11.07.2013

Snowden and the state: David and Goliath in high tech

People like Edward Snowden may normally function as software in a hard drive, writes Jim Creegan, but for the state they have one drawback: they can think

National chauvinism - more charitably called patriotism - is the strongest ideological cement binding subaltern classes to their rulers. But American patriotism - like that of Britain and other empires past - has long functioned not only as an ordinary bond between government and governed, but as a super-adhesive, endowing its believers with a sense of extraordinary virtue as the global defenders of liberty and the scourge of totalitarians.

Americanism also has a less lofty appeal: the US is the mightiest power in the world; to be one of its citizens is widely seen as participating in its power. In 2008, Barack Obama put himself forward as a more moderate custodian of that power, tarnished in the hands of an uncouth Texan who shot from the hip. Over the past month all these illusions - historic and conjunctural - have been dealt a significant blow at the hands of a courageous 30-year-old cyber-renegade.

By all indications, Edward Snowden does not subscribe to any political party or creed. Like many of his age, he is vaguely libertarian and highly sceptical of political power. His technical precocity - which has the same prestige among today’s educated young as superior intellect had among older generations - allowed him to land several well-paid jobs, first with the CIA, then with the NSA, and finally with a private government security contractor, Booz Allen Hamilton.

By his own account, he took the last job to ferret out critical information after having already decided to act as a whistle-blower. His privileged access to US intelligence put him in a position to observe the enormous secret spying power of the US government, as well as the vast discrepancy between the purposes the government professes and the actual use to which its power is put. To help bring this power and this discrepancy under public scrutiny, Snowden was willing to sacrifice a comfortable career, his domestic life and his personal freedom.

‘No Such Agency’

When, in the 1970s, a Senate committee headed by the late senator Frank Church was looking into abuses of power under the Nixon administration, a joke circulated in Washington that the initials NSA stand for ‘No Such Agency’ or ‘Never Say Anything’. And, while the CIA is a household word, only Washington insiders knew very much till now about the National Security Agency. Tasked with surveillance of foreign communications, the NSA is in fact three times larger than the CIA. Forty years ago, Church remarked that, were the NSA to turn its vast power on American citizens, they would have no place to hide.

Snowden’s revelations show, among other things, that this is precisely what the NSA has done. Through its secret Prism programme - conducted with the indispensable, if at times reluctant, cooperation of Yahoo, Google, Apple, Skype and Microsoft - the NSA obtained records of internet communications not only amongst people living abroad, but between foreigners and US residents (or between “US persons” and anyone of whom the NSA had a “51% certainty” was outside the country). If Prism’s domestic data-mining could at least be justified by the claim that foreigners were involved, no such rationale could be invoked for the most sensational of Snowden’s disclosures: that the NSA - with the cooperation of major telephone service-providers - was indiscriminately siphoning up records of nearly all telephone calls made within the United States for storage in its newly constructed data warehouse in Utah.

The government’s assertion that these operations were both legal and non-intrusive will probably satisfy anyone in Congress who might have momentarily indulged in fantasies of prosecuting the administration for violating the Fourth Amendment to the constitution, intended to protect citizens against unreasonable searches and seizures. But government declarations are hardly reassuring to anyone not easily mollified by official rationalisations.

The spying was being conducted under the aegis of two Congressional bills: the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA, passed in 1978 to curb abuses of intelligence agencies under Nixon, but amended many times since 9/11 to give the government more latitude); and the post-9/11 Patriot Act. Their ‘legality’ does not, however, alter the fact that these operations were completely unknown to the American people, and that the Senators and Congresspersons privy to them were sworn to secrecy. Equally hollow are Obama’s assurances that the operations were restricted to “metadata” (the time, origin, destination and duration of internet and phone communications), and that the contents of these communications cannot be accessed without a court warrant. The court to which the NSA must apply is a panel of 11 federal judges set up under FISA. Not only does the FISA court operate behind closed doors, but it also functions as a rubber stamp. Over the past three years, this judicial body has approved 4,976 government requests and denied none.

Moreover, it is not entirely clear whether listening in to phone conversations or reading emails actually requires a warrant. In his Hong Kong interview with Glenn Greenwald, The Guardian columnist who broke the story, Snowden claimed that his position as ‘systems administrator’ at Booz Allen in Hawaii allowed him to “wiretap anyone from you or your accountant to a federal judge to even the president”. The Occupy website also quotes a New York congressman, Jerrold Nadler, as having been told in a secret Congressional briefing that the contents of a phone call could be accessed “simply based on an analyst deciding that”.

‘Yes, we scan’

It would be a great exaggeration to say that Snowden’s revelations have ignited widespread controversy among the American public. Polls indicate an only slightly higher than normal level of concern, and a public opinion more or less evenly divided between Snowden and the administration. (A plurality favour the disclosures, but a plurality also think Snowden should be prosecuted.) But the revelations have had a great impact upon the minority that takes politics seriously. They are especially unsettling for those, here and around the world, who hoped for a new beginning in foreign policy and security matters from a president who was elected on a platform for change and transparency in government.

Foreign policy has indeed been tweaked in certain ways since 2008. Instead of boots on the ground overseas, there is now more emphasis on counterinsurgency and support for various foreign factions. Instead of Abu Ghraib and extraordinary rendition, there are now targeted drone assassinations with widespread ‘collateral damage’. But these are changes in tactics, not in substance, in Washington’s drive to strengthen its imperial grip.

Continuity is also evident in home affairs. Warrantless wiretapping, persecution of whistle-blowers and government mendacity were expected of Bush and Cheney. However, these things have not only been maintained, but expanded under Obama. More government documents are marked ‘classified’ than ever before. The government is now collecting more data than ever under the Bush-derived pretext of the ‘war on terror’, and trying to conceal its actions behind a smokescreen of lies. When asked point-blank in March before a Congressional committee whether the government was collecting data on the private communications of American citizens, James Clapper, the director of national intelligence, responded with an outright denial, while half covering his face with his hand. (Although lying to Congress under oath is a felony, and Clapper has had to admit he lied after the revelations, he, unlike Snowden, has not been charged.)

Persecution (by means of prosecution) of whistle-blowers has also intensified. The current administration has thus far issued eight indictments, including those of Bradley Manning and Edward Snowden, under the infamous 1918 Espionage Act - used to jail the socialist leader, Eugene V Debs, for opposing Word War I, and to prosecute Daniel Ellsberg for releasing the Pentagon Papers in 1971. Manning, now being court-martialled, faces a life sentence under this law for disclosures to Wikileaks; if apprehended, Snowden could face the same. Only three Espionage Act indictments were issued under all previous presidencies combined. Thus leaking government secrets is now being defined as espionage, even though the leakers have given no information directly to any foreign power or hostile ‘non-government actor’, unless the enemy is defined as the world public. Journalists who publish such secrets are also being accused of aiding and abetting the ‘spies’.

There is simply no getting away from the fact that the ‘national security state’ is now bigger and more menacing than ever before, and that the face of Big Brother bears the unmistakable features of Barack Obama. The entire affair has exposed the ruthless practitioner of power behind the reasonable and accommodating public persona.

Tangled web of truth

It is also entertaining to watch the government and servile media wriggle about in the tangle of contradictions they have got themselves into confronting a rare emission of unfiltered truth. Snowden said that one of his purposes was to start a discussion on the issue of government spying. No-one can deny his success on this score. The media - in the US and around the world - have been abuzz for weeks with the issues Snowden’s revelations have raised. Even Barack Obama, in faux-conciliatory mode, has said that perhaps there should be a wider conversation among Americans about how much of their privacy they are willing to trade for safety. Yet, if Obama had had his way, there would be no discussion at all because no-one outside official circles could have known about the things now being discussed.

Even the two Democratic members of the Senate Intelligence Committee who appear genuinely distressed about what they learned from confidential documents and briefings, Ron Wyden of Oregon and Mark Udall of Colorado, were constrained from doing anything more than sounding a general alarm that the government was overstepping its legal authority; their vow of secrecy regarding classified information prevented them from supplying any specifics. An earlier NSA whistle-blower, Thomas Drake, joined by two other employees, had tried to curb the agency’s abuse of privacy by going through the ‘proper’ administrative and Congressional channels. Only when this produced no results whatsoever did Drake, after leaving the NSA, go to the media with unclassified documents to support his case. His house was raided and searched as a result, and he, like Manning and Snowden, was indicted under the Espionage Act, only to have all major charges dropped in 2011 because they could not stand up in court.

In short, Snowden chose the only effective channel for revealing what he had come to know. But the same government, and many of the same media outlets, that are either calling for, or engaging in, a ‘wider discussion’ of government snooping are simultaneously screaming for the scalp of the only person who made their discussion possible, and hunting him to the ends of the earth. It is a peculiar democracy in which legitimate subjects of public debate can only be brought to light by an alleged act of treason.

Old bogeys

To rationalise its vast expansion of ‘intelligence-gathering’ and legal vindictiveness, the Obama administration never ceases to exploit the fear of terrorist attacks. Obama has stated that his secret operations have foiled over 50 plots, and that Snowden’s revelations compromise such efforts. It seems never to occur to the president that any terrorist worthy of the name just might be a trifle suspicious that his/her telephone and email communications would be intercepted, and take appropriate precautions. Intelligence-gathering did nothing to prevent the Boston marathon bombing in April. Greenwald has repeated many times that the documents are being carefully screened to avoid releasing any information that could harm ‘national security’.

Moreover, only the hopelessly naive could believe that the far-flung US empire would confine the use of billions of telephone and internet records to the exclusive purpose of thwarting terrorists. Already, Snowden’s revelations concerning extensive spying on European allies and cyber-espionage, cyber-sabotage and even preparations for cyber-warfare on China and Iran have given such absurdities the lie.

On the home front, the combination of police with military and information-gathering functions in recent years suggests yet another use of the gargantuan federal data base. The department of homeland security (DHS) and the US justice department have established 72 ‘fusion centres’ around the country since 2003. Wikipedia says that these facilities are designed to “promote information sharing at the federal level between agencies such as the CIA, FBI and US department of justice, US military, and state- and local-level government”. The Guardian’s Naomi Wolf has exposed the efforts of these centres, working in league with banks and other businesses, to suppress the Occupy movement. She reports that government documents obtained by the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund:

… shows a terrifying network of coordinated DHS, FBI, police, regional fusion centre, and private-sector activity so completely merged into one another that the monstrous whole is, in fact, one entity: in some cases, bearing a single name, The Domestic Security Alliance Council. And it reveals this merged entity to have one centrally planned, locally executed mission. The documents, in short, show the cops and the DHS working for and with the banks to target, arrest and politically disable peaceful American citizens (December 29 2012).

The massive data-mining and frantic efforts to capture and make an example of Snowden - even to the point of international air piracy - are completely out of proportion to any damage that may have been done to counter-terrorism efforts ... As Snowden said, “Bathtub falls and police officers kill more Americans than terrorism ...” Washington’s actions are those of a state with a lot to hide - one which takes seriously Glenn Greenwald’s promise that Snowden’s revelations thus far are only the tip of the iceberg. Like Bush before him, Obama is flogging the bogeys of terrorism and Islamophobia to conceal the real aims of the “surveillance state”.

Bipartisan bloodlust

The leadership of both parties, in both houses of Congress, could not have been quicker to fall in line against Snowden. The house majority leader, John Boehner, called him a traitor, while John McCain complained that Russia was slapping the US in the face by harbouring the celebrated fugitive. Leading Democrats were not to be outdone. Hillary Clinton, now the leading aspirant for the 2016 presidential nomination, called Snowden’s behaviour “outrageous”, and declared that the Chinese government had damaged its relationship with the US by allowing him to leave Hong Kong. One of the Senate’s most senior liberals, Dianne Feinstein, called the revelations “an act of treason”.

Although a majority of Senators and Congressmen followed their leaders, support for Obama was not quite as solid in the back benches. The response of the 75-member Democratic Progressive Caucus was predictably pusillanimous. Although its leading members expressed “alarm” and “concern” in varying degrees about threats to civil liberties, no-one uttered a single word in defence of Edward Snowden. Nor has there been any mention of the revelations on the website of the Obama-boosting ‘progressives’ of MoveOn.org.

The reaction of the Tea Party types reflects the current disarray within the Republican Party. The soon-to-retire head of the Tea Party caucus in the House of Representatives, Michele Bachmann, joined her party’s leadership in branding Snowden a traitor. On the other end of the spectrum, Rand Paul, a Kentucky Senator who seems to take libertarian, small-government rhetoric seriously, went further than any ‘progressive’ Democrat in defending Snowden, comparing him favourably to national security director, James Clapper, who “lied to defend security”. Paul said that Snowden, on the other hand, “told the truth to defend privacy”. These remarks were denounced as “disgraceful” by New York Republican Congressman Peter King - a flack for the military-police complex, who has also called for the arrest of Glenn Greenwald. Paul’s views were echoed by other prominent Tea Partiers.

Sarah Palin said that government spying, not Snowden, is the problem, although she added that Snowden should come home to face charges. The rightwing radio and television demagogue, Glenn Beck, hailed Snowden as a hero, and two other ‘shock jocks’, Rush Limbaugh and Michael Savage, also lean toward Snowden. The far right is less reluctant than anyone to wave the stars and stripes. But the chance to embellish its fear-mongering about sinister plots against ‘real Americans’ by the black man in the White House was too good to be missed. This opportunism can only deepen the rift between the top and base of the Republican Party.

Media maledictions

The mainstream media took a week or so to start incanting the talking points of the White House and Congressional leaders. They were still unsettled from having learned in May - just before the Snowden revelations - that the justice department had tapped 20 phone lines of the Associated Press because of suspicion that one of its reporters had leaked classified information concerning an aborted anti-terrorist initiative in Yemen.

Almost as disturbing was a Washington Post report that the government had, in effect, served notice on Rupert Murdoch’s paleo-reactionary Fox television network that even it was not beyond the range of federal eyes and ears. Attorney general Eric Holder had signed a warrant allowing his department to trace the phone and email records of a Fox reporter named James Rosen. Rosen was also suspected of revealing classified information, this time of (inaccurate) US intelligence reports that North Korea planned to explode a nuclear bomb in response to western sanctions. Such investigations, it was rightly feared, could intimidate inside-government sources into silence, and hence the ability of journalists to report based on their tips.

Yet any initial sympathies the media may have felt for Snowden because their own wings had been singed were soon eclipsed by their instinctive identification with the government officials on whose good graces they rely far more heavily than the occasional leaky valve. It was thus not long before government talking points began to dominate the airwaves: NSA operations were legal and nothing out of the ordinary for any government. Snowden had betrayed his trust. He was guilty of hypocrisy for depending upon the good will of China, Russia, Venezuela and Ecuador - hardly champions of individual and press freedom. If he was really trying to make a point through an act of civil disobedience, why did he not return to the United States to face the consequences of his actions (in this case a possible life sentence and perhaps treatment like that meted out to Bradley Manning, who was imprisoned two years before his trial, eight months of it in solitary confinement, often stripped naked). And so on and so on.

The media also mimicked the well-worn Washington tactic of attempting to shift the focus from the news itself to the character and motives of the messengers. Perhaps the most sophisticated attack on Snowden appeared in a New York Times op-ed column by David Brooks, who styles himself a conservative in the mould of Edmund Burke. Snowden, according to Brooks, is a product of today’s increasingly atomised society, a high school and community college dropout who was raised without the benefit of society’s “gently gradated authoritative structures”. From the standpoint of this socially unintegrated techno-loner, say Brooks, all institutions are suspect, and individual preference reigns supreme. This is why Snowden could so lightly betray his oaths, his co-workers, his employers and his government.

Brooks seems to forget another circumstance that has shaped the consciousness of many of today’s youth: that they live under a government that has repeatedly and systematically lied to its citizens over the decades - most memorably concerning Vietnam, Watergate and Iraq. Snowden may not yet have figured out why lying comes as naturally as breathing to those in power (ie, because the state is a class apparatus), but at least he has concluded that those who govern in his name are liars, and does not, like Edmund Burke and David Brooks, worship institutions simply because they exist.

Snowden was also attacked on the leading Sunday morning news programme, Face the nation, by its moderator, Bob Shieffer. Shieffer said that Snowden was not a hero, but a “narcissistic young man who thinks he’s smarter than the rest of us”. David Gregory, host of another widely viewed Sunday news show, Meet the press, asked his guest, Glenn Greenwald, why he should not be indicted for ‘abetting’ Snowden. A human rights lawyer and commentator for Salon.com before becoming a Guardian columnist, Greenwald is a trenchant and uncompromising foe of the crimes of US imperialism, whether it wears a Republican or Democratic face. Since he flew to Hong Kong to receive Snowden’s documents and act as his press liaison, Greenwald has moved from the margins of the media onto centre stage - the only figure with views as radical as his to attain such prominence on national network television. His riposte to Gregory could make other hacks think twice about trying to demonstrate their loyalty to power at his expense:

I think it’s pretty extraordinary that anyone who would call themselves a journalist would publicly muse about whether other journalists should be charged with felonies … The scandals that arose in Washington before our stories began was about the fact that the Obama administration was trying to criminalise investigative journalism by going through the emails and phone records of AP reporters and accusing a Fox News journalist, on the theory that you just embraced, of being a co-conspirator in felonies for working with sources. If you want to embrace that theory, it means that every investigative journalist in the United States who works with their sources, who receives classified information, is a criminal. And it is precisely those theories and precisely that climate that has become so menacing in the United States. It’s why the New Yorker’s Jane Mayer said that investigative reporting has come to a standstill ... (June 23).

Gregory replied that he was not embracing anything, only repeating a question that had been asked by lawmakers.

Global manhunt

Team Obama appeared a little taken aback when the rest of the world did not snap to attention with the alacrity of Congress and the mass media.

They were probably expecting a drawn-out procedural wrangle with Hong Kong over their extradition order for Snowden. It never seemed to cross their minds that the Chinese government, which has a decisive influence in the former British colony, might be a little miffed over the aggressive cyber-espionage against both China and Hong Kong that Snowden revealed, especially since Washington had just been waging a hypocritical public campaign against electronic spying on American industry by the Chinese military. Washington was even more surprised when Russia, to which the Chinese government had allowed Snowden to fly, would not honour an American extradition request. Putin has also been at loggerheads with Obama, most recently over Syria, but also over a host of geopolitical matters.

From that point on, the US government pulled out all stops to hunt down its quarry. It succeeded in strong-arming Ecuador and even persuading Russia against granting asylum to Snowden. But Obama’s most outrageous move to date was the forcing down in Vienna of the plane of Bolivian president Evo Morales, en route from Moscow to La Paz, on the suspicion that Morales was smuggling Snowden to Bolivia. The incident revealed that Washington was prepared to go to any lengths, even flouting international law, to get its hands on Snowden; and that European governments, despite all their tub-thumping about the American diplomatic eavesdropping that Snowden also exposed, know who is boss when the chips are down. Recent talk to the effect that the European-American free trade deal is imperilled by US spying is nothing more than posturing for the sake of a European public that is genuinely angry at Obama. Snowden has now revealed that the German government was not only cooperating in Washington’s intelligence gathering efforts, but spying on its own people.

Whether or not Obama’s manhunt succeeds, it has already done his government considerable damage. The world has witnessed the spectacle of an imperialist Goliath stalking a laptop-armed David, who will not slay his pursuer, but may just succeed in eluding him. Contemporary information technology places enormous power in the hands of governments. Its sprawling networks, however, have what is from an official standpoint the disadvantage of involving more people than ever before; these individuals may normally function as software in a hard drive, but, as Bertholt Brecht said, they have one drawback: they can think.

Washington has no hope of preventing further disclosures from Snowden; all his documents are now in other hands. It rather seeks to prevent his example from becoming contagious - an objective for which most of the world’s people have no sympathy. Obama was not greeted in Europe during the G8 summit by the same exultant crowds that welcomed him in 2008, and got a cool reception in Africa as well. His affront to Morales has unleashed a tide of indignation in Latin America, and, at this writing, Venezuela, Bolivia and Nicaragua have come forward to offer Snowden asylum.

Much will depend on Moscow’s willingness to facilitate his travel. Putin no doubt wishes to rid himself of a troublesome refugee. However, European states willing to interrupt the flight of a head of state to get Snowden cannot be counted on to allow any westward-bound plane to pass undisturbed over their territories. This leaves open the option of an eastward-bound flight to Latin America that would stop for refuelling in Vladivostok.

Although they probably do not know it, Julian Assange, Bradley Manning and Edward Snowden reprise an illustrious past. The greatest blow against official secrecy was struck in 1917, when the newly formed Bolshevik government published the secret treaties for the division of post-war spoils between the tsar and the other allied powers; and when, in 1918, Leon Trotsky, renouncing all secret diplomacy with foreign governments, conducted negotiations with imperial Germany at Brest-Litovsk in the presence of the international press and before the eyes of the world.

Today’s champions of government transparent to the governed may not be revolutionaries. But the sympathy they have aroused among people the world over shows that many are not willing to sign their political agency over to omnipotent state actors, and that what people like Snowden stand for is a potentially revolutionary idea.