Glenn Greenwald 13

Home    Sign up for our FREE Daily Email Newsletter Glenn Greenwald to Haaretz: Why Whistleblower Snowden Came to Me By Noam Sheizaf September 26, 2013 "Information Clearing House - "Haaretz" -   One muggy day in May, the journalist Glenn Greenwald and the documentary filmmaker Laura Poitras stood outside a restaurant in a Hong Kong mall, waiting for a man who would be carrying a Rubik’s Cube. According to the instructions they had received, they were supposed to ask him what time the restaurant would open. He would reply and add a warning: The food is lousy. Greenwald and Poitras arrived early. The man with the Rubik’s Cube, who was tense and a bit suspicious, told them to follow him to a room in a hotel. There he showed them his employer’s card at Booz Allen Hamilton, a contractor for the U.S. National Security Agency. His name was Edward Snowden, and within a few days he would become the most wanted person on the planet. On June 6, Greenwald published, in The Guardian, the first article based on the documents Snowden had given him. He revealed a secret court order directing the communications giant Verizon to transmit to the NSA “on an ongoing, daily basis” the telephone records of all its customers, among them millions of American citizens. The story, which rocked the world media, turned out to be only the tip of the iceberg. Subsequently revealed was the existence of a program called Prism, through which the NSA monitors and mines traffic on the Internet on a massive scale, as well as a system that allows the penetration, storage and analysis of private information gleaned from most of the world’s email services. The details Snowden gave Greenwald and Poitras revealed the vast scope of surveillance of American citizens and diplomats conducted by the United States, including on American soil; the development of a program capable of penetrating every cellular phone; “back doors” in the big Internet services and leading Internet companies, which enable the administration to intercept the communications of their clients; and more. “I, sitting at my desk, could wiretap anyone, from you or your accountant to a federal judge or even the president, if I had a personal email,” Snowden told The Guardian. According to press reports, Snowden, who took four computers with him when he left the United States, provided Greenwald and Poitras with some 20,000 carefully chosen documents. The amount and full content of the material in Snowden’s possession is unclear, though he is known to have backed it up on the web. According to a report in The Daily Beast, Snowden has hidden “encrypted insurance files” that will become public automatically if he disappears or is murdered. Snowden’s leak is one of the biggest in history, and perhaps the most significant of them all. He spent years planning it, starting to download classified material while working for Dell, the computer technology corporation, which he joined in 2009. He said he had decided to go public to enhance the credibility of the revelations, as well as remove suspicion from his work colleagues. To avoid extradition to the United States, Snowden flew from Hong Kong to Russia at the end of June, and spent several weeks in Moscow’s Sheremetyevo airport. Last month, he was granted temporary asylum in Russia. Greenwald and Poitras themselves became targets of the intelligence services. On August 18, Greenwald’s partner, David Miranda, a Brazilian national, was detained at Heathrow airport in London while in transit between Berlin ‏(where he met with Poitras‏) and Rio de Janeiro, where he and Greenwald live. Airports have become dangerous places for journalists and their sources: increasing numbers of Western governments view them as extraterritorial sites in which the citizen’s usual protections are not in effect. Laura Poitras has been subjected to searches and interrogations for years every time she entered the United States. She and Greenwald avoid carrying sensitive documents or electronic files during flights. The British deputy prime minister, Nick Clegg, said that the material confiscated from Miranda posed a “significant threat” to national security, but the revelations did not stop. Miranda was interrogated for nine hours under Schedule 7 of the Terrorism Act 2000, which allows the authorities to question anyone in an airport to determine if he is a terrorist. All the electronic equipment he was carrying was confiscated. Two days later, editor of The Guardian, Alan Rusbridger, revealed that even earlier, the British intelligence agency Government Communications Headquarters‏(GCHQ‏) had forced the paper to destroy hard drives containing documents leaked by Snowden. Poitras and Greenwald do not intend to set foot on American soil anytime soon. Greenwald is currently at home in Brazil, where he continues to work on stories deriving from the Snowden material. My interview with him was conducted via Skype. Greenwald confirmed to me that he is in constant contact with Snowden, via encrypted chat services. “Edward doesn’t want me to take the documents and publish them all indiscriminately,” Greenwald says. “He has made it clear all along that he wants me to make choices about the things that should be published and about those that ought to remain secret, according to the accepted journalistic balance between the public’s right to know and avoidance of causing harm. That’s what I do every day: go over the documents, connect them to one another, try to understand them.” What do you mean by “avoidance of causing harm”? “He doesn’t want to put anyone’s life at risk by exposing the identity of NSA employees or secret agents. He also said very clearly that he does not want to eradicate with his own hands the NSA’s surveillance methods by publishing the exact way in which they work. He doesn’t see that as his role. He wants to inform the public about what the agency is doing and let the public make up its own mind about those actions.” What was your impression of Snowden? “The first time I met him I was very confused, mostly because I had expected someone a lot older. He was 29, but looked at least five years younger. I was so surprised that it took me a little time to recover. After spending the first six or seven hours with him, it was clear to me that he is very intelligent and that he had thought long and hard about what he wants to do. My feeling was that he had a very sophisticated grasp of the subject we were talking about − the American surveillance program and its political implications − and I sensed that he is a very passionate person, but also very serious and rational.” Did that first impression change subsequently? “The most amazing thing is how consistent he is in his personality and character. He hasn’t really changed, despite the tremendous pressure he is under and despite the intensity of the criticism against him. He’s one of those guys who is capable of controlling their feelings very effectively, and he didn’t actually reveal what he thinks and feels. Everything is super-rational. He’s very calm. The main quality he projects is the strength that comes from making a choice that you are absolutely convinced is the right one. There’s an inner peace there.” Global surveillance The affair turned Greenwald himself into an international celebrity and a highly controversial figure, almost like Snowden. American journalists and members of Congress called for him to be arrested and tried the moment he sets foot in the United States, though officially he is not under investigation and has not been charged with anything. Even before the latest events, Greenwald was a caustic and consistent critic of the U.S. administration and the excessive powers it claimed following the attacks on September 11, 2001. However, the developments of the past few weeks seem to have honed his viewpoint even more and have extracted a few unusually sharp comments from him. After Miranda’s detention, Greenwald said that the security services will come to regret their action, as it will only spur him to be more determined and more thorough in publishing the Snowden documents. Glenn Greenwald, 46, was born to a Jewish family in New York and grew up in southern Florida. He is an attorney specializing in constitutional law and civil rights. In the course of the past decade he gradually abandoned law practice in favor of writing. The assertive tone, the ardor, the attention to detail, the pungent criticism of the political establishment and the subjects he deals with − surveillance, wiretapping, personal security and human and civil rights − made the blog he launched in 2005 ‏(“Unclaimed Territory”‏) an instant success. In 2007, he started to write for the Internet magazine Salon. According to someone who worked with him there, Greenwald alone was responsible for a large part of the site’s traffic, one that exceeds any other writer. He moved to The Guardian in 2012, just after the paper opened a separate editorial office in New York. With its liberal, ultra-critical line and strong web presence, The Guardian was just right for Greenwald, who had fallen into increasing disfavor with the American press establishment. After the publication of the Snowden documents, The New York Times ran an unflattering profile of Greenwald, dubbing him a “blogger” and “activist” rather than a journalist. ‏(Despite the mutual sniping between the two newspapers, the assault on The Guardian by the British authorities led to a recent announcement that they would cooperate and that the Times will take part in making Snowden’s documents public.‏) The possibility cannot be overlooked that the disrespect Greenwald encountered from part of the industry in the first stages of the affair stemmed from professional envy; after all, it was Greenwald’s firmly held views that prompted Snowden to approach him. “He said he had been reading my columns for some time and knew that I was informed about the subject, and that I shared his opinion that mass espionage is very dangerous,” Greenwald says. “He also wanted to be sure that if he were exposed and his whole life changed as a result, he would not do it with a paper that would be vulnerable to threats by the government or that might choose not to publish the information in its possession. He believed I would be prepared to report on these issues very aggressively.” Snowden contacted Greenwald by email in December 2012, requesting that they communicate using encryption. “Because I didn’t really know who he was, or whether he had anything of interest, his request wasn’t high on my order of priorities, and I didn’t follow it up. He then encouraged Laura Poitras to get me involved. That’s how we started to work together.” Until their first meeting, Greenwald didn’t know that Snowden was behind the anonymous December email. “He kept asking me to come to Hong Kong, and in the end I told him I would come only if he sent me a few documents so I would know he was the real thing and was in possession of valuable information. During May, he sent me about 20 documents that were staggering in terms of the secrets they contained and their journalistic value. But it wasn’t until I met him in Hong Kong and saw his ID papers, and even more until I received thousands more documents from him, that I was convinced he was for real. The number of documents alone proved that.” What is the most significant information you received from Snowden? “The cardinal point is that part of the goal of the NSA is to completely eliminate privacy everywhere in the world. Its goal is to make every piece of human communication that is done by electronic means vulnerable to monitoring and surveillance − to collect, store and analyze every message transmitted by people via the telephone or the Internet. “All the specific revelations are only examples of this: the fact that they collected the telephone records of all American citizens, that they detail every phone call made by every American citizen; the Prism and XKeyscore programs, which show how they can collect billions of pieces of communication every day and store and analyze the things you say, who you say them to, which websites you visit and so on. Those are the means. The essence is the vast, sealed system of surveillance which is conducted in absolute secrecy.” What’s the problem with that? “If those with power are capable of monitoring everything we do or say, that means we are very limited in what we can do or say against them. That’s the reason that every tyranny has always used surveillance as a tool to preserve its power. The second problem is that it’s a tool of intimidation. If the population knows that it is always being watched, people will have far less motivation to act, because they will feel vulnerable and threatened. The result is a kind of political paralysis among the public. “The third and perhaps most important thing is that human behavior changes very fundamentally when there is no private space. People who know they are being observed behave in a manner that is far more restrained, narrow and fossilized. They become a lot less free, a lot less willing to test boundaries. Supervision and surveillance encourage conformity in people and eliminate something very essential in the human experience, in human nature: the freedom to do things when we know that no one is looking.” We live in an era in which people share on the social networks, of their own free will, much information that was once considered private. Maybe privacy is no longer so fundamental? “There is a big difference between what you share voluntarily and information that is collected from you. But even people who share all kinds of things voluntarily do not share everything. They have Internet passwords, and they put locks on their bathrooms and bedrooms. Even people who live in the most public manner take measures to ensure the existence of a space in which no one can observe them or oversee them. We are social beings and political animals, so we want others to see what we are doing, but we also have this need for privacy, which is no less essential.” The threat you are talking about is very abstract. The mainstream feeling is that the average citizen has no reason to be afraid and that his name will never come up in the system. “The history of almost every country that exercises surveillance of its citizens is one of extreme abuse of that power. There is no consolation in the thought that the government promises to use that power exclusively against terrorists. Its use is almost always against political dissidents or against people who constitute a threat or challenge to the power apparatus. But the very people who claim they have nothing to hide are rarely speaking the truth. I suggest that you ask each of them for their email password or their bank records or access to their social media accounts, so that you can read their emails and publish whatever you please. Hardly anyone will let you do that, because they all know they have things to hide.” According to most surveys, the American public supports the NSA surveillance programs, though not sweepingly. “Most of the surveys I’ve seen were quite close, divided almost equally, and what I found even more encouraging was that for the first time since September 11, when people are asked what they fear more, an infringement of their liberties by the government or an act of terrorism, the majority replied for the first time that they are more fearful of a possible infringement of their freedom by the government. That is an extraordinarily important change. You also see a great deal more public criticism and skepticism. Two years ago, when surveys asked about NSA programs, support was unequivocal. So the general direction is positive.” Further Reading: http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article36360.htm