport …
Google discovered that web searches were very revealing, and they started collecting data on all the things people searched for. That mapped nicely with what advertisers desired – to be able to target ads towards the ‘right’ people.
Google’s 2004 launch of G-mail had vastly more storage than Hotmail and Yahoo mail. This sparked controversy for how it mined mail content.
Quote United States of Secrets
They would scan your mail and try to figure out if there was a relevant ad they could show you alongside the mail. They said, “We’re going to basically recover our costs and make a profit by showing ads when you send emails or when you receive email.” And in order to determine what ads to show you they read your emails.
A senator planned to present a bill to stop this practice – but after Google claimed they would never retain the information they collected, she amended her bill.
Quote United States of Secrets, a former Google employee
I believed then – and still do – that Gmail was a privacy disaster. The moment you allow people to look at the content of your communication for some advertising purpose is the moment that the government is going to come along and say, “If you’re going to let them listen in for advertising, why don’t you let us listen in?”
And that is exactly what happened – as described in the Wikileaks quote. The NSA “teamed up with its British counterpart, Government Communications Headquarters, or GCHQ, to break into the private fiber-optic links that connected Google and Yahoo data centers around the world."
Facebook wanted to increase their advertisement as well – and what is called “The Data War” began. To win in that game they needed to have the most data possible.
Google ‘Double Click’ pioneered and refined the tracking of people’s web browsing. When you go to a website, a file is dropped to your computer, a cookie. It’s basically a tracking number, a unique identifier.
At the Washington Post, Gellman was going through the thousands of posts from Snowden and found the slide above.
He contacted an internet security expert, Ashkan Soltani.
Quote Ashkan
The slide indicated the use of a specific Google cookie – called a PREF cookie. […]
And we found out that the NSA was piggybacking on that.
As you can see on the slide GCHQ is mentioned – the British counterpart, they teamed up with.
Ashkan called Google for comment before Gellman published the story – and Google pushed back very hard. They didn’t want their commercial ad cookies to be associated with US government surveillance.
“We can prove it” Ashkan said – “the NSA is piggybacking on your technology.”
Google tried to claim that “it is not a tracking cookie…”
Before the article went to press, Google tried to smear Ashkan to the editor, claiming he had received funds from some privacy fund. It was a personal hit.
The editor asked if anything they had sent was technically inaccurate? Which it wasn’t. So they published.
In December 2013, representatives from Silicon Valley went to the White House. The meeting was supposed to be about healthcare – but they instead raised strong objections against Obama. They told him, that what he had authorized the NSA to do, was doing huge damage to their global markets.
Quote United States of Secrets
The next day, the panel the president had assembled to review NSA policies and programs issued its report. They found that some programs, like PRISM, had played an important role in preventing terrorist attacks. But it was sharply critical of both data collection, […] surveillance, and the use of national security measures. They concluded that the NSA was overreaching. And that American civil liberties were at risk.
Since then, there have been more reports. Surveillance of smartphone apps, web cam images, hundreds of millions of text messages, how the NSA is capable of recording foreign countries' phone calls – and how they can crack most online encryptions. The population was outraged – and the media dared to publish about it.
That is 10 years ago.
Gellman visited Snowden in Moscow in December 2013. He interviewed Snowden for fourteen hours over two days.
Quote - United States of Secrets
I found a guy who was almost Zen-like in his serenity and his comfort with what he had done. He had consciously decided he was willing to take huge risks – to provoke a public debate … provoke a public debate that no one could have possibly seen coming.
But, despite all that he did, despite all the debate – it has only gotten worse, the spying. ‘They’ know almost everything about us – and we know so little about them.
Quote Ben Wizner about Free Press, in the video ‘Free Julian Assange’
No government at any time in history will voluntarily disclose its own crimes. For that, we need brave sources who have first-hand evidence – and we need a free press and brave publishers who are willing to bring this information to the people to whom it belongs.
They’ve used the Espionage Act against both Snowden and Assange. Biden has demanded the extradition of Assange to the US.
I haven’t looked deeply into Assange yet, but I’ll mention one thing: He is not American. So how can the US claim that they can impose US criminal secrecy laws on a foreign publisher that published outside the US?
We see how their totalitarian actions have a chilling effect on reporters and publishers.
Quote Ben Wizner
Does this administration want to be the first to establish the Global precedent that countries can demand the extradition of foreign reporters and publishers for violating their own laws?
I truly hope not.
Neither do I. But it worries me to see the global totalitarian regime in the process of setting this precedent - that journalists, publishers, sources, and whistleblowers can be convicted whenever, wherever, however.
Privacy – and thereby freedom – is under constant attack.
In the next part, we’ll look at Pegasus, another surveillance program.
To be continued …
Links
United States of Freedom - Part One
United States of Freedom - Part Two
Wikileaks about PRISM
https://wikileaks.org/hackingteam/emails/emailid/69276
Snowden 10 years in exile, the Guardian
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/jun/08/no-regrets-says-edward-snowden-after-10-years-in-exile
About the Patriot Act
https://www.aclu.org/documents/surveillance-under-usapatriot-act
Laura Poitras documentary, CitizenFour
Snowden interview from Hong Kong – Greenwald
Oliver Stone film about Snowden
About the Patriot Act
https://www.aclu.org/documents/surveillance-under-usapatriot-act
Edward Snowden conversation at Future Fest 2015
Tulsi Gabbard video about Snowden, Assange, the Espionage Act
Snowden video: we must free Assange
Pompeo: “Death to Snowden”
Pompeo wants to kill Assange
Snowden, Greenwald, & Chris Hedges on Democracy Now
Ben Wizner about Free Press
If we knew then what we know now. 9/11 was all a big lie and the people who died there and our military that lost their lives in Afghanistan. The terrorists were not who “they” said they were. The terrorists were walking among us. Snowden and Assange are heros not villains. Thank you, Jytte. Well written as always Be blessed.
Thanks again for the deep dive into what the media didn't blare out loud, and how bad the Patriot Act was gotten around. I understand now how Snowden fits in and Assange. Snowden took a great leap of faith and courage. He is a hero. Lots of people in the US were not for the Patriot Act taking our freedoms away, but fear gripped the population that did not think. Fear freezes rationality.
Tusind tak.