Edward Snowden didn’t look very different from all the other young computer geeks that worked in the NSA’s Hawaii base. He dressed casually, sometimes wearing a hoodie. Like many idealistic young people Snowden had wanted to make the world a better place. His father had served in the US Coast Guard and Snowden learned from him the lessons of duty and responsibility. Probably more importantly, Snowden Senior had brought his son up to be an independent thinker, and not to follow the crowd. Snowden had originally joined the CIA, but grown disenchanted at the work of deception the job demanded of him. When he started working for the NSA as a contractor, his duties seemed far more straightforward: his job as an analyst for an organisation intercepting communications would help make America stronger and thereby the population safer. It is difficult to say exactly when the disillusion set in, but he came to the conclusion that the very people he was helping the NSA spy on, themselves needed protection from that surveillance.
Yet it was the NSA itself which decided the level of protection the population could be granted. In the 1990s the US government became so concerned that the public might be given access to unbreakable encryption that it tried to ban the public from getting access to any kind of cypher that the NSA might not be able to crack.
The NSA supported a level of protection for internet users that was extremely weak. One estimate said it would be possible to crack the NSA’s preferred option, the 56-bit Data Encryption Standard being proposed for all US computers, in just two minutes. Few doubted that another system developed by a supporter of the public’s right to privacy, Phil Zimmermann, was the most effective tool to defeat surveillance. Zimmermann had created Pretty Good Privacy (PGP); with its 1024-bit key, it was going to be difficult and time-consuming for any intelligence agency to decipher.
In 1991, the US government took another step towards improving its capacity to gather information transmitted over the internet, calling on manufacturers of secure communications equipment to insert special ‘trapdoors’ in their products, so that the government could read anyone’s encrypted messages. The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the NSA and the Department of Justice went so far as to demand tough laws that would mandate the public to use only government-approved encryption products or adhere to government encryption criteria. Feeling the net tightening, Zimmermann acted first, releasing his new system because he wanted cryptography to be made available to the American public before it became illegal to use it. Zimmermann became so worried he gave it away for free to increase the uptake. The result was beyond his wildest dreams. His encryption program ‘spread like a prairie fire’,1 and within months it was not just net activists who were encrypting their messages. The biggest users, human rights groups, used it to encode evidence and protect the identities of witnesses. Zimmermann’s system might be helping protect privacy, but it was also making the NSA’s work much harder. He would never have thought that 20 years later someone working inside the NSA would become one of the world’s greatest supporters of his encryption system.
Working at the top-secret NSA listening post housed in a huge tunnel – a relic of the Second World War – drilled into a rocky outcrop, Snowden held a job which described him as an infrastructure analyst. But Snowden had hidden talents. ‘That kid was a genius among geniuses,’ said one NSA employee who knew Snowden.2 The fact that he did not always have security clearance for the work he was asked to do did not prevent people giving him access to some of the top levels of the NSA system so he could solve their problems. What he discovered as he worked in these areas which required high levels of security clearance made him fearful for the privacy of those the NSA was supposedly responsible for protecting. Snowden decided to do something about it. He threw what is known as a ‘crypto party’, an informal gathering where the technically capable teach the technically incapable how to protect their private communications. For such a daring act the location could not have been more low-key: the rear of a furniture store in Kamani Street, just a short walk from one of Honolulu’s famed sandy white beaches. According to Wired Magazine, the grassroots crypto party movement began in 2011 with a Melbourne, Australia-based activist, Asher Wolf. The idea was to help activists, journalists, and anyone else who wanted their privacy protected to learn how to use PGP and Tor, a web browser which allows people to surf the net without being identified. Tor works by accepting connections from the public internet, encrypting the traffic and bouncing it through a winding series of relays before dumping it back on the web through any one of more than 1,000 exit relays.
Snowden was already deeply involved with Tor, running a server known as The Signal, one of the system’s exit relays. According to internet freedom organisation Electronic Frontier Federation (EFF) the exit relay is the most dangerous part of the Tor network to operate. Because the Tor traffic joins the internet through these relays, the Internet Protocol (IP) address, which can identify the user, is seen by everyone using the net as the gateway for the traffic. EFF warns: ‘People who run exit relays should be prepared to deal with complaints, copyright takedown notices and the possibility that their servers may attract the attention of law enforcement agencies.’3 Technologist and writer Runa Sandvik, who co-presented with Snowden at the crypto party, said Snowden was even trying to persuade some of his co-workers working in the NSA’s high security listening post to set up additional ‘fast servers’. He asked Sandvik if she could send him official Tor stickers, as some ‘swag might incentivize them to do it sooner rather than later.’4
It might be reasonable to expect that Snowden’s activities would have attracted the attention of his employer, the most powerful intelligence agency in the world. For what he was quite openly doing was challenging the very principals of the organisation’s activities, what it calls a ‘collect it all’ strategy.5 whereas Snowden was dedicated to making sure that that did not happen.
Extraordinarily, no one took much notice. Not even, it seems, in October 2012, when Snowden says he raised his concerns with four superiors – two from the NSA’s Technology Directorate and two from the NSA Threat Operations Center’s regional base.
To illustrate the point that the NSA was breaking the law, Snowden says he opened a system on his computer called Boundless Informant, which used colour-coded ‘heat maps’ to depict the volume of data ingested by NSA taps. He showed this to his four superiors and 15 other co-workers. Snowden said his colleagues were ‘astonished to learn we are collecting more in the United States on Americans than we are on Russians in Russia’.6 Many of them were troubled, and several said they did not want to know any more.
‘I asked these people, “What do you think the public would do if this was on the front page?”’ he said.7
It is difficult to fathom how those who work at an agency whose role it is to predict and analyse threats seemingly did not understand the gravity of what Snowden was revealing. To reinforce the point he was making, Snowden kept a copy of the US Constitution, often citing the Fourth Amendment, which specifically forbids random searches of American citizens. It is a broad Constitutional pillar which defends the right to privacy – unless intelligence or police agencies specifically know what they are searching for and have reasonable suspicions that a crime has been, or is about to be committed. There is no precedent under the Constitution for the government to seize the vast amounts of data sucked up by the NSA involving innocent Americans’ communications.
Such is the strength of the Fourth Amendment that in 2012 the US Supreme Court overturned a guilty finding against a cocaine trafficker because the police fixed a tracking device to the suspect’s wife’s car. The majority decision found that installing the device breached the Fourth Amendment which enshrines the ‘right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures.’8
One of the most conservative members of the bench, Justice Samuel Alito, went further, supporting the ruling but also finding that the collection of data impinged on ‘expectations of privacy’.9 Putting aside all the other Snowden revelations, one of the NSA’s systems, Boundless Informant – a Top Secret system that catalogued nearly 3 billion pieces of data from the US alone in one 30 day period – pointed to a possible breach of that Constitutional right. What is extraordinary is that the NSA, which has gathered more data on everyone on the planet than any other organisation in history, says it could find no record of Snowden raising any issues of illegality with its management or other members of staff. They clearly were not looking very hard. In December 2012, a full six months before he leaked his NSA cache, Snowden was publicly proselytising the benefits of encryption to anyone who would listen. By early 2013 Snowden had decided that only public disclosure of what was happening inside the NSA would be sufficient to make the organisation change. He said he was prepared to risk his life, or a life behind bars, rather than live in a world where innocent people could not go about their everyday lives without being watched and profiled by the US government. It is a world often portrayed as being like George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four – written in 1948 and warning of the perils of communism – whose Big Brother’s ‘thought police’ maintain surveillance of the population: ‘It was even conceivable that they watched everybody all the time,’ Orwell wrote,
but at any rate they could plug in your wire whenever they wanted to. You had to live – did live, from habit that became instinct – in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and except in darkness, every movement scrutinised.10
But, as Snowden’s lawyer Ben Wizner argued, Snowden was more concerned about a Kafkaesque future. This dystopian world was aptly described by Frederick R. Karl, author of a biography of Franz Kafka:
What’s Kafkaesque, is when you enter a surreal world in which all your control patterns, all your plans, the whole way in which you have configured your own behaviour, begins to fall to pieces, when you find yourself against a force that does not lend itself to the way you perceive the world … You don’t give up; you don’t lie down and die. What you do is struggle against this with all of your equipment, with whatever you have. But, of course, you don’t stand a chance. That’s Kafkaesque.11
What is called the Surveillance State seems to fulfil many of Snowden’s concerns about the effect of being trapped in a place where, it is argued, no one knew who was in control and no one was accountable. Snowden’s experiences at the heart of the NSA made him determined to resist, before, as it saw it, it was too late. But first Snowden had to decide how he would release the information he had been gathering for several months. Normally the New York Times or the Washington Post would have been the first choice of any whistle-blower. The newspapers had developed a strong reputation for disclosing important information. The Washington Post had broken the Watergate story, which led to the removal of Richard Nixon from the White House; the New York Times was famous for the Pentagon Papers. Yet when Snowden planned to leave the NSA in Hawaii he did not contact either of those newspapers. In fact, he deliberately shunned the New York Times, citing the decision by then editor Bill Keller not to run the report exposing the NSA’s spying on US citizens as the reason. Snowden bluntly asserted that if the New York Times had run the report it might have defeated George W. Bush, who subsequently went on to win his second term as president. ‘Hiding that story changed history,’ Snowden said.12
The new executive editor, Dean Banquet, said later that he deeply regretted that Snowden had not chosen the New York Times. ‘I am much, much, much more sceptical of the government’s entreaties not to publish today than I was ever before,’ Banquet said.13
Banquet said the Snowden revelations yielded two key insights for American journalists: ‘First off, the public wants this information. Secondly, it does not destroy everything if the information comes out.’ He added: ‘The government makes it sound like something really large, and in retrospect, it wasn’t quite as large.’14 The Snowden revelations published in The Guardian and the Washington Post only underscored his conviction. ‘I would love to be able to tell you it wasn’t good,’ he said. ‘But it was great. It was important, ground-breaking work. I wish we had it.’15
There had been a very good reason why Snowden had decided to go elsewhere and it was not just the NSA wire-tapping issue. Snowden had been closely monitoring the work of a then little-known blogger, Glenn Greenwald, contributing to the online site Salon.com.
It was a measure of what the internet had become that its ability to connect millions of people – a rich web for the NSA to monitor – also gave those who opposed surveillance the ability to connect with each other. Even though Snowden was living in Hawaii and Greenwald was operating out of Brazil, every day Snowden could read what Greenwald was writing.
What made Greenwald interesting for Snowden was the strong stand he took on challenging the US government and defending the rights of journalists to disclose information in the public interest. Of particular interest was how strongly he defended the work of WikiLeaks and its founder Julian Assange when large sections of the main stream press, particularly in the US, were condemning his work. Much of the media was acting as an unquestioning relay station for politicians who had been exposed by WikiLeaks. Vice President Joe Biden called Assange a ‘high tech terrorist’.16 Others were more direct. The Conservative website Townhall ran an opinion piece entitled ‘5 Reasons The CIA Should Have Already Killed Julian Assange’.17 Both Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal and former Republican Vice-Presidential candidate Sarah Palin accused WikiLeaks a non-State based group run by an Australian citizen of ‘treason’. Palin also demanded Assange be ‘pursued with the same urgency we pursue al Qaeda and Taliban leaders’.18
Even the prime minister of his own country, Australia, said he had broken the law, when the evidence was that he had not; the Australian Attorney General, threatened to take Assange’s passport away, and but for the intervention of the then foreign minister, Kevin Rudd, it might have happened. The matter was under serious consideration.
Against this onslaught, the former human rights lawyer turned journalist Greenwald rallied to Assange’s support. There is no doubt that WikiLeaks had made errors of judgment; publishing the names of Afghan informers certainly put lives at risk, but no one had been killed – a point made by the Pentagon after numerous assertions that Assange had blood on his hands. Just as importantly, Assange had delivered on his promise to provide maximum impact for Manning’s leaks. WikiLeaks had protected Manning as a source, but in the end it was Manning herself who revealed her identity by giving details of the documents to internet activist Adrian Lamo, who turned her in to the US military.
Greenwald argued that Assange had been doing the work that other journalists had not, exposing the inside workings of government at the highest level, peeling back the lies and deception. In November 2010 Greenwald wrote that those who demanded that the US government took people’s lives with no oversight or due process as though they were advocating changes in tax policy were ‘morally deranged barbarians’.19
In May 2013, Snowden checked in sick at his NSA job in Hawaii and caught a plane to Hong Kong to meet Greenwald. Snowden had chosen the former British colony because, as he saw it, it had a ‘spirited democracy’ but importantly it also put him outside the clutches of both US and British security services.20 Snowden ensconced himself in The Mira, a luxury hotel on Hong Kong’s Nathan Road. It might be expensive at AU$400 a night but there were a number of attractions for a fugitive spy: reasonable security, a free smartphone to use while checked in and high-speed Wi-Fi in every room.
With the US consulate and its CIA station nearby, Snowden was only too aware of how vulnerable he was. Worried there might be spy cameras in the walls, he wore a hood which covered both his head and his laptop – a somewhat clumsy but effective protection from prying eyes when he typed passwords on the keyboard. He also barricaded the door with pillows to prevent eavesdropping devices from picking up sounds of conversations from outside. Snowden was convinced his life and those of any journalists who dealt with him were in danger. ‘The US intelligence community,’ he wrote later, ‘will certainly kill you if they think you are the single point of failure that could stop this disclosure and make them the sole owner of this information’.21 When Snowden met Greenwald, he told him he was willing to ‘sacrifice all’ because he could not in ‘good conscience’ allow the US government to ‘destroy privacy, internet freedom and basic liberties for people around the world with this massive surveillance machine they’re secretly building’.22
By now Greenwald, with filmmaker Laura Poitras, had teamed up with The Guardian, the newspaper that led the partnership with WikiLeaks to break Cablegate, the Afghan War Diaries and the Iraqi War Logs. Poitras had acted as a go-between between Greenwald and Snowden when Snowden first tried to contact him. Unable to make a connection, Snowden turned to Poitras, because he knew her work. Her films about Iraq had revealed the shocking truth about what was happening while much of the rest of the world was often accepting the official line that the war was going well. She had been stopped several times as she re-entered America and questioned about her activities. At one time as she pulled out a pen to make notes during a period of questioning, she was told to put it away because it was seen as an offensive weapon. As part of her latest film she had been filming inside the Ecuador Embassy producing a documentary about WikiLeaks. It was Poitras who received the all-important communication from Snowden by encrypted email. Greenwald had failed to install the program despite detailed prompts and even lessons from Snowden – a cyber version of his Hawaiian crypto party. As the person now entrusted with Snowden’s cache of files, Poitras made a decision which would not please Greenwald: she agreed to share some of the material with the Washington Post reporter Bart Gellman. As Poitras navigated the labyrinthine world of activist and whistle-blower politics where trust and credibility are an often fragile commodity, the deal she struck would prove amazingly – and unexpectedly – effective. But at the time Greenwald did not see any benefits at all. He regarded the newspaper as the worst example of conservative, Establishment journalism, keen to keep onside with the US government rather than expose its wrongdoings and inclined to pump out a few stories based on a leak, pick up the journalistic awards and then move on. But Poitras remained convinced that engaging the conservative press in Washington would serve a useful purpose – blunting the inevitable attacks that would come with Snowden’s disclosures. Despite their individual reservations about dealing with the mass media, both Greenwald and Poitras could see that for Snowden’s stories to have maximum impact, and to meet even some of the enormous production costs involved for them personally, they would have to fully engage with at least one newspaper from the mass media. The reason they chose Britain’s Guardian was simple. It was by far the most adventurous mainstream media outlet in the English-speaking world, Greenwald’s work had been regularly published there and the paper had a track record of fearless exposure. Unavoidably there was a price to pay for dealing with The Guardian: the newspaper insisted on sending one of its best and most experienced journalists, Ewen MacAskill, to Hong Kong as a minder. Greenwald viewed MacAskill, who had been The Guardian’s defence and intelligence correspondent and was now the newspaper’s Washington bureau chief, as a ‘company man’. MacAskill’s presence would be a constant reminder that Greenwald and Poitras were no longer totally free agents. Arrangements were made; flights booked. Four strong-minded individuals were about to meet in Hong Kong under tense circumstances.
First of all, Poitras and Greenwald had to persuade MacAskill that Snowden was an authentic whistle-blower, not merely a fantasist with a story to tell and nothing to back it up but fabricated files. They arranged a meeting in Snowden’s hotel room, where MacAskill would be able to challenge Snowden to produce evidence he was not a fake. MacAskill wasted no time, pressing Snowden on details of his past, probing for any sign that his story did not add up. The robust questioning went on for over an hour. Snowden’s answers were consistent and crisp. As final proof Snowden showed MacAskill his old CIA identification pass and a now disused diplomatic passport. MacAskill was convinced. With MacAskill onside – a major achievement – Greenwald and Poitras now had to persuade the formidable Alan Rusbridger. A tricky conversation ensued, using encrypted communications. Rusbridger was the quintessential newspaperman, having come up through the ranks as a reporter, and had edited The Guardian since 1995. Most newspapers regularly changed editors but The Guardian allowed an almost academic tenure for its editorial leader. It encouraged a culture of independence and allowed the editor to make big and often controversial decisions without worrying that his job was on the line. Rusbridger had long championed investigation and disclosure and thoroughly understood the cost, both emotional and financial, of taking on high-risk enterprises. Over the years fighting court cases had cost the newspaper millions of pounds. He was at the helm in 2009 through an absolute monster of a saga involving the oil trading company Trafigura and strong allegations about toxic waste it had dumped in Africa. When The Guardian reported it had received a demand to delete the online historical records of its reporting of the toxic oil disaster, Carter-Ruck, the defamation law firm engaged by Trafigura, said the reports were gravely defamatory and untrue. They maintained it was wrong to report that Trafigura’s waste may have caused deaths and severe injury, even though, as The Guardian reported, Trafigura had agreed to pay compensation to its 30,000 West African victims. Within days Carter-Ruck obtained a super-injunction. It prevented The Guardian from revealing any information covered by the injunction, including the fact that there was an injunction at all. Even a question in the House of Commons about Carter-Ruck and Trafigura ran into problems: Carter-Ruck’s injunction made the reporting of the parliamentary question a breach of the injunction. The Trafigura case was a symptom of the culture of secrecy that pervades the British legal system. In relation to Snowden’s story, The Guardian might be protected under the First Amendment for publishing in the US but it could well fall foul of the Official Secrets Act, particularly if British interests were exposed by Snowden – as would be the case in any disclosure involving the NSA. Rusbridger would have been haunted too by the case of a whistle-blower from GCHQ who leaked a devastating memo from the NSA before the 2003 invasion of Iraq. The memo showed that the US was trying to manipulate the UN Security Council vote. After the story was published in The Observer, sister paper to The Guardian, Katharine Gun, working as a Chinese-language linguist at GCHQ, was arrested and charged under the Official Secrets Act. Rusbridger had observed the lengths the government was prepared to go to prosecute her; finally, it decided not to proceed. It is believed what saved Gun from prosecution was the fear that any court hearing would have to produce evidence which might expose the fact the government knew the argument for going to war was based on a fraud. Rusbridger was being encouraged by Greenwald and Poitras, and even The Guardian’s own reporter, to publish as soon as possible. With the history of battle weighing heavily on Rusbridger, he was not inclined to rush his decision. If The Guardian was showing a sense of nervousness, the Washington Post’s Barton Gellman was pushing for a bigger role. Gellman was in possession of at least one major scoop handed to him by Poitras and was agitating to join Greenwald and Poitras in Hong Kong; he wanted direct access to Snowden so he could produce more stories for the Post.
Meanwhile senior management at the Post seemed to be searching for reasons not to publish. Its lawyers argued that there was a chance Chinese intelligence might overhear Gellman discussing the Snowden documents, an act which could be seen as ‘recklessly passing secrets to the Chinese’.23 The lawyers warned such an action could ‘result in criminal liability’ for both the Post and Gellman under the Espionage Act. It is a measure of the level of fear in the United States that this advice was taken seriously by the editors of the Washington Post. Clearly intimidated, they prevented Gellman from boarding the plane to Hong Kong. The kind of overly cautious journalism that had lost Snowden for the New York Times was now being repeated at that once iconic bastion of investigative reporting, the Washington Post. The Obama administration was piling on the pressure, and the Post had caved in. While Rusbridger continued to cogitate, over at The Guardian’s New York office the newspaper’s US editor, Janine Gibson, was already fielding the possibility of threats from the FBI. Greenwald and Gibson were in constant contact; Gibson told him, ‘They’re saying the FBI could come in and shut down our office and take our files.’24
The Guardian’s lawyers thought there might be the risk of criminal exposure, not only for Snowden but – given the Obama administration’s pursuit of journalists – for both Greenwald and Poitras as well. The Obama White House had brought charges against more whistle-blowers under the Espionage Act than all the other US governments in history. On top of that, news had just broken that the US Justice Department might charge James Rosen, head of the Fox News Washington bureau, with being a co-conspirator in a leak from the State Department. The wording of the court filings was that Rosen may have ‘aided and abetted’ the source’s decision to leak by working closely with him to disclose classified information. The Justice Department (DOJ) was pushing back hard against the First Amendment’s freedom of speech provisions.
There’s a legal argument that journalists are not protected by these provisions if they take part in the process of leaking themselves – and if the DOJ could prove that Rosen had aided and abetted the source, his First Amendment protection could be in shreds. With the possible Rosen charge fresh in his mind, as the hours ticked by Greenwald became increasingly agitated. He reminded Gibson that the Washington Post might publish its story first. Neither of them had any inkling of just how likely that would be, but the possibility did put added pressure on The Guardian to move ahead. Even so Gibson said she could not guarantee when the story would run. She told Greenwald The Guardian would be meeting its lawyers the next day, 5 June. Greenwald was itching to release one particular story about a secret court order allowing the NSA to collect information on all telephone calls handled by the US communications giant Verizon. He asked when The Guardian planned to run the exposé but could not get a straight answer. The 12-hour time difference between New York and Hong Kong could not have made life more difficult for The Guardian and Greenwald. At 3 p.m. on 5 June, Janine Gibson sat down for a meeting with lawyers in New York while Greenwald sat up at 3 a.m. wide awake in Hong Kong, waiting for the outcome. It was already 6 June in Hong Kong. Two hours later Greenwald received the answer he didn’t want to hear: Gibson told him there were considerable legal questions to be addressed.
And even after that, the US government would have to be informed so that it could make its case for non-publication. According to the lawyers consulted by The Guardian editors, publishing classified information could be deemed a crime by the US government if it could be proved that the publication, either recklessly or with intent, damaged US national security. By alerting the intelligence agencies to sensitive information it was going to publish, a newspaper felt it could protect itself from the threat of prosecution.
Fearing The Guardian would give in to the US government’s sustained legal threats, Greenwald began making plans to walk away and find another publisher. He made calls to both Salon, his old publisher for years, and The Nation to see if they would be happy to run the NSA stories right away. As Greenwald tells it, they offered all the support he needed, with lawyers ready to vet the articles immediately.
Just as concerning for Greenwald as having to switch publishers was the fact that the Washington Post was working on the Snowden material they had been given by Poitras. The possibility that they would publish first was a nightmare scenario for him, that he would be scooped on his story by one of the mainstream institutions he loathed most. After phoning his partner, David Miranda, at their home in Brazil and talking things over, Greenwald hit upon a fresh strategy. It involved both of them and Poitras opted in. If The Guardian dithered much longer they would set up their own website to upload the Snowden stories. With that fall-back plan in place, Greenwald’s spirits lifted tremendously. From the start he believed that ‘the documents presented an opportunity to shine a light not only on secret NSA spying but on the corrupting dynamics of Establishment journalism’.25 To Greenwald, ‘breaking one of the most important stories in years through a new and independent model was very important’.26
An energised Greenwald rang friends, lawyers and other journalists, asking for advice. They all told him it was too risky without the backing of an existing media structure.
David Miranda was adamant however that ‘only releasing the stories at a newly created website could capture the intrepid spirit driving the reporting we wanted to do’. He was also convinced it would inspire people everywhere. As for Snowden, his exact words were, ‘Risky, but bold. I like it.’27
Resolution was imminent: either The Guardian was going to publish or Greenwald was on the verge of making one of the greatest mistakes of his career. Self-publishing is scorned by journalists for good reason – either no one else is interested, which is a major obstacle for sales, or the risks outweigh the benefits.
On Wednesday 6 June Greenwald woke early. It was still evening the previous day in New York. He would have to wait a full 12 hours before Janine Gibson arrived at work for what he hoped would be the final day of negotiations. As soon as Greenwald saw Gibson come online he asked her what the plan was. ‘Are we going to publish today?’ ‘I hope so,’ she replied. The Guardian intended to contact the NSA to ask for its response. Gibson told Greenwald she would ‘know our publishing schedule only once we heard back from them’.28
Greenwald could not understand why The Guardian was holding off publishing. ‘For a story this clean and straightforward who cares what they think we should and shouldn’t publish?’29
Aside from his contempt for the process – the government should not be a collaborative editorial partner with newspapers in deciding what gets published – he says he ‘knew there was no plausible national security argument against our specific Verizon report, which involved a simple court order showing the systemic collection of Americans’ telephone records’.30
The idea that terrorists would benefit from exposing the order was laughable: any terrorists capable of tying their own shoelaces already knew that the government was trying to monitor their telephone communications. Greenwald believed the people who would learn something from the article were not the terrorists but the American people. At around noon New York time Janine Gibson phoned the NSA and the White House to tell them the newspaper was planning to publish some top-secret material. The request was met with complete silence. ‘Right now, they don’t think they need to call us back,’ Gibson wrote. ‘They’re going to learn quickly that they need to return my calls.’31
Gibson had asked to hear from the NSA ‘by the end of the day’.32
A little over three hours later the phone rang. It was not just the NSA on the other end; there were officials from numerous agencies, including the NSA, the DOJ and the White House. What started off as an attempt to patronise Gibson by telling her she did not understand the meaning or context of the Verizon court order ended with threats. They wanted to meet her ‘some-time next week’33 to explain the sensitivity of the issues involved. Greenwald’s understanding was that these callers became ‘belligerent even bullying when she said she wanted to publish that day and would do so unless she heard very specific and concrete reasons not to do so’.34
Gibson had deftly turned the tables. The White House and the intelligence services of the US had been mercilessly trying to undermine the use of the First Amendment, which gave journalists protection, by appealing to patriotism as a reason not to publish. They had drawn journalists into the Establishment, using the argument that the country was at war to silence its critics. Finally, a lone whistle-blower, an individual who recognised the corruption in the system, had played a different game with the powerful US media institutions, initially bypassing them, and was about to get his story told. The cosy relationships that successive administrations in Washington had so carefully tended were worthless. The internet – a system which US intelligence agencies had exploited to gather unimaginable amounts of data on billions of people – was now being used against them. It must have been wounding that The Guardian, a newspaper from another country, would reinvigorate the meaning of the First Amendment, freedom of speech and the right to publish – using the internet to transmit its stories across the US and across the world. The US administration was stunned. ‘No normal journalistic outlet would publish this quickly without first meeting with us,’ they said.35
Greenwald remembered thinking,
They’re probably right, that’s the point. The rules in place allow the government to control and neuter the news gathering process and eliminate the adversarial relationship between press and government … These stories were going to be released by a different set of rules, ones that would define an independent rather than subservient press corps.36
Gibson now found herself being squeezed by the US administration on one side, accusing her of acting recklessly, and Greenwald on the other, suggesting she might be too weak to face up to the challenge. Extraordinarily, in the middle of one of the most difficult decisions The Guardian would make in its over 150-year history, the editor-in-chief, Alan Rusbridger, got on a plane for New York. With Rusbridger out of touch, and up in the air, it was Gibson who would handle the story during this critical stage.
Though Rusbridger had a demonstrable zeal for investigative journalism, he also had a barely concealed contempt for Greenwald. Explaining the perils and potential of the internet age to a Sydney audience in December 2014, Rusbridger commented that Greenwald was an activist and said he would find it hard to get a job as a journalist in the US. It was meant as a criticism but it could well have been taken as a compliment. It was an echo of the dismissive way Assange had been treated by The Guardian when he came to them with the WikiLeaks exposé, which until Snowden emerged had been the world’s biggest scoop. Whatever was going on, Rusbridger’s flying across the Atlantic at that moment placed firmly in Gibson’s hands the final decision on whether to publish. Greenwald decided to pile on the pressure; first of all, he had to decide whether to stop working with The Guardian and go it alone, publishing the material online. David Miranda told him, ‘You have no choice. If they’re scared to publish, this isn’t the place for you. You can’t operate by fear or you won’t achieve anything. That’s the lesson Snowden just showed you.’37
After several drafts Greenwald sent Gibson a message: ‘I understand that you have your concerns and have to do what you feel is right. I’m going to go ahead now and do what needs to be done too. I’m sorry it didn’t work out.’ Greenwald hit ‘Send’.38
Fifteen seconds later the phone rang in Greenwald’s hotel room. It was Janine Gibson, who by now was feeling the pressure. Gibson was totally out on her own, making decisions which her immediate boss, Rusbridger – who was still out of touch – might not like. There was also the distinct possibility that a large section of the media might hate Gibson’s decisions, firstly because they did not get the story but perhaps more significantly because they might accept the White House argument that the report aided terrorists. Even so, Gibson told Greenwald The Guardian was ‘going to publish today. It will be no later than 5.30 pm’.39 At 5.40 pm Gibson sent Greenwald an instant message: ‘It’s live’.40
The story was page one on The Guardian website. Headlined ‘NSA Collecting Phone Records of Millions of Verizon Customers Daily’, it carried that much overused but in this case deserved tag, ‘Exclusive’. The National Security Agency, it reported, was currently collecting the telephone records of millions of US customers of Verizon, one of America’s largest telecom providers, under a top-secret court order issued in April. The order, a copy of which has been obtained by The Guardian, required Verizon to give the NSA information on all telephone calls in its systems, both within the US and between the US and other countries. The document showed for the first time that under the Obama administration the communication records of millions of US citizens were being collected indiscriminately and in bulk, regardless of whether they were suspected of any wrongdoing. The impact was immediate and profound. The piece led the evening news bulletins right across the US. Greenwald appeared on CNN, MSNBC, NBC, the Today show and Good Morning America. He found the experience of being interviewed by what he called ‘sympathetic reporters’41 unusually pleasant. When he criticised the administration in his other stories he had been pilloried, but not this time. Even the New York Times supported the story with an editorial which said, ‘Mr Obama is proving the truism that the executive branch will use any power it is given and very likely abuse it.’42
Snowden, sitting in his room at The Mira in Hong Kong, had watched it all. He might have sacrificed his future, even his life, but his fear that no one would care had proved unfounded, in a spectacular way. ‘Everyone seemed to get it,’ he told Greenwald.43
Snowden had every reason to feel vindicated: the course of action he had so carefully laid out had worked. Twenty-four hours later – having allowed The Guardian to take the first of the criticism from the White House – Gellman’s Washington Post story appeared online. It revealed the existence of a top-secret program codenamed PRISM, which internal NSA documents showed gave the agency direct access to data held by Google, Facebook, Apple and other US internet giants. There were howls from tech companies denying that they had set up backdoor access to their systems for the US government but there was no doubt that most had been compliant in giving the NSA what it wanted. According to the New York Times, ‘Twitter declined to make it easier for the government’, but others developed ‘technical methods to more efficiently and securely share the personal data of foreign users in response to lawful government requests’.44
As much of the internet media industry fell in line with the US government’s demands, The Guardian began taking serious precautions against surveillance intrusion at their functional glass-clad head office near St Pancras Railway State in London. It was from here that reporter Nick Davies had taken the Eurostar to meet Julian Assange at a Brussels cafe in 2010 where they began working together on the Chelsea Manning disclosures. As we sit in a café in the genteel Sussex market town of Lewes, Davies reflects on meeting Assange and the precautions he took to protect the Brussels meeting from surveillance. Assange had flown to Brussels from Australia, changing planes in Hong Kong to lessen the possibility of being snatched during transit. Like Snowden, he chose Hong Kong because of its comparative safety from the reach of Western intelligence agencies. But Brussels could be just as dangerous for phone interception, such was the reach of GCHQ and the NSA.
‘We both understood that it was highly likely that his communications were being targeted because this was about four weeks after Bradley Manning had been arrested,’ Davies said.45
And if Assange’s communications were being intercepted and he had email contact with Davies, it was conceivable, though less likely according to Davies, that Davies was also being monitored.
At one time during the six-hour conversation Davies’ then girlfriend called. She knew who Davies was meeting and asked: ‘How are you getting on with Julian?’46
Thinking quickly Davies replied: ‘It’s a disaster, the guy won’t co-operate, it’s a mess, waste of time.’47
The next day at dawn Davies caught the first train back to London to explain to Rusbridger in person the deal he had struck with Assange and, probably just as importantly to him, to tell the truth to his girlfriend.
Working with Assange’s material, The Guardian set aside a room inside its offices, creating a secure area with some particularly journalistic touches. The office windows were pasted over with newspapers ‘because it is conceivable that one of those very, very powerful cameras on a satellite could look through at the window and read something which might assist a state agency to interfere’.48
Davies said it might be ‘a bit absurd when you get to that point and yet I think that is[it is] alright’.49
He said it was about ‘being realistic in assessing the threat’.50 The Guardian took other simpler precautions ‘like using computers that aren’t connected to the internet’.51 Davies described these actions as ‘Just being bloody careful about your electronic communications’.52
Three years later, again behind the newspaper-covered windows of the ‘bunker’, The Guardian team began sifting through the Snowden documents, making a choice to publish stories which would not give ammunition to the newspaper’s opponents. The Guardian was keen to buy some time to assess the treasure trove of intelligence documents provided to it by Snowden, while at the same time beginning to publish stories, but the newspaper was wary. Davies said The Guardian made a conscious decision to head off attacks: ‘Let us not publish anything which allows them to do the obvious thing to accuse us of helping terrorists and bad guys. That simple.’53
In theory, the British Official Secrets Act might cover a lot of what The Guardian proposed to publish, Davies said. The question was: ‘Will the attorney-general use his legal power to prosecute us under the Official Secrets Act?’54 The Guardian decided to position itself to put political pressure on the Attorney General or the Director of Public Prosecutions not to invoke the law against the newspaper. Though the original law, enacted in 1911, was a wide-ranging catch-all which prohibited any government information being released without authority, it was still a formidable piece of legislation specifically mentioning newspapers who publish intelligence material without authority.
Under this legislation journalists revealing what is deemed to be ‘damaging information’ can be charged with an offence which attracts a prison sentence of up to two years plus unlimited fines.55
The Guardian team, including investigations editor David Leigh, editor Alan Rusbridger and Davies earnestly discussed, ‘How can we do this without getting nicked?’56
As Davies tells it,
There was this image of this kind of smoke filled room in Whitehall and on one side there were the hawks who were saying ‘send the police into The Guardian building, arrest anybody who had access to the Snowden material, seize their computers and if they don’t cooperate start fining them, say a million pounds a day’. So, there would be the hawks on one side of the room and then there would be the doves saying ‘hang on a moment, doesn’t look great if we bust a newspaper’. So, we had to send political signals which would strengthen the hand of the doves against the hawks, so they would decide not to come after us.57
The Guardian decided to start by running a story that ‘wasn’t actually the most powerful but was politically the most helpful’.58
The story revealed how the NSA and GCHQ spied on foreign politicians and officials attending two G20 summit meetings in London in 2009 – and had their computers monitored and their phone calls intercepted on the instructions of their British government hosts. Some delegates were tricked into using internet cafes which had been set up by British intelligence agencies to read their email traffic. ‘It was all being syphoned off by MI6,’ Davies said.59
The revelation came as Britain prepared to host another summit a few days later – for the G8 nations, all of whom attended the 2009 meetings which were the subject of the systematic spying.
The Guardian reported: ‘The G20 spying appears to have been organized for the more mundane purpose of securing an advantage in meetings. Named targets include long-standing allies such as South Africa and Turkey.’60
Davies told me the reason The Guardian started by publishing the G20 spying story first was that it hoped it would provoke the French and the Germans to say to London, ‘How dare you?’ If in those circumstances the British government had tried to prosecute The Guardian ‘it would be very obvious this was a political embarrassment that was motivating them and not a genuine fear that we were helping the enemy’. Davies said The Guardian was ‘thinking politically’ to stop the law being enforced.61
After publishing the first story – about the Verizon phone intercepts – under heavy pressure from Glenn Greenwald to act quickly, The Guardian followed a voluntary process, where newspapers proposing to publish sensitive security and military information inform an independent committee which gives direction on what it believes should or should not be published. Housed in the Department of Defence, off London’s Whitehall, the Defence, Press and Broadcasting Advisory Committee – known as the D-notice committee – oversees a ‘voluntary code’ which ‘operates between the UK Government departments which have responsibilities for national security and the media’.62 The Guardian consistently dealt with the D-notice committee, comprised of senior representatives of government departments like Defence and the Foreign Office, and executives from newspapers, TV stations and other media bodies. Its job is to ‘prevent inadvertent public disclosure of information that would compromise UK military and intelligence operations and methods, or put at risk the safety of those involved’.63 During the period that The Guardian was revealing the Snowden stories, Rusbridger estimated he had 100 meetings with Whitehall officials to discuss what it would report.
‘The message that Alan conveyed,’ Davies said, was
‘We are not crazy. Don’t get over excited. you know we have got this material we are not about to publish something that is going to bring the roof down on people’s heads’, i.e. we are not going to publish something that’s going to get innocent people hurt. ‘So just relax, take it easy.’64
If the intelligence community had been assured that there was nothing much to worry about, they were about to get a rude awakening. Cabinet Secretary Jeremy Heywood must have been well aware that he had been ‘played’ by The Guardian when he rushed to King’s Place to discuss the next story the newspaper was about to publish. Exactly how much detail he knew has not been disclosed but Heywood warned the paper ‘not to publish the article on the grounds that it would jeopardize national security and intelligence work against organised crime’.65 Heywood also wanted the Snowden documents.
On 21 June, 2013, just four days after the G20 revelation, The Guardian splashed across its front page an incredible story which revealed the real significance of GCHQ’s role in information-gathering with the NSA. In one of the most picturesque and remote areas of England, where the Atlantic Ocean laps against the south-west coast, huge cables carrying much of the data and telephone traffic from the US come ashore. Just as importantly the cables also provide a traffic link to mainland Europe, providing GCHQ with access to US-UK traffic and communications between the US and European nations. GCHQ had inserted dozens of taps on 200 of these cables, syphoning off the material – and storing it in massive computer systems. Snowden said Tempora was part of ‘the largest programme of suspicion-less surveillance in human history’.66 The Guardian reported that GCHQ was processing vast streams of sensitive personal information and sharing it with the NSA.
The Tempora system allowed GCHQ to store huge volumes of data drawn from the fiber-optic cables and store it for up to 30 days so that it could be sifted and analysed.
GCHQ and the NSA had access to vast quantities of communications between entirely innocent people, as well as targeted suspects. These were not just metadata, the electronic fingerprints that all users of the web leave behind. The information being sucked up by Tempora included recordings of phone calls, the content of email messages, entries on Facebook and the history of any internet user’s access to websites.
GCHQ carries out much of its work under the legal protection of the 2000 Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA), which allows communications to be tapped only with a warrant signed by the Home or Foreign Secretary.
However, paragraph four of section eight of RIPA is much looser, allowing the Foreign Secretary to issue a certificate for broad interception of categories of material relating to terrorism or organised crime, for example.67 It appears that GCHQ was using that clause to justify its broad interception of web traffic for its own use – and sharing the spoils to allow the US government to benefit as well, circumventing its Fourth Amendment law protecting privacy. ‘The US agency can get back from GCHQ the data of US persons passing along these cables without any need to comply with US law,’ according to an assessment entitled ‘Publishing the Snowden Secrets: The Guardian, the Government and the People’, by Gavin Millar, QC, from Doughty Chambers. By 2010, two years after the system was first trialled, Tempora boasted it had the ‘biggest internet access’ of any member of the Five Eyes electronic eavesdropping alliance – the US, UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.
UK officials could also claim GCHQ ‘produces larger amounts of metadata than NSA’.
Three hundred analysts from GCHQ, and 250 from the NSA, were assigned to sift through the flood of data.
The Americans were given guidelines for its use, but were told in legal briefings by GCHQ lawyers: ‘We have a light oversight regime compared with the US.’68
When it came to judging the necessity and proportionality of what they were allowed to look for, would-be American users were told it was ‘your call’.69
The Guardian reported that a total of 850,000 NSA employees and US private contractors with top-secret clearance had access to GCHQ databases. The Snowden documents revealed that by 2012 GCHQ was handling 600m ‘telephone events’ each day, had tapped more than 200 fibre-optic cables and was able to process data from at least 46 of them at a time.70
It appeared that the US was managing to circumvent the Constitution’s Fourth Amendment, which protects its citizens from random search, by paying GCHQ to spy on their citizens with the looser rules which exist in the UK.
Davies described the decision to hold off on the Tempora story until later as ‘an example of quite clever maneuvering to give ourselves some space which to publish information that the public need to know’.71 The Guardian knew what was coming. Three weeks later Heywood returned to Kings Place. If The Guardian did not stop publishing the Snowden stories, it would be shut down. The government would take The Guardian to court. Davies said Heywood told Rusbridger: ‘You’ve had your fun, we want the computers, we want the material.’72 Explaining the nature of international collaborations, Rusbridger detailed to Heywood the way in which media organisations could take advantage of the most permissive legal environments – The Guardian did not have to do its reporting from London. But the threat was unambiguous: if The Guardian did not promise to stop publication it would have to destroy the files it had, or be taken to court.
Rusbridger made what appeared to be a rational decision at the time: he agreed to the destruction of the files, but it would not be a decision without consequences. On a hot Saturday morning, 20 July, 2013, two staff members from Britain’s GCHQ were escorted to the basement of The Guardian offices not far from St Pancras railway station. Normally for jobs like this, intelligence agencies bring with them what they call ‘cake mixers’. They are gadgets specifically used for destroying computers and reducing them to powder, so their drives are irretrievably damaged and all the information in them is obliterated. But this time they seemed satisfied with less conventional systems of destruction, among them electric angle grinders and a drill. Several Apple computers contained thousands of documents which formed the Snowden cache. The GCHQ staff watched as two Guardian staff drilled into the computer hard drives and ripped the machines to pieces. When they had finished, one of the government men joked as he swept up the remains of a MacBook Pro: ‘We can call off the black helicopters.’73
Just why this important act was not reported immediately to the public has never been explained. It was not until the following month that Rushbridger revealed what had happened. What appeared to jolt Rusbridger into action was an act by the British police which showed how far the government was prepared to go to intimidate journalists. Their target in this case was Glenn Greenwald’s partner, David Miranda.
On his way home to Brazil, Miranda was detained in the transit lounge at London’s Heathrow Airport – an international no-man’s land where the laws of the UK are murky to say the least. In a front-page comment piece, Rusbridger told how Miranda was kept there for nine hours under Schedule 7 of the UK’s terror laws, which give enormous discretion to stop, search and question people who have no connection with ‘terror’ as anyone would normally understand it. Those held have no right to legal representation and may have their property confiscated for up to seven days. Under this measure – which applies specifically to places ‘beyond the customs barrier’ in international space – there are none of the checks and balances that apply once someone has crossed the ‘frontier’ into Britain. It is a complex and difficult area of operations for the police and intelligence agencies who are careful not to accuse anyone they detain of being a ‘suspect’, for a ‘suspect’ has the right to a lawyer. According to Duncan Campbell, the investigative journalist who first revealed the existence of GCHQ in the 1970s, there was
a general agreement between Poitras, Greenwald, and The Guardian that they should share everything when they all left Hong Kong separately. Some parts of [Snowden’s] material were with one party, some with another, so David Miranda’s trip was a levelling up process.74
Police seized Miranda’s laptop, and an encrypted external drive to search for Snowden’s documents. ‘As far as Miranda was concerned even if they [the police] had been found to act unlawfully subsequently which they weren’t, they had got away with taking all his information’.75 In particular, the police reported finding a written note giving the key for the memory sticks holding an index (prepared by the journalists) to all the GCHQ documents in the cache.
For Rusbridger it was a defining moment. Only now did he tell the story of the decision to allow GCHQ to destroy The Guardian’s copy of the Snowden files. By detaining Miranda in the Heathrow transit lounge, the security forces – in fact MI5 – had gone too far. Rusbridger wrote:
The state that is building such a formidable apparatus of surveillance will do its best to prevent journalists from reporting on it. Most journalists can see that. But I wonder how many have truly understood the absolute threat to journalism implicit in the idea of total surveillance, when or if it comes – and, increasingly, it looks like ‘when’.
He added: ‘We are not there yet, but it may not be long before it will be impossible for journalists to have confidential sources. Most reporting – indeed, most human life in 2013 – leaves too much of a digital fingerprint.’76
For journalists like Rusbridger who stood in the way, there was a price to pay. Required to appear before the UK Parliamentary Home Affairs Committee to answer questions about the Snowden leaks, Rusbridger, who was born in Zambia, was subjected to a form of aggressive nationalism, his loyalty to the UK questioned. Rusbridger responded: ‘Yes, we are patriots and one of the things we are patriotic about is the nature of a democracy and the nature of a free press.’77 He said that the ‘freedom to write and report’ was ‘one of the things I love about this country’.78 The most aggressive questioning came from Michael Ellis, the Conservative MP for Northampton North, who went for the editor with all the gravitas of a prosecuting counsel, accusing Rusbridger of being a criminal. ‘Mr Rusbridger, you authorised files stolen by Snowden, which contained the names of intelligence staff to be communicated elsewhere, didn’t you – yes or no?’ he demanded. ‘Do you accept that from me that it is an offence, a criminal offence under section 58A of the Terrorism Act 2000?’79 To the question, as pompous as the questioner, Rusbridger replied that no one had presented any evidence that any security agents had been put at risk owing to The Guardian’s Snowden stories. The Guardian had published no names. The Daily Mail, salivating over the prospect that Guardian journalists could be jailed, headlined a story ‘The Guardian May Face Terror Charges over Stolen Secrets’ and ‘NSA’s Mission is of Great Value to the Nation’.80
As Rusbridger succinctly put it,
Those colleagues who denigrate Snowden or say reporters should trust the state to know best (many of them in the UK, oddly, on the right) may one day have a cruel awakening. One day it will be their reporting, their cause, under attack.81
Rusbridger was asked why he had sent the Snowden material overseas to the New York Times. For Rusbridger the decision to do so was pragmatic: knowing that the material – which had been ground to a pulp in the basement of The Guardian by the ‘men from Whitehall’ – was still held by the New York Times, he had saved The Guardian possibly millions of pounds in court costs alone in not having to defend any legal action. Davies says he ‘never quite understood why’82 the government had deemed it necessary to destroy The Guardian’s computers:
Whether the London spooks were trying to send a signal to Washington [that] ‘We are seriously trying to stop this happening’. Or whether they were trying to send a signal to the staff at GCHQ, [that] ‘We are seriously trying to stop this happening’, it was pantomime. They knew the information was no longer restricted to the computers. So, it was a pointless symbolic act.83
But the fact was, The Guardian had lost control of the information. The doubts that Davis raised earlier about whether the government – despite all the threats – would have the political strength to prosecute a newspaper reporting on matters which, though it would put The Guardian in a difficult position, might also raise many difficult questions for the government to answer. Prosecuting a whistle-blower was one thing, but prosecuting the editor of a significant and prestigious newspaper like The Guardian was another matter altogether. For whatever reason, Rusbridger had caved in. The British government ‘wanted The Guardian to stop reporting these stories and what they did was superbly effective’, according to Duncan Campbell.84
The Guardian had lodged safety copies of the Snowden documents under the protection of the First Amendment with the New York Times. ‘Well what the fuck was done with them? They sit in the room in the New York Times office.’85
Campbell says that without undermining the security of the United Kingdom, it would have been ‘in the public interest if The Guardian didn’t want to publish these stories to invite others to use the material’. That would ‘bring before the British public material that was pertinent to the debate’,86 as the UK Government proposed increasing the power of surveillance laws.
Dr Paul Lashmar, former UK Reporter of the Year, investigative journalist for The Observer and The Independent, and now Senior Lecturer and Journalism Lead at Sussex University, says it was ‘unfortunate’87 that Snowden gave the information to just two people, Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras. Lashmar, who also worked for the acclaimed British investigative TV programme World in Action, says that he and others feel that while Greenwald and Poitras did a good job of releasing documents responsibly in the earlier days, what was needed was ‘a more systemic and speedy effort with perhaps a team of experts to assist’.88 He added: ‘They have released things when it suited them for reasons that best advantaged them and have not made them more widely available. They have certainly not utilised the expertise of a lot of leading journalists or academics.’89 For instance, the priority had clearly been US documents and little had been released from the other Five Eyes countries’ archives, which could have been extremely important in those countries.
Dr Lashmar makes the criticism that The Intercept used the information as its ‘personal fiefdom’,90 and points out that the documents are fast losing their currency. Snowden released the documents in 2013 and ‘very few of the documents are as young as that, most of the documents are older’.91 He points out it has been estimated that are between 500,000 and 1.7 million documents. According to the authoritative website Cryptome, at the current rate of disclosure by The Intercept, it could take up to 620 years to release all the documents.
The Snowden files were indeed a gold mine for The Intercept; they formed the basis of its beginning and the stories have produced a sound foundation for Glenn Greenwald’s challenging online journalism. They almost certainly helped propel The Guardian, under Rusbridger’s leadership, to become the world’s first truly international online newspaper, expanding with local editions in the US and Australia. Now The Guardian was shut out of the Snowden files – documents which had produced a wealth of stories boosting The Guardian’s online presence and promising, in part at least, to answer the vexed question: how could newspapers survive when their incomes through classified advertisements were fast disappearing?
If The Guardian, funded by a trust which guaranteed its independence and allowed it to take more chances than most newspapers, couldn’t hold out against the government, who could? It was a problem which afflicted other newspapers too. Just when they needed to be strong to protect vigorous, challenging journalism holding governments to account, they were transparently getting financially weaker by the day.
Notes
1 Fowler, A. 2001.The Most Dangerous Man in the World. Melbourne University Press.
2 Fowler, A. 2015. The War on Journalism. Penguin Random House.
3 Electronic Frontiers Foundation. What is Tor? [online]. Available at www.eff.org/torchallenge/what-is-tor.html [Accessed 24 November, 2016].
4 Available at www.wired.com/2014/05/snowden-cryptoparty/
5 Available at https://theintercept.com/2015/05/28/nsa-officials-privately-criticize-collect-it-all-surveillance/
6 Gellman, B. 23rd December, 2013. Edward Snowden, After Months of Revelations Says His Mission is Accomplished. Washington Post.
7 Gellman, B. 24th December, 2013. Mission Accomplished, Says Edward Snowden [online]. Available at www.smh.com.au/world/mission-accomplished-says-edward-snowden-20131224-hv6t0.html [Accessed 27 November].
8 Legal Information Institute. [Undated]. Fourth Amendment. Cornell Law School [online]. Available at www.law.cornell.edu/constitution/fourth_amendment [Accessed 27 October, 2016].
9 Legal Information Institute. 23rd January, 2012. United States, Petitioner v Antoine Jones. Cornell Law School [online]. Available at www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/10-1259#writing-10-1259_CONCUR_5 [Accessed 6 August, 2016].
10 Nineteen Eighty-Four. 1949. George Orwell. New American Library.
11 Edwards, I. 29th December, 1991. The Essence of ‘Kafkaesque’ [Online]. Available at www.nytimes.com/1991/12/29/nyregion/the-essence-of-kafkaesque.html [Accessed 12 July, 2016].
12 Greenwald, G. 2014. No Place to Hide. Hamish Hamilton, London.
13 Greenwald, G. 6th June, 2014. Encouraging Words of Regret from Dean Baquet and Weasel Words from James Clapper [online]. Available at https://theintercept.com/2014/06/06/encouraging-words-dean-baquet-weasel-words-james-clapper/ [Accessed 5 August, 2016].
14 Greenwald, G. 6th June, 2014. Encouraging Words of Regret from Dean Baquet and Weasel Words from James Clapper [online]. Available at https://theintercept.com/2014/06/06/encouraging-words-dean-baquet-weasel-words-james-clapper/ [Accessed 5 August, 2016].
15 Greenwald, G. 6th June, 2014. Encouraging Words of Regret from Dean Baquet and Weasel Words from James Clapper. The Intercept [online]. Available at https://theintercept.com/2014/06/06/encouraging-words-dean-baquet-weasel-words-james-clapper/ [Accessed 19 October, 2016].
16 MacAskill, E. 19th December, 2010. Julian Assange is Like a High-Tech Terrorist, Says Joe Biden [online]. Available at www.theguardian.com/media/2010/dec/19/assange-high-tech-terrorist-biden [Accessed 24 August, 2016].
17 Hawkins, J. 30th November, 2010. 5 Reasons the CIA Should Have Already Killed Julian Assange. Available at http://townhall.com/columnists/johnhawkins/2010/11/30/5_reasons_the_cia_should_have_already_killed_julian_assange [Accessed 5 August, 2016].
18 Beckford, M. 30th November, 2010. Sarah Palin: Hunt WikiLeaks Founder Like al-Qaeda and Taliban leaders [online]. Available at www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/wikileaks/8171269/Sarah-Palin-hunt-WikiLeaks-founder-like-al-Qaeda-and-Taliban-leaders.html [Accessed 8 August, 2016].
19 Greenwald, G. 1st December, 2010. WikiLeaks Reveals More Than Just Government Secrets [online]. Available at www.salon.com/2010/11/30/wikileaks_10/ [Accessed 1 August, 2016].
20 Fowler, A. 2015. The War on Journalism. Penguin Random House.
21 Gellman, B. 9th June, 2013. Code Name Verax: Snowden in Exchange with Post Reporter Made Clear He knew the Risks. Washington Post.
22 Gellman, B. 9th June, 2013. Code Name Verax: Snowden in Exchange with Post Reporter Made Clear He knew the Risks. Washington Post.
23 Greenwald, G. 2014. No Place to Hide. Hamish Hamilton, London.
24 Greenwald, G. 2014. No Place to Hide. Hamish Hamilton, London.
25 Greenwald, G. 2014. No Place to Hide. Hamish Hamilton, London.
26 Greenwald, G. 2014. No Place to Hide. Hamish Hamilton, London.
27 Greenwald, G. 2014. No Place to Hide. Hamish Hamilton, London.
28 Greenwald, G. 2014. No Place to Hide. Hamish Hamilton, London.
29 Greenwald, G. 2014. No Place to Hide. Hamish Hamilton, London.
30 Greenwald, G. 2014. No Place to Hide. Hamish Hamilton, London.
31 Greenwald, G. 2014. No Place to Hide. Hamish Hamilton, London.
32 Greenwald, G. 2014. No Place to Hide. Hamish Hamilton, London.
33 Greenwald, G. 2014. No Place to Hide. Hamish Hamilton, London.
34 Greenwald, G. 2014. No Place to Hide. Hamish Hamilton, London.
35 Greenwald, G. 2014. No Place to Hide. Hamish Hamilton, London.
36 Greenwald, G. 2014. No Place to Hide. Hamish Hamilton, London.
37 Greenwald, G. 2014. No Place to Hide. Hamish Hamilton, London.
38 Greenwald, G. 2014. No Place to Hide. Hamish Hamilton, London.
39 Greenwald, G. 2014. No Place to Hide. Hamish Hamilton, London.
40 Greenwald, G. 2014. No Place to Hide. Hamish Hamilton, London.
41 Greenwald, G. 2014. No Place to Hide. Hamish Hamilton, London.
42 Greenwald, G. 2014. No Place to Hide. Hamish Hamilton, London.
43 Greenwald, G. 2014. No Place to Hide. Hamish Hamilton, London.
44 Miller, C. 7th June, 2013. Tech Companies Concede to Surveillance Program [online]. Available at www.nytimes.com/2013/06/08/technology/tech-companies-bristling-concede-to-government-surveillance-efforts.html [Accessed 16 August, 2016].
45 Davies, N. August, 2016. Interview.
46 Davies, N. August, 2016. Interview.
47 Davies, N. August, 2016. Interview.
48 Davies, N. August, 2016. Interview.
49 Davies, N. August, 2016. Interview.
50 Davies, N. August, 2016. Interview.
51 Davies, N. August, 2016. Interview.
52 Davies, N. August, 2016. Interview.
53 Davies, N. August, 2016. Interview.
54 Davies, N. August, 2016. Interview.
55 UK Parliament. 2nd May, 2017. The Official Secrets Act and Official Secrecy [online]. Available at http://researchbriefings.parliament.uk/ResearchBriefing/Summary/CBP-7422 [Accessed 2 June, 2017].
56 Davies, N. August, 2016. Interview.
57 Davies, N. August, 2016. Interview.
58 Davies, N. August, 2016. Interview.
59 Davies, N. August, 2016. Interview.
60 MacAskill, E., Davies, N., Hopkins, J., Borger, J., and Ball, J. 17th June, 2013. GCHQ Intercepted Foreign Politicians Communications at G20 Summits’. The Guardian [online]. Available at www.theguardian.com/uk/2013/jun/16/gchq-intercepted-communications-g20-summits [Accessed 27 July, 2016].
61 Davies, N. August, 2016. Interview.
62 DSMA. 2017. The Defence and Security Media Advisory [DSMA] Committee [online]. Available at www.dnotice.org.uk/index.htm [Accessed 23 October, 2016].
63 DSMA. 2017. The Defence and Security Media Advisory [DSMA] Committee [online]. Available at www.dnotice.org.uk/index.htm [Accessed 23 October, 2016].
64 Davies, N. August, 2016. Interview.
65 Millar, G. [No date]. Publishing the Snowden Secrets, The Guardian, the Government and the People by Doughty Chambers, London [online]. Available at www.law.ox.ac.uk/sites/files/oxlaw/publishing_snowden_gmfinal.pdf [Accessed 8 October, 2016].
66 Available at www.theguardian.com/uk/2013/jun/21/gchq-cables-secret-world-communications-nsa
67 Available at www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2000/23/contents
68 Available at www.theguardian.com/uk/2013/jun/21/gchq-cables-secret-world-communications-nsa
69 Available at www.theguardian.com/uk/2013/jun/21/gchq-cables-secret-world-communications-nsa
70 Available at www.theguardian.com/uk/2013/jun/21/gchq-cables-secret-world-communications-nsa
71 Davies, N. August, 2016. Interview.
72 Davies, N. August, 2016. Interview.
73 Rusbridger, A. 19th August, 2013. David Miranda, Schedule 7 and the Danger that All Reporters Now Face. The Guardian [online]. Available at www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/aug/19/david-miranda-schedule7-danger-reporters [Accessed 10 August, 2016].
74 Campbell, D. October, 2016. Interview.
75 Campbell, D. October, 2016. Interview.
76 Rusbridger, A. 19th August, 2013. David Miranda, Schedule 7 and the Danger that All Reporters Now Face. The Guardian [online]. Available at www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/aug/19/david-miranda-schedule7-danger-reporters [Accessed 10 August, 2016].
77 Rusbridger, A. 3rd December, 2013. MP’s Questions to Alan Rusbridger: Do You Love this Country? The Guardian [online]. Available at www.theguardian.com/media/2013/dec/03/keith-vaz-alan-rusbridger-love-country-nsa [Accessed 28 August, 2016].
78 Rusbridger, A. 3rd December, 2013. MP’s Questions to Alan Rusbridger: Do You Love this Country? The Guardian [online]. Available at www.theguardian.com/media/2013/dec/03/keith-vaz-alan-rusbridger-love-country-nsa [Accessed 28 August, 2016].
79 Burrell, I. 3rd December, 2013. MPs Question Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger’s Patriotism Over Edward Snowden Leaks. The Independent [online]. Available at www.independent.co.uk/news/media/press/mps-question-guardian-editor-alan-rusbridger-s-patriotism-over-edward-snowden-leaks-8981167.html [Accessed 23 September, 2016].
80 Daily Mail reporter. 4th December, 2013. ‘NSA’s Mission is of Great Value to the Nation’: Under Fire Spy Agency’s Guide to Thanksgiving Small Talk Revealed in Leaked Memo to Employees [online]. Available at www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2517506/NSAs-Thanksgiving-memo-wants-employees-highlight-good-work-agency-done.html [Accessed 2 January, 2017].
81 Rusbridger, A. 19th August, 2013. David Miranda, Schedule 7 and the Danger That All Reporters Now Face. The Guardian [online]. Available at www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/aug/19/david-miranda-schedule7-danger-reporters [Accessed 10 August, 2016].
82 Davies, N. August, 2016. Interview.
83 Davies, N. August, 2016. Interview.
84 Campbell, D. October, 2016. Interview.
85 Campbell, D. October, 2016. Interview.
86 Campbell, D. October, 2016. Interview.
87 Lashmar, P. August, 2016. Interview.
88 Lashmar, P. August, 2016. Interview.
89 Lashmar, P. August, 2016. Interview.
90 Lashmar, P. August, 2016. Interview.
91 Lashmar, P. August, 2016. Interview.