Page 2 of 2 Snowden and the three wise NSA whistleblowers
By Peter Lee
As for Snowden's assertion that he could listen to the phone calls of anyone in the United States, including the president, it's a question of admin privileges, according to Binney (from USA Today):
So that meant he had access to go in and put anything. That's why he said, I think, "I can even target the president or a judge." If he knew their phone numbers or attributes, he could insert them into the target list which would be distributed worldwide. And then it would be collected, yeah, that's right. As a super-user, he could do that.
The third reason to pay attention to Binney, Wiebe, and Drake is that they seem to be trying to coach Snowden on the best way to
avoid the most dire legal and public relations jeopardy (from USA Today):
Q: What would you say to him?
Binney: I would tell him to steer away from anything that isn't a public service - like talking about the ability of the US government to hack into other countries or other people is not a public service. So that's kind of compromising capabilities and sources and methods, basically. That's getting away from the public service that he did initially. And those would be the acts that people would charge him with as clearly treason.
Drake: Well, I feel extraordinary kinship with him, given what I experienced at the hands of the government. And I would just tell him to ensure that he's got a support network that I hope is there for him and that he's got the lawyers necessary across the world who will defend him to the maximum extent possible and that he has a support-structure network in place. I will tell you, when you exit the surveillance-state system, it's a pretty lonely place - because it had
its own form of security and your job and family and your social network. And all of a sudden, you are on the outside now in a significant way, and you have that laser beam of the surveillance state turning itself inside out to find and learn everything they can about you.
Wiebe: I think your savior in all of this is being able to honestly relate to the principles embedded in the constitution that are guiding your behavior. That's where really - rubber meets the road, at that point.
A few inferences we can draw:
First, Snowden gave considerable thought to the consequences of his revelations (something which has inexplicably escaped certain critics, such as The Daily Banter's Oliver Willis - motto: "Like Kryptonite to stupid" - who characterized Snowden as a "childish simpleton").
Second, if he had stayed in the US and tried to pursue the legal whistleblower route - which protects NSA employees who report their concerns about illegal behavior, fraud, abuse, and mismanagement to the Inspector General and the relevant congressional oversight committees, but specifically forbids them to go public - he would have
gotten nowhere.
Third, his best option was to go overseas, beyond the reach of the FBI, and publicize his information and gain sympathy for himself and his cause, perhaps hoping that, as in the case of Thomas Drake, the Obama administration would find it politically awkward to pursue the maximalist criminal case.
Fourth, when reviewing his overseas options, he wanted to establish himself in a jurisdiction less vulnerable to US government pressure. For this reason, he ruled out Iceland (and Iceland has apparently ruled out Snowden; the Iceland government declined to meet with Snowden's intermediary and said that Snowden could only apply for asylum if he was already in Iceland).
Quite possibly, he chose Hong Kong both for its laudable freedom of speech/rule of law credentials, and also because, as an ex-CIA employee who had worked briefly on the covert side (and made a point of stating he knew where the CIA Hong Kong station was located), he regarded Hong Kong as a jurisdiction in which the PRC does not cooperate with the CIA very actively and may, in fact, keep their people on a relatively tight leash.
Also, asylum requests in Hong Kong are handled by the local office of the UN Human Rights Council, not the SAR itself. Perhaps this unique wrinkle in the Hong Kong asylum process had more than a little to do with Snowden?s decision to go there.
The UNHCR's concern about the treatment of Wikileaks whistleblower Bradley Manning invites speculation that its local office might eventually approve a request by Snowden for asylum against a US extradition demand on the grounds that he is at risk of persecution, not just prosecution in the United States.
After all, the UN Special Rapporteur for Human Rights, Juan Mendez, reports to the UNHRC and is on record characterizing the treatment of Bradley Manning at Quantico as follows: "I conclude that the 11 months under conditions of solitary confinement (regardless of the name given to his regime by the prison authorities) constitutes at a minimum cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment in violation of article 16 of the convention against torture. If the effects in regards to pain and suffering inflicted on Manning were more severe, they could constitute torture."
Fifth, in order to retain the sympathy of the "few good men" inside the national security apparatus and supporters in the media and public - and to forestall a domestic witchhunt - it would be important not to disclose operational details of NSA operations that might open him to the charge, no matter how specious, that he was helping the "bad guys" evade US surveillance.
It seems Snowden has done this; in fact, pundits looking for smoking gun revelations have been frustrated with the vagueness with which he has described the PRISM program and other surveillance techniques.
Parenthetically, Binney had this to say about the "helping the enemy" issue in his Daily Caller interview:
Q: Did foreign governments, terrorist organizations, get information they didn't have already?
Binney: Ever since ... 1997-1998 ... those terrorists have known that we've been monitoring all of these communications all along. So they have already adjusted to the fact that we are doing that. So the fact that it is published in the US news that we're doing that, has no effect on them whatsoever. They have already adjusted to that.
Sixth, Snowden and Glenn Greenwald understand the importance of sustaining media heat and public interest in his case by dribbling out sensational revelations - while trying not to compromise his "American patriot" cred.
So, while one would expect that US spying on international gabfests would be expected, Snowden exposed non-US activity: the pervasive surveillance regime instituted by the British government targeting foreign dignitaries and their staffs attending the Group of 20 conference in the UK last September.
Seventh, I believe that Snowden wants to very carefully pressure the US government by increasing its anxiety that he a) has information interesting to the PRC, and b) is currently gallivanting around in a PRC Special Administrative Region vulnerable to whatever skullduggery the Chinese might unleash, either during his residence or when his 90-day visa expires mid-August.
The Snowden-in-Hong Kong situation certainly raised hackles in the United States, particularly among the less informed for whom the distinction between Hong Kong and the People's Republic of China (and, for that matter, between the South China Morning Post and some Red Chinese broadsheet) is considerably less than a clear, bright line, and even Bill Binney expressed his anxiety about what Snowden might be telling the Chinese:
Q: There's a question being debated whether Snowden is a hero or a traitor.
Binney: Certainly he performed a really great public service to begin with by exposing these programs and making the government in a sense publicly accountable for what they're doing. At least now they are going to have some kind of open discussion like that. But now he is starting to talk about things like the government hacking into China and all this kind of thing. He is going a little bit too far.
I don't think he had access to that program. But somebody talked to him about it, and so he said, from what I have read, anyway, he said that somebody, a reliable source, told him that the US government is hacking into all these countries. But that's not a public service, and now he is going a little beyond public service. So he is transitioning from whistle-blower to a traitor.
As far as Dick Cheney is concerned, of course, Snowden has already completed the journey.
To which Snowden riposted:
Being called a traitor by Dick Cheney is the highest honor you can give an American.
I think in his interview with the South China Morning Post, Snowden was, as usual, trying to use the sizzle to sell the steak, intentionally vague in his responses, resorting to generalities, repeating details in the public domain, and not handing over documentation that might turn out to be legally compromising to his case (one interested Hong Kong legislator commented that Snowden's allegations so far "are noticeably lacking in details or evidence.")
Snowden said that according to unverified documents seen by the Post, the NSA had been hacking computers in Hong Kong and on the mainland since 2009. None of the documents revealed any information about Chinese military systems, he said.
One of the targets in the SAR, according to Snowden, was Chinese University and public officials, businesses and students in the city. The documents also point to hacking activity by the NSA against mainland targets.
Snowden believed there had been more than 61,000 NSA hacking operations globally, with hundreds of targets in Hong Kong and on the mainland.
"We hack network backbones - like huge Internet routers, basically - that give us access to the communications of hundreds of thousands of computers without having to hack every single one," he said.
In what was probably more unwelcome news for the United States, the UN Human Rights Council local office told the South China Morning Post it might take the UNHRC months to shuffle Snowden's asylum paperwork to the top of the pile if he decided to apply:
Farooqi [a protection officer at the Hong Kong UNHRC office] said because the city has no asylum-screening system, applicants whose tourist visas have expired are usually detained at an immigration centre while their documents are verified. Applications can be made to the UNHCR for asylum at any time. The period of detention usually ranges from a few weeks to a few months, but can be longer, the UNHCR says.
What would happen to Snowden's four laptops, purportedly jammed with interesting information (encrypted? Unencrypted) if he was detained by the Hong Kong government prior to deportation or extradition? Enquiring minds want to know.
For the time being, the PRC government is happy to keep its head down and let the US government writhe on the forked stick of its predicament.
In their public statements, Snowden and the three whistleblowers declare their belief that the NSA has misled congress and the president, implying there is wriggle room for President Obama to mitigate the abuses of the US surveillance state - and recognize Edward Snowden in a role other than that of thief or traitor. It remains to see if this fond hope is rewarded.
Exactly how this plays out - and whether the public goes along with the Snowden-as-Chinese-spy narrative - is open to conjecture. In a US Today/PEW poll released on June 17, 54% said Snowden should be prosecuted, with 34% saying no. As to whether the revelations served the public interest, 49% said yes and 44% said no.
The situation is fluid, and a mis-step by Snowden - or overreach by the US government - could send public opinion tilting either way. The way the pendulum swings may determine whether Snowden gets asylum in Hong Kong - or a favorable plea bargain in the United States and US government re-evaluation of the pervasive NSA surveillance regime that
he says he desires - or extradition and long, hard time in a US penitentiary.
It is possible that Binney, Wiebe, and Drake will continue to give the pendulum a push toward Snowden in order to use his notoriety to gain public accountability for a government program that they believe is profoundly unconstitutional.
Laura Poitras, the filmmaker who produced Snowden's video interview with the Guardian (and co-bylined Snowden stories in the Guardian and the Post) was also the first person Snowden contacted when he decided to go public - because she had made a short film about Bill Binney and Stellar Wind, The Program, that was posted on the New York Times in 2012, and had described her personal experience of being on a government watch list in the accompanying article:
To those who understand state surveillance as an abstraction, I will try to describe a little about how it has affected me. The United States apparently placed me on a "watch-list" in 2006 after I completed a film about the Iraq war. I have been detained at the border more than 40 times. Once, in 2011, when I was stopped at John F Kennedy International Airport in New York and asserted my First Amendment right not to answer questions about my work, the border agent replied, "If you don't answer our questions, we'll find our answers on your electronics."
When Snowden contacted her in January, he told her:
He told me he'd contacted me because my border harassment meant that I'd been a person who had been selected. To be selected - and he went through a whole litany of things - means that everything you do, every friend you have, every purchase you make, every street you cross means you're being watched. "You probably don't like how this system works, I think you can tell the story."
Poitras is now working on a documentary about Snowden.
This is the story that the Obama administration is trying to make smaller, about Edward Snowden, the rogue analyst, the "childish simpleton".
In his most detailed defense of the system so far, in Germany, President Obama has decided to acknowledge the NSA's capabilities but hang his hat on the legal process ostensibly underpinning the surveillance, a "circumscribed, narrow system, directed at us being able to protect our people and all of it is done with the oversight of the courts".
By moving the debate away from the universe of tens of thousands of leak-prone analysts to the privileged and murky world of the allegedly rubber-stamp FISA court, President Obama perhaps expects he can keep the NSA story bottled up. But there are some smart, connected, and determined people - starting with, but probably not limited to Binney, Wiebe, Drake, Greenwald, and Poitras - out there who want to make the story bigger.
Peter Lee writes on East and South Asian affairs and their intersection with US foreign policy.
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