[D66] Snowden memoirs | wsws.org

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Edward Snowden: The man who exposed the electronic surveillance of
everyone by US intelligence
By
Kevin Reed
wsws.org
13 min
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In the final chapter of his memoir Permanent Record, Edward Snowden
issues a warning to his readers. He writes, “[I]t wouldn’t take much for
an interested government to find out that you’ve been reading this book.
At the very least, it wouldn’t take much to find out that you have it,
whether you downloaded it illegally or bought a hard copy online or
purchased it at a brick-and-mortar-store with a credit card.”

Prior to Edward Snowden’s 2013 exposure of a secret US mass surveillance
program, the idea that the government was electronically eavesdropping
on the entire population—such as what books they are reading or what
subjects they are searching for online—was feared and even suspected.

This suspicion was aided by intelligence service whistleblowers who came
before Snowden, such as Mark Klein (2006), Thomas Drake (2011) and
William Binney (2012), as well as some Hollywood movies such as Enemy of
the State(1998) starring Will Smith and Gene Hackman, and the Jason
Bourne series based on the novels of Robert Ludlum and starring Matt
Damon (beginning in 2002).

However, the exposures by Snowden provided the public for the first time
with extensive documentary proof of mass electronic surveillance and
violation of democratic rights by the US intelligence state. As Snowden
writes in the preface to his book, the National Security Agency (NSA)
and Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) had built a vast system with a
hegemonic goal: “to collect all the world’s digital communications,
store them for ages and search through them at will.”

The exact number of NSA documents that Edward Snowden disclosed to the
media and the number that he exfiltrated from US intelligence are both
unknown. Some estimates put the former at approximately 10,000 and the
latter at 1.7 million. The documents included classified reports, email
messages, memos, planning documents, promotional and training PowerPoint
presentations.

Among the most devastating revelations from Snowden’s disclosures is the
existence of the downstream surveillance method known as PRISM. Snowden
describes PRISM as a tool used “to routinely collect data from
Microsoft, Yahoo!, Google, Facebook, Paltalk, YouTube, Skype, AOL and
Apple, including email, photos, video, and audio chats, Web-browsing
content, search engine queries, and all other data stored on their
clouds, transforming the companies into witting coconspirators.”

He goes on to describe upstream collection as “arguably even more
invasive. It enabled the routine capturing of data directly from private
sector Internet infrastructure—the switches and routers that shunt
Internet traffic worldwide, via satellites in orbit and the high
capacity fiber-optic cables that run under the ocean.” Snowden explains,
in some detail, the technologies behind the upstream data collection:

“As I came to realize, these tools are the most invasive elements of the
NSA’s mass surveillance system, if only because they’re closest to the
user—that is, the closest to the person being surveilled. Imagine
yourself sitting at a computer, about to visit a website. You open a Web
browser, type in a URL, and hit Enter. The URL is, in effect, a request,
and this request goes out in search of its destination server. Somewhere
in the midst of its travels, however, before your request gets to that
server, it will have to pass through TURBULENCE, one of the NSA’s most
powerful weapons.

“Specifically, your request passes through a few black servers stacked
on top of one another, together about the size of a four-shelf bookcase.
These are installed in special rooms at major private telecommunications
buildings throughout allied countries, as well as in US embassies and US
military bases, and contain two critical tools. The first, TURMOIL,
handles “passive collection,” making a copy of the data coming through.
The second, TURBINE, is in charge of “active collection”—that is,
actively tampering with the users …

“If TURMOIL flags your traffic as suspicious, it tips it over to
TURBINE, which diverts your request to the NSA’s servers. There,
algorithms decide which of the agency’s exploits—malware programs—to use
against you. This choice is based on the type of website you’re trying
to visit as much as your computer’s software and Internet connection.
These chosen exploits are sent back to TURBINE (by programs of the
QUANTUM suite, if you’re wondering), which injects them into the traffic
channel and delivers them to you along with whatever website you
requested. … it all happens in less than 686 milliseconds. Completely
unbeknownst to you.

“Once the exploits are on your computer, the NSA can access not just
your metadata, but your data as well. Your entire digital life now
belongs to them.”

In warning his readers about these programs, Snowden anticipates the US
government’s reaction to his book. Upon the September 17 release of
Permanent Record, the Justice Department filed a motion against both
Snowden and his publisher Macmillan seeking to block any proceeds from
the book ever getting to the whistleblower.

The absurd US legal claim is that Snowden violated his nondisclosure
agreement with the CIA and NSA by failing to submit his manuscript to
his former employers for review before publishing. The reality is that
the DOJ and Trump administration intend to intimidate anyone else who
might consider going public with evidence of crimes committed by US
imperialism.

Also contained in Snowden’s warning is a clear message: the mass
surveillance he exposed and shared with the Guardian and the Washington
Post just over six years ago is not only continuing, it is expanding.
Although his revelations have resulted in improvements in the technology
of electronic communications—such as widespread adoption of data
encryption methods—Snowden acknowledges that government spying continues.

It is noteworthy that among the nonstop references to an unnamed CIA
“whistleblower” behind the unfolding impeachment proceedings against
President Trump over his phone call with Ukraine’s leader Volodymyr
Zelensky, Democratic and Republican politicians and, corporate news
programs, have made scarcely any reference to the example of Edward
Snowden. Although he has received numerous international whistleblower
awards, such as the Ridenhour Prize for Truth-Telling and the Carl von
Ossietzky Medal, Snowden has been living “somewhere in Moscow” for the
past six years and faces three US charges including violating the
Espionage Act of 1917.

Among the most important parts of the book are where Snowden describes
how he came to learn about and understand the scope and scale of the
NSA’s criminal surveillance apparatus. In the chapter called “Tokyo,”
the city where he went to work for the NSA in 2009 as an “employee,”
first of Perot Systems and then Dell, after Perot Systems was acquired
by the personal computer maker, he explains, “As in the CIA, this
contractor status was all just formality and cover, and I only ever
worked in an NSA facility.”

He writes, “The material that I disseminated to journalists in 2013
documented such an array of abuses by the NSA, accomplished through such
a diversity of technological capabilities, that no one agent in the
daily discharge of their responsibilities was ever in the position to
know about all of them—not even a systems administrator. To find out
about even a fraction of the malfeasance, you had to go searching. And
to go searching, you had to know that it existed.”

Snowden says in his first days with the NSA he was only “slightly more
knowledgeable about its practices than the rest of the world.” After
reading in July 2009 a document called Unclassified Report on the
President’s Surveillance Program about George W. Bush-era warrantless
wiretapping, he had questions, and this suspicion “sent me searching for
the classified version of the report.”

In Tokyo, Snowden had been assigned the responsibility of developing a
backup and storage document management system that provided the NSA with
“a complete, automated and constantly updating copy of all of the
agency’s most important material.” It was due to this unique
responsibility that Snowden became exposed to a wide range of top secret
information.

When the classified version of the report on Bush’s surveillance program
came to Snowden’s attention by mistake, before moving to “scrub the
document from the system” per IT procedures, he decided to examine the
file to “confirm” that it should be deleted. “Usually, I’d take just the
briefest glance at the thing. But this time, as soon as I opened the
document and read the title, I knew I’d be reading it all the way through.”

Snowden goes on, “Here was everything that was missing from the
unclassified version. … a complete accounting of the NSA’s most secret
surveillance programs, and the agency directives and Department of
Justice policies that had been used to subvert American law and
contravene the US Constitution. … The document was so deeply classified
that anybody who had access to it who wasn’t a sysadmin would be
immediately identifiable. And the activities it outlined were so deeply
criminal that no government would even allow it to be released unredacted.”

In another chapter called “The Tunnel,” Snowden tells about working in
2012 at the NSA facility located in a former airplane factory located
under a pineapple field on the island of Oahu, Hawaii. It was here that
he would later copy the NSA documents to a micro SD card, smuggle them
out in his Rubik’s Cube and share them with the news media. Snowden
explains, “my active searching out of NSA abuses began not with my
copying of documents, but with the reading of them. … I had to
understand the system before I could decide what, if anything, to do
about it.”

In Permanent Record , Snowden provides his personal history through his
life in exile in Russia since 2013. Readers get to know who Edward
Snowden is as a person and they learn how it was that a 29-year-old
intelligence contractor living a comfortable life in Hawaii decided to
take on the world’s most powerful military-intelligence establishment.
As he writes, “This book is about what led up to that decision, the
moral and ethical principles that informed it, and how they came to
be—which means it’s also about my life.”

Snowden’s life story is important as personal biography and it is also
significant in terms of what it says about the generation that has grown
up in the era of the personal computer, video games, the Internet and
the World Wide Web. A broader social and political phenomenon lies
behind the clarity, determination, courage and values expressed by the
individual Edward Snowden.

As he recounts his days with the CIA and NSA, Snowden reveals many
aspects of the criminal operations of US intelligence on a global scale.
He discusses the role of IT specialists like himself in the transition
of the intelligence agencies from the predominance of older generation
HUMINT (human intelligence) to the modern era of SIGINT (signals
intelligence) or what later became known as “cyber-intelligence.” The
espionage operations of US imperialism were becoming more and more
dependent upon the skills and knowledge of Snowden’s generation.

Due to his facility with computer hardware, operating systems, software,
networking and data, Snowden rose rapidly within the intelligence
apparatus and eventually obtained access to documents and information
available to only a handful of deep state officials with the highest
security clearance. As he began reading through these documents, Snowden
grew increasingly alarmed about the meaning of the massive data
collection that was taking place behind the backs of the public.

Along with others—such as WikiLeaks founder and editor Julian Assange,
who is in a London prison fighting threat of extradition to the US, and
whistleblower and former US Army soldier Chelsea Manning ,who is in jail
in Virginia for refusing to testify against Assange—Snowden is part of
the growing political opposition within the working class
internationally to the crisis and crimes of American imperialism.

While corporate media references to the so-called Millennials (those
born between 1980 and 1994) is often focused on consumer buying
preferences or affinity for digital gadgets, the political experiences
of this generation are reviewed, recorded and explained in Permanent
Record. Snowden deserves credit for forthrightly and honestly recounting
how a relatively apolitical 22-year-old passed through a series of
bitter political lessons that transformed his outlook.

Edward Joseph Snowden was born in Elizabeth City, North Carolina in
1983. His family moved to Fort Meade, Maryland—the home of the NSA—while
he was in grade school. His maternal grandfather was an FBI official,
his father an officer in the Coast Guard, and his mother a clerk at the
US District Court for Maryland.

After the events of September 11, 2001, Edward decided to enlist in the
US Army—against the wishes of his parents. Like many, Snowden bought
into the fraudulent “war on terror” campaign announced by the
administration of George W. Bush and backed by both the Democrats and
Republicans in Congress as they launched the invasion of Afghanistan
less than a month after the terror attacks.

In a chapter entitled “9/12,” Snowden writes, “The greatest regret of my
life was my reflexive, unquestioning support of that decision [the US
going to war after 9/11]. … I accepted all the claims retailed by the
media as facts, and I repeated them as if I were being paid for it. …
The sharpest part of the humiliation comes from acknowledging how easy
this transformation was, and how readily I welcomed it.” Along with
these regrets came alternating bouts of anger, reading, disgust and
thinking.

Snowden also reviews his experience—along with that of his girlfriend
Lindsay Mills—in supporting the candidacy of Democrat Barack Obama for
president in 2008. He writes, “The fact that President Obama, once in
office, refused to call for a full congressional investigation [of
Bush-era NSA spying on the public] was the first sign, to me at least,
that the new president—for whom Lindsay had enthusiastically
campaigned—intended to move forward without a proper reckoning with the
past. As his administration rebranded and recertified PSP (President’s
Surveillance Program)-related programs, Lindsay’s hope in him, as well
as my own, would prove more and more misplaced.”

Snowden’s memoir is also something of a handbook. As he explains the
forms of the most common government electronic surveillance methods, he
then goes over in layman’s terms the readily-available techniques for
concealing IP addresses, text messaging with end-to-end encryption,
strong encryption techniques to protect the contents of data storage
drives and tools for uploading documents securely and anonymously to
journalists.

In Permanent Record, Snowden comes across as a very intelligent and
politically knowledgeable whistleblower. He was careful and calculating
in gathering the evidence of US government criminality. He was
deliberate and cunning in his delivery of this evidence to the press. He
provides a convincing and well-reasoned explanation for why he acted
selflessly to expose to the public the secret surveillance programs of
the CIA and NSA and, at the same time, identify himself publicly as the
man who did it. He solidly grounds his decision-making in a commitment
to democratic and constitutionally protected rights.

However, in acknowledging his important strengths, it is also possible
and necessary to look critically at the political views articulated by
Edward Snowden and point out his errors and weaknesses. Among the
serious fallacies in Snowden’s outlook is his portrayal of the emergence
of the secret mass surveillance state following the events of September
11, 2001 as a well-intentioned response gone awry.

He writes, “After 9/11, the IC was racked with guilt for failing to
protect America, for letting the most devastating and destructive attack
since Pearl Harbor occur on its watch. … The doors to the most secretive
intelligence agencies were flung wide open to young technologists like
myself. And the geek inherited the earth.”

Aside from the fact that “geeks” like Snowden are employees of and
contractors for the intelligence state, the electronic technology
infrastructure being marshaled for spying on the public—as well as the
use of other high-tech tools for war making such as unmanned drones—is
driven by the historic crisis and decline of American imperialism. The
increasing resort to war as well as the attacks on democratic rights
both at home and abroad are rooted in the loss by American capitalism of
its post-war global economic and political hegemony.

While Snowden makes passing references to American “imperialism” and
“capitalism,” his grasp of these socioeconomic concepts lack depth and
it is clear that he has a limited historical understanding of their
relationship to the class character of society. Operating without the
theoretical understanding of class society, Snowden is mistaken that
democratic rights can be defended without a political struggle by the
vast majority—the working class—against the ruling class and its state
apparatus.

Instead, he believes that the “error” of the secret surveillance of the
entire population can be corrected by appeals to the very forces who
created it. As he writes, “I realized that coming forward and disclosing
to journalists the extent of my country’s abuses wouldn’t be advocating
for anything radical, like the destruction of the government, or even of
the IC. It would be a return to the pursuit of the government’s, and the
IC’s, stated goals.” These are indeed dangerous illusions.

In spite of these shortcomings, Edward Snowden has written a compelling
memoir that deserves the widest possible readership. The story of his
life, his career with US intelligence, his exposure of US government
criminality and his courage and self-sacrifice—including the fact that
he has been living for the past six years in an “undisclosed location”
in Moscow and is constantly looking over his shoulder—is one that must
be told.