Greenwald: Snowden’s Files Are Out There if ‘Anything Happens’ to Him

by Eli Lake Jun 25, 2013 1:36 PM EDT

Snowden has shared encoded copies of all the documents he took so that they won’t disappear if he does, Glenn Greenwald tells Eli Lake.



As the U.S. government presses Moscow to extradite former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden, America’s most wanted leaker has a plan B. The former NSA systems administrator has already given encoded files containing an archive of the secrets he lifted from his old employer to several people. If anything happens to Snowden, the files will be unlocked.

Glenn Greenwald, who first reported former NSA contractor Edward Snowden’s disclosure of government surveillance programs, speaks to reporters in June at his hotel in Hong Kong. (Vincent Yu/AP)

Glenn Greenwald, the Guardian journalist who Snowden first contacted in February, told The Daily Beast on Tuesday that Snowden “has taken extreme precautions to make sure many different people around the world have these archives to insure the stories will inevitably be published.” Greenwald added that the people in possession of these files “cannot access them yet because they are highly encrypted and they do not have the passwords.” But, Greenwald said, “if anything happens at all to Edward Snowden, he told me he has arranged for them to get access to the full archives.”

The fact that Snowden has made digital copies of the documents he accessed while working at the NSA poses a new challenge to the U.S. intelligence community that has scrambled in recent days to recover them and assess the full damage of the breach. Even if U.S. authorities catch up with Snowden and the four classified laptops the Guardian reported he brought with him to Hong Kong the secrets Snowden hopes to expose will still likely be published.

A former U.S. counterintelligence officer following the Snowden saga closely said his contacts inside the U.S. intelligence community “think Snowden has been planning this for years and has stashed files all over the Internet.” This source added, “At this point there is very little anyone can do about this.”

The arrangement to entrust encrypted archives of his files with others also sheds light on a cryptic statement Snowden made on June 17 during a live chat with The Guardian. In the online session he said, “All I can say right now is the U.S. government is not going to be able to cover this up by jailing or murdering me. Truth is coming, and it cannot be stopped.”

Last week NSA Director Keith Alexander told the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence that Snowden was able to access files inside the NSA by fabricating digital keys that gave him access to areas he was not allowed to visit as a low-level contractor and systems administrator. One of those areas included a site he visited during his training that Alexander later told reporters contained one of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) Court orders published by The Guardian and The Washington Post earlier this month.

U.S. politicians were visibly upset when news broke of Snowden's trip to Russia.

It’s unclear what else is in the Snowden archive. The Guardian and The Washington Post have already published slides from a classified presentation on a program known as Prism that gives the NSA access to data on non-U.S. persons from Internet companies like Google and Facebook. The newspapers have also published the “minimization procedures” approved by Attorney General Eric Holder to make sure this collection does not include U.S. persons without a warrant and a top-secret presidential directive approving offensive cyber operations.

Greenwald said that he himself has thousands of documents from Snowden that he is continuing to examine. That figure is considerably higher than the 200 documents that Sen. Dianne Feinstein, the chairwoman of the Senate Select Committee, said over the weekend that she was told Snowden possessed.

“I don’t know for sure whether [Snowden] has more documents than the ones he has given me,” Greenwald said. “I believe he does. He was clear he did not want to give to journalists things he did not think should be published.”

In addition to providing documents to The Guardian and The Washington Post, Snowden has also given interviews to the South China Morning Post, an English-language newspaper in Hong Kong, which reported that Snowden has disclosed the Internet Protocol addresses for computers in China and Hong Kong that the NSA monitored. That paper also printed a story claiming the NSA collected the text-message data for Hong Kong residents based on a June 12 interview Snowden gave the paper.

“He was not trying to harm the U.S. government; he was trying to shine light on it.”

Greenwald said he would not have published some of the stories that ran in the South China Morning Post. “Whether I would have disclosed the specific IP addresses in China and Hong Kong the NSA is hacking, I don’t think I would have,” Greenwald said. “What motivated that leak though was a need to ingratiate himself to the people of Hong Kong and China.”

However, Greenwald said that in his dealings with Snowden the 30-year-old systems administrator was adamant that he and his newspaper go through the document and only publish what served the public’s right to know. “Snowden himself was vehement from the start that we do engage in that journalistic process and we not gratuitously publish things,” Greenwald said. “I do know he was vehement about that. He was not trying to harm the U.S. government; he was trying to shine light on it.”

Greenwald said Snowden for example did not wish to publicize information that gave the technical specifications or blueprints for how the NSA constructed its eavesdropping network. “He is worried that would enable other states to enhance their security systems and monitor their own citizens.” Greenwald also said Snowden did not wish to repeat the kinds of disclosures made famous a generation ago by former CIA spy, Philip Agee—who published information after defecting to Cuba that outed undercover CIA officers. “He was very insistent he does not want to publish documents to harm individuals or blow anyone’s undercover status,” Greenwald said. He added that Snowden told him, “Leaking CIA documents can actually harm people, whereas leaking NSA documents can harm systems.”

Greenwald also said his newspaper had no plans to publish the technical specifications of NSA systems. “I do not want to help other states get better at surveillance,” Greenwald said. He added, “We won’t publish things that might ruin ongoing operations from the U.S. government that very few people would object to the United States doing.”

In this sense Greenwald is applying a more traditional journalistic approach to publishing classified information than WikiLeaks, the anti-secrecy organization that published hundreds of thousands of sensitive diplomatic cables and intelligence reports from Afghanistan and Iraq—initially without removing the names of individuals who were placed at risk after their interactions with U.S. officials in dangerous places were made public. “I am supportive of WikiLeaks, but I am doing something different,” Greenwald said.

For now, the FBI has taken a keen interest in the leak of FISA court documents. Those documents are some of the most closely guarded secrets in the U.S. intelligence community. As of last week, the FBI was investigating whether Snowden may have obtained those documents from a leak inside the secret FISA court.

Thus far, The Guardian and The Washington Post have only published FISA documents that disclosed the wholesale collection of telephone metadata, but not the authorization to monitor the electronic communications of individuals. Greenwald declined to say whether or not he possessed FISA court warrants authorizing surveillance of a specific individual.

For now, Greenwald said he is taking extra precautions against the prospect that he is a target of U.S. surveillance. He said he began using encrypted email when he began communicating with Snowden in February after Snowden sent him a YouTube video walking him through the procedure to encrypt his email.

“When I was in Hong Kong, I spoke to my partner in Rio via Skype and told him I would send an electronic encrypted copy of the documents,” Greenwald said. “I did not end up doing it. Two days later his laptop was stolen from our house and nothing else was taken. Nothing like that has happened before. I am not saying it’s connected to this, but obviously the possibility exists.”

When asked if Greenwald believed his computer was being monitored by the U.S. government. “I would be shocked if the U.S. government were not trying to access the information on my computer. I carry my computers and data with me everywhere I go.”

It Is Now Abundantly Clear Why Edward Snowden Is The US Government's 'Worst Nightmare'

Michael Kelley Jul. 15, 2013


Thousands of documents that NSA whistleblower/leaker Edward Snowden stole from the NSA constitute "the instruction manual for how the NSA is built," Guardian journalist Glenn Greenwald told the Associated Press.

Greenwald added that particular documents "would allow somebody who read them to know exactly how the NSA does what it does, which would in turn allow them to evade that surveillance or replicate it."

So now we know why Snowden could be Washington's "worst nightmare."

And in the sense that the 30-year-old ex-Booz Allen employee has "access to some of the U.S. government's most highly-classified secrets," he already is.

As we have previously reported, citing the book "Deep State: Inside the Government Secrecy Industry," the most closely held secrets by the U.S. "are what we know about everyone else's secrets and how we came to know them."

That type information is precisely what Snowden carried on four laptops while spending a month in China, and is presumably included in the 10,000 secret documents Greenwald is carrying around with him wherever he goes.

As Greenwald previously said, "Snowden has enough information to cause harm to the U.S. government in a single minute than any other person has ever had."

Greenwald has said that the documents have been highly-encrypted so that they don't leak, but that statement — from a constitutional lawyer who didn't have encryption software before communicating with Snowden — has not allayed concerns of intelligence officials and the original NSA whistleblower.

“That stuff is gone,” a former senior U.S. intelligence official who served in Russia told The Washington Post last month. “I guarantee the Chinese intelligence service got their hands on that right away. If they imaged the hard drives and then returned them to him, well, then the Russians have that stuff now.”

Greenwald and Snowden pushed back against assertions such as that one, but the threats of Chinese and Russian intelligence remotely lifting that data are real.

Last year China expert Kenneth G. Lieberthal told The New York Times that when he travels to that country, he doesn't bring his cellphone or laptop. Instead, he brings “loaner” devices, which he erases before he leaves the U.S. and wipes clean the minute he returns.

Mike Rogers (R-Mich.), who chairs of the House Intelligence Committee, also told the Times that he travels “electronically naked.”

Russ Tice, the original NSA whistleblower who recently claimed that the NSA wiretapped then-Senator Barack Obama in 2004, found it hard to believe that Snowden would carry physical data on him — because of how dumb that would be.

"It would be foolish," Tice told Business Insider. "If he went out to lunch, the Chinese authorities would be searching his hotel room … to try to see if he had any more physical goodies on the NSA. And if he did, he certainly would not have left Hong Kong with that information without the Hong Kong authorities making sure they got it from him."

Greenwald contends that "there was never any evidence that this was true," which is true — but it's also highly unlikely that Chinese or Russian intelligence would indicate that they copied the data.

Just like we don't know what Chinese and Russian officials learned from interviewing the NSA-trained hacker.

After all, the subject at hand is international espionage.

Then there is the argument that even if China got the NSA's secrets, the data itself is highly encrypted. That's most likely true, but the NSA's own supercomputers aim to crack the world's strongest encryption.

And China's top supercomputer is almost twice as powerful as any other in the world.

Ultimately no one knows who has copies of what Snowden took. Although one important point, as former intelligence analyst Joshua Foust notes, is that it appears Snowden is no longer in control of his situation.

That's why sources told Reuters that U.S. authorities are operating on a "worst case" assumption that all of the classified material in Snowden's possession has made its way to one or more adversary intelligence services.

If those countries found out what was in those files, it would be catastrophic for America's ability to spy and cause of far greater damage than Snowden ever intended.

Greenwald told the AP that Snowden insisted that the NSA "blueprints" not be made public. But it is not ridiculous to wonder if China and Russia could have bested the former CIA technician.

Nevertheless, simply by having the potential to leak the NSA's modus operandi, Snowden has the U.S. government very concerned.

NSA holds emergency hearing to fight off anti-surveillance amendment in Congress


RT
July 24, 2013

The National Security Agency has invited certain members of Congress to a top secret, invitation only meeting to discuss a proposed amendment that could end the NSA’s ability to conduct dragnet surveillance on millions of Americans.

A letter circulated only to select lawmakers early Tuesday announced that NSA Director General Keith B. Alexander would host a question and answer session with members of Congress in preparation of a Thursday vote on Capitol Hill expected to involve an amendment introduced last month by Rep. Justin Amash (R-Michigan).

That amendment, a provision tacked along to a Department of Defense Appropriations Act along with nearly 100 others, aims to greatly diminish the NSA’s domestic spying powers in the wake of disclosures attributed to Edward Snowden, a 30-year-old former employee of Booz Allen Hamilton currently fighting extradition to the US where he faces charges of espionage for his role in leaking state secrets.

One of the leaked files released by Snowden to the UK’s Guardian newspaper details how the government’s interpretation of the PATRIOT Act’s Section 215 has allowed the NSA to collect call logs and other so-called “telephony metadata” pertaining to millions of Americans on a regular basis. If the Amash amendment is approved, it would end that authority.

The amendment, as it appears on the House of Representatives Committee on Rules website, “Bars the NSA and other agencies from using Section 215 of the Patriot Act to collect records, including telephone call records, that pertain to persons who are not subject to an investigation under Section 215.”

“It’s not a partisan issue. It’s something that cuts across the entire political spectrum,” Amash told the Rules panel. “In order for funds to be used by the NSA, the court order would have to have a statement limiting the collection of records to those records that pertain to a person under investigation,” Amash said, according to Politico. “If the court order doesn’t have that statement, the NSA doesn’t receive the funding to collect those records.”

Amash’s suggestion isn’t unheard of in the wake of a massive public backlash caused by Mr. Snowden’s disclosures, but it certainly isn’t sitting pretty with the NSA. According to Huffington Post, a letter circulated on Tuesday only hours after the Amash amendment was confirmed to be in order and expected to go up for vote this Thursday.

“In advance of anticipated action on amendments to the DoD Appropriations bill, Ranking Member C.A. Dutch Ruppersberger of the House Intelligence Committee invites your Member to attend a question and answer session with General Keith B. Alexander of the National Security Agency,” HuffPo quoted from the invitation.

The meeting, added journalist Ryan Grim, was scheduled to be held at a security level of top secret/SCI and was only open to certain lawmakers, echoing the secrecy involved in the very programs Amash aims to shut down.

In preparation for Amash’s amendment going up for vote, the activism group Demand Progress has http://act.demandprogress.org/letter/nsa_amash/a campaign in hopes it will encourage Americans to ask their representatives to vote in favor of the bill.

“As the NSA spying revelations continue to unfold, we increasingly find ourselves facing the reality that — at any moment — the federal government could be listening to our phone calls, watching our email traffic, keeping tabs on our Internet browsing, or worse,” the website reads. “But now we have our first real chance to fight back.”

Speaking to Huffington Post, Demand Progress executive director David Segal said, “To invoke that expert on surveillance George W. Bush: After this vote we’ll finally know who is with us in the cause to protect civil rights — and who is against us.”

A spokesperson for Rep. Amash told TIME Magazine on Tuesday afternoon that debate over the amendment is scheduled for Wednesday evening, with lawmakers expected to move for a vote the following morning. The amendment is being cosponsored by Rep. John Conyers, a Democrat from Amash’s home state of Michigan.