In 1972 when the Washington Post’s Bob Woodward met the man known at the time simply as Deep Throat for a briefing on what to look for next in his Watergate investigation of President Richard Nixon, he took the kind of precautions which kept the identity of his source secret for 30 years. The famous rendezvous between Woodward and the deputy director of the FBI, Mark Felt, took place close enough to the centre of Washington to be accessible, without being somewhere they might easily be seen by people they knew. Felt and Woodward took simple precautions to keep their meetings secret. They would head there separately, meeting up at 2 a.m. in Arlington, just across the Potomac River from the scene of the famous break-in at the Watergate complex. The prearranged spot, in a North Nash Street carpark, was as deserted a place as you would find: space 32D, where they talked away the hours, as far away as possible from the entrance ramp, and in the event of being seen by early morning visitors was also close to a side door for a quick exit into the street.
Woodward says that whenever he wanted to contact Felt, he made a prearranged signal – moving a flowerpot containing a red flag on the windowsill of his apartment, and then heading off to the car park that night. When Felt wanted a meeting he circled the number of page 20 of the New York Times and drew a clock face indicating the time he wanted to see Woodward. Even in those days, they did not trust the phone to make contact to arrange their meetings.
The fact that for two years Woodward and Felt managed to maintain their clandestine relationship without discovery is perhaps testimony to their professional capabilities. As deputy chief of the FBI – America’s counter-intelligence agency whose job it is to catch foreign spies – it might be expected that Felt would be used to living in the shadows and remaining anonymous. Woodward too had no doubt learned skills in the US Navy, where he had top-secret security clearances in cryptography before turning to journalism.
Forty years on and they would not even be confident that they could drive down the street without being highly visible, and potentially even audible. On his way to meet Felt in Arlington, the drive from Woodward’s apartment (No. 617, housed in a plain brick block at 1718 P Street North West Washington DC) would take him past several of the 33 permanent CCTV street cameras in the city and many of the 354 Federal Communications Commission registered antenna towers. Whether his phone was on or off it would automatically send out a tiny electronic signal to each mobile phone tower he passed along the route, allowing his precise location to be triangulated and thus calculated during his five-kilometre journey across town to Arlington, where he would be met by another 134 antenna towers and 180 traffic cameras. It was no longer possible to hide in plain sight, even in a high street store or a hotel lobby.
In March, 2017 WikiLeaks revealed that the CIA had developed, in cooperation with the UK’s MI5, a system called Weeping Angel which turned Samsung Smart TVs into surveillance tools. The TV could be used to record any conversations nearby, relaying them to a covert CIA server, even if the TV was turned off. WikiLeaks also reported that in October 2014 the CIA was examining the possibility of interfering with the computerised control systems on cars and trucks.
It is this interlocking web which is a central part of modern-day surveillance capabilities. Communications systems, including internet browser use, banking, toll-way use, speed cameras, licence plate identification cameras, and even the landline telephone, add to the capability of intelligence agencies to conduct surveillance and track the movements of anybody, making the job of gathering information and dealing with sources in 2017 so much more difficult than it was in the 1970s.
Journalists have been caught between twin forces, the so-called war on terrorism with its intrusive gathering of mass data and the desire by executive government to keep secret the systems used to gather that information and to control the content of the information itself. There is little new about the desire of prime ministers and presidents – or intelligence and law enforcement agencies – to restrict information to those who are sympathetic. It is a tried and tested way to attempt to shape public opinion. The Iraq War ‘sexed-up’ dossier – a piece of pure propaganda – is but one of the most recent examples, coupled with the New York Times reporting on weapons of mass destruction by Judith Miller. But there are many others, hidden from public view in the world’s democracies. The UK government set up an entire organisation, housed as a separate unit in the British Foreign Office. Called, innocuously, the Information Research Department (IRD) it was in fact an arm of British propaganda.
Established after the Second World War in Central London’s Carlton House Terrace, just off Horse Guards Parade, it shared the building with an MI6 Russian translation unit before moving to larger accommodation just down the road from MI5 and across the River Thames from MI6, which moved from St James to Lambeth in 1964. For 30 years, it pumped out slanted material mainly to foreign journalists to counter what they saw as Soviet propaganda. But many mainstream UK media organisation were also on the mailing list of the IRD. Like any good disinformation service, it also provided a lot of accurate information, some of it about places in the Cold War where it was impossible for a British journalist to visit. Dr Paul Lashmar, whose book Britain’s Secret Propaganda War, 1948–1977 (Sutton Publishing Ltd, May 1999) gives a detailed insight into the workings of the IRD, explained that many journalists were given briefings ‘which enabled them to write about the inside of the Soviet Union when nobody could get into the Soviet Union at that point’.1 For many journalists information provided by the IRD was career-enhancing, and the temptation was not to write a critical story.
Though the IRD was shut down in the 1970s, another version emerged. During the military battle to defeat the Irish Republican Army (IRA) in Northern Ireland in the 1970s, the UK’s domestic security service, MI5, worked closely with an organisation called the Information Policy Unit – part of the British Army press office in Belfast. Like the IRD’s, its work included routine public relations. And like the IRD, its primary objective was to place stories based on disinformation in the press as part of a psychological warfare operation. A black propaganda task force called ‘Clockwork Orange’ was set up to spread fake stories about the Provisional IRA, questioning their competence and effectiveness. Once again, the stories were published, sometimes without question, by journalists such as Chapman Pincher of the UK’s Daily Express. Under the byline ‘Chapman Pincher: The Man Who Gives You Tomorrow’s News – Today’, Pincher reported that the IRA was recruiting ex-Vietnam veterans in the US to fight in Ireland. With the Vietnam War unpopular in the United Kingdom it was an attempt to blacken the name of the IRA. If the Vietnam vets ever ended up in Northern Ireland they were the quietest Americans in history. No one has ever heard of them since. Another planted fake story given to Pincher portrayed the IRA as incompetents. It involved claims in a supposed internal IRA memo that the British had intercepted weapons and bombs being imported by the IRA and had tinkered with them to make them misfire or prematurely explode. Pincher explained that the IRA had deliberately concocted this document and then leaked this ‘false information’ in the hope of ‘showing that the British will stoop to any devilry’.2 Pincher explained to his readers that it was all a hoax. ‘My inquiries have established this memo is a fake,’ he wrote.3 Pincher was absolutely right about that: it was a fake. What he did not understand was who had faked it. The document had not been written by the IRA, but by the Clockwork Orange group. They had concocted the fake IRA document and ‘leaked’ it in an attempt to sow doubt and confusion in the IRA’s ranks.
Over the following 30 years not much changed in the attempt to mould public opinion; if anything it possibly became more institutionalised. As the US Defense Department tried to spin stories of success in Iraq, it fell back on the well-trodden path of bribery and deception. While President Bush was announcing victory in Iraq, the government ran a covert operation to counter media reports which questioned that assertion. Few people had a better understanding of what happened in the Pentagon than Rosa Brooks, Professor of International Law at Georgetown University. She served as counsel for the Under-Secretary of Defense for Policy and led a major overhaul of the Defense Department’s Department of Strategic Communications and Infrastructure.
‘All sorts of things happened under the rubric of communication at the Pentagon, particularly during the first years after the 9–11 attacks,’4 Professor Brooks told ‘Spycast’, the online radio station of Washington DC’s International Spy Museum. ‘Planting fake stories in foreign press outlets, things they should not have been doing. Dumb, Dumb, and ineffective,’5 she said. The administration ‘got up to some pretty crazy stuff, some of which had to be repudiated when it got leaked to the press’,6 including paying for stories to be planted in Iraqi media.
The Pentagon ‘crazy stuff’7 was but one example of the strategy of the neocon philosophy which defined the entire US population as either combatants or potential victims in the war on terror.
Brooks explains that ‘Once, war was a temporary state of affairs’8 – a violent but brief interlude between times of peace. But today ‘America’s wars are everywhere and forever. America’s enemies change constantly and rarely wear uniforms, and virtually anything can become a weapon.9’ As the definition of war expanded, so too did the role of the US military. ‘Today, military personnel don’t just “kill people and break stuff”.10 Instead, they analyse computer code, train Afghan judges, build Ebola isolation wards, eavesdrop on electronic communications, develop soap operas, and patrol for pirates. You name it, the military does it.’11 As Brooks argues in her book How Everything Became War and the Military Became Everything (Simon and Schuster, New York, 2016), the blurring of the line between war and peace has had serious repercussions. ‘As war rules trickle down into our ordinary life, they are beginning to change everything,’12 she said.
Her experiences led her to an urgent warning: ‘When the boundaries around war disappear, we risk destroying America’s founding values and the laws and institutions we’ve built – and undermining the international rules and organizations that keep our world from sliding towards chaos.’13 Her findings have an eerie echo in the findings of a detailed study by the Chicago Law School which questioned American exceptionalism and raised the possibility of a drift away from democracy to authoritarianism. The study, citing the Trump administration, warns that one of the danger signals of an anti-democratic drift from the principles of the US Constitution has been the use of ‘aggressive misinformation by the White House’ on what it calls ‘matters of signal national concern’.14
The White House of George W. Bush might have been just as culpable in the use of disinformation, particularly as it fought to win public support for the Iraq invasion, but Trump’s outright lies and fearmongering about refugees and terrorism has created a dangerous coupling: even less respect for the office of the president and greater reliance on militaristic action. The posing of a threat from without, bound up with a threat from within, has created heightened levels of anxiety and pushed sections of the population into supporting a non-democratic solution to America’s problems. Consciously or not, many people appear to be turning more and more to the very organisations which pose the biggest threat to its democratic process, what Republican US President Dwight Eisenhower presciently warned about in 1961. In his farewell address as he stepped down from office, Eisenhower – a former commander of NATO and US Five-Star General – coined a chilling phrase denoting the perils of a powerful military linked to big business and a compliant political class:
In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.15
Fifty-four years later in 2015, a Gallup poll suggested his warnings had not been heeded. The poll revealed that 72 per cent of American expressed ‘a great deal’ or ‘quite a lot’16 of confidence in the military, compared to 33 percent expressing confidence in the presidency. And only eight per cent expressed any confidence in Congress. The Chicago Law School analysis points out that over the past three decades, the proportion of U.S. citizens who believe it would be a ‘good’17 or a ‘very good’18 thing for the ‘army to rule’19 has spiked from one in sixteen to one in six. Among the cohort of ‘rich young Americans’20 the proportion of those who look favourably on military rule is more than one in three.21 It is a view partly explained by the fact that ‘the U.S. defense industry remains well-funded and has become one of ‘the best places for new college graduates to turn to for employment’.22
Successive US governments have poured billions of dollars into military and intelligence institutions. It is estimated that during the Cold War, spending on intelligence alone peaked at US$71 billion (in 2013 dollars), surging to US$75 billion in 2013. Since the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon in September 2001 the US has spent an estimated US$500 billion on intelligence, according to a secret report23 given to the Washington Post by Edward Snowden.
For all the public affirmation that the increases were about fighting terrorism, much of the evidence points to the contrary. Having worked as a CIA operative and been employed as an analyst with access to some of the most highly classified inner workings of the NSA, Snowden says the US intelligence agencies have a completely different agenda.
‘These programs were never about terrorism; they’re about economic spying, social control, and diplomatic manipulation. They’re about power.’24
It seemed like an obvious comment, since the intelligence agencies had been operating well before terrorism became such a significant political issue. The question is: what have the intelligence agencies really been doing with the money which has poured into their coffers? If it were not for Edward Snowden we might have believed the extra income was being spent protecting the Five Eyes countries’ citizens from terrorism. But Snowden’s claims that the real work covers other areas of national interest, such as trade and strategic power, are compelling. Every four years the head of US national intelligence publishes the Quadrennial Intelligence Community Review. In April, 2009 the report, classified Secret, outlined projected future plans for the Intelligence Community (IC) for the next 10–15 years. Many of these plans reveal just how closely the IC works with corporate America. Significantly in the 32-page, 7600-word document there is only one oblique mention of terrorism. The document gives an example of ‘transnational interest group[s]’25 who question limiting ‘human enhancement’ to the ‘wealthy few’26 There was an ‘extremist sub-current’27 which the intelligence community was concerned could lead to ‘medical terrorism’,28 the document adds, without explaining further. As an oblique example, it could be moulded to fit other kinds of terrorism too, but it appears as a passing mention in a long and densely-written forecast of how the intelligence community should prepare for the future. The threat of rampaging terrorism as a huge threat is nowhere to be found. Instead the review reads like a handbook for how to keep US industry as the predominant force in the world, focussing on a situation where the country’s ‘innovative edge slips’.29 Under one scenario, a bloc of states actively seeking to undermine US geostrategic leadership could deny access to key emerging technologies. Another example raises the possibility that the technological capacity of foreign multinational corporations could outstrip that of US corporations.
The review says the intelligence community would be challenged to understand technological innovation outside its traditional competencies (e.g., weapons systems) and in domains where it traditionally has focused less effort (e.g., commercial research and development (R&D). It warns that United States industry could become left behind putting the US at ‘a growing – and potentially permanent – disadvantage in crucial areas such as energy, nanotechnology, medicine, and information technology’.30
To deal with this potential loss of leadership the US would need to use what the report called a ‘multi-pronged systemic effort’31 to gather both open-source information and material through what it calls physical and cyber means, in other words old-fashioned break-ins and the planting of listening devices and other forms of surveillance. How the intelligence community might go about this work is explained in a secret section which includes ‘cooperating U.S. students, professors, and researchers’32 to help the intelligence community ‘continue to advance U.S. scientific progress’.33 Another Secret section deals with ‘direct penetration’34 for ‘more restrictive environments’35 which might involve sending in intelligence officers to directly download sensitive material. The US was particularly focused on implanting bugs to spy on ‘software and hardware used by foreign researchers and manufacturers, and by conducting computer-network exploitation of foreign R&D intranets’.36 The intelligence community should also prepare itself for ‘possible loss of access’37 to what it calls reliable financial and economic data ‘by penetrating corporations, foreign finance ministries, central banks, and market participants’.38
As a blunt statement of mission the review could not be clearer: ‘As the United States struggles to maintain its world standing amidst competing and insular blocs, the IC is predominantly focused on economics and commercial science and technology (S&T) missions.’39
In what are called illustrative examples in another section marked [S/REL] meaning Secret only to be released to the Five Eyes countries, the review puts forward two scenarios:
1. (S//REL) India and Russia are pursuing high-temperature superconductivity, which would yield a significant economic advantage to the first adopter. But four separate streams of intelligence, when put together, yield a new insight – the two countries are working together.
2. (S//REL) Sustained reporting from open and clandestine sources enables a team of experts from the IC, academia, and industry to assess the likelihood, either moderate or high, of a breakthrough by India and Russia. Counterintelligence reporting suggests the two countries are not very interested in U.S. superconductivity efforts, which may indicate they believe they have a secure lead.
The report suggests that after sifting the evidence, the intelligence community would secretly try to break up the partnership by ‘conducting cyber operations against research facilities in the two countries’,40 as well as the intellectual ‘supply chain’41 supporting these facilities. Finally, it would assess whether and how its findings ‘would be useful to U.S. industry’.42
If those examples were designed to show how the US intelligence community was preparing to deal with a threat to the country’s industrial supremacy, there was nothing hypothetical about the action the NSA took against Brazil. While many embassies are protected by guards and razor wire, Brazil’s in Washington DC stands in stark contrast. The country’s mission at 3006 Massachusetts Avenue, Washington, DC is open to surrounding land, its large, lofty glass walls given shade by towering deciduous trees. It would appear to have been an easy target for what the NSA calls ‘Close Access domestic collection’.43 Documents released by Snowden show that in September 2010 the embassy – plus its representative at the UN in New York – were singled out for special attention. While other embassies and diplomatic missions were being removed from a long list of targets, Brazil became one of the most heavily surveilled foreign missions in the US. Using code names such as LIFESAVER, HIGHLANDS AND VAGRANT, the NSA collected information from ‘implants’,44 surveillance devices planted in the embassy, ‘screen shots ’or ‘mirroring’,45 copying the entire hard drive of computers used by Brazil’s diplomatic service. The NSA, however, did not confine its attention to Washington. As WikiLeaks revealed, the NSA also selected a list of 29 key Brazilian government phone numbers for intensive interception. WikiLeaks said the documents, classified Top Secret, proved that not only Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff was targeted but also her assistant, her secretary, her chief of staff, her Palace office and even the phone in her presidential jet. Documents show the US focused on not only those closest to the president, but waged a broad ‘economic espionage campaign against Brazil’,46 spying on those responsible for managing Brazil’s economy, including the head of its Central Bank and diplomats, targeting the phones of its Foreign Minister and its ambassadors to Germany, France, the EU, the US and Geneva.
The key areas of surveillance included the country’s Finance Ministers and even a senior member of the Central Bank of Brazil: Cabinet Minister Nelson Henrique Barbosa Filho, who served as Executive Secretary at Brazil’s Ministry of Finance from 2011 to 2013 and who was now Minister of Planning, Budget and Management.
This whole-of-government attack could possibly be explained by Brazil’s rise as a leader in a part of the world the US has long considered its area of influence. As a part of the so-called BRICS group – Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa – of developing nations on the rise, Brazil had also recently signed an agreement with France to buy four nuclear-powered submarines, giving its already impressive navy a huge reach throughout the south Atlantic and even further afield. It had become the only nuclear-powered navy in South America. If the NSA documents had simply revealed a list of names and targeted phone numbers, the spying could possibly be explained away as keeping an eye on an emerging power in the neighbourhood. Strategically it would be important for the US to understand the position that Brazil would take on any given issue. But as a subsequent release of Snowden documents disclosed, there was a very specific target for the NSA’s surveillance programme. It fitted perfectly with the Secret Quadrennial Intelligence Report which outlined the US intelligence community’s priorities. What the state-owned Brazilian petroleum company Petrobras had managed to do very much interested the US. For decades petrol companies had been searching the nearby seabeds in the hope of discovering what geological surveys suggested might be huge oil reserves. In 10 years Petrobas spent about $350 billion on expanding the company’s In May 2010 the effort and the gamble paid off: the country discovered huge gas and oil fields in the pre-salt substrata of the ocean off the coasts of San Paulo and Rio de Janeiro. The pre-salt oil is found in high seas, at depths of two thousand metres – below a layer of rocky salt, four kilometres underneath the ocean floor. Reaching this oil requires a lot of technology, and Petrobras is a world leader in deep-sea oil extraction.
Adriano Pires, a specialist in infrastructure, considers many countries would be interested in ocean-floor exploration technology. ‘Petrobras is the world’s number one in drilling for oil at sea. Pre-salt layers exist all around the world – there’s a pre-salt in Africa, in the Gulf of Mexico, in the North Sea. If I have this technology I can drill anywhere I want,’ he said.47 This kind of information would be extremely useful to oil companies grappling with the problem of how to extract oil from fields, not only out in deep water, but also far below the ocean floor. Sometimes the oil could be several kilometres under the crust of the earth and the best oil, a particularly light grade in the case of Brazil, could be found even deeper, four kilometres below a two-kilometre thick layer of salt laid down when the earth was first forming. In ten years Petrobas spent about $350 billion on expansion, a period during which it made some of the world’s largest ever offshore oil finds. In May 2010, the country discovered huge gas and oil fields in the pre-salt substrata of the ocean off the coasts of San Paulo and Rio de Janeiro. The Brazilian oil company had achieved some incredible, and enviable, results. Petrobras bragged that the average time to build an offshore well in the Santos Basin had been slashed from 310 days to 89 days using ‘advanced technologies’,48 – a 71 per cent reduction.
The savings were staggering. Petrobras reported that ‘due to technological innovation’ the costs had fallen consistently from US $9.1 per barrel of oil equivalent (oil plus gas), in 2014, to $8.3 in 2015, and to less than $8 per barrel in the first quarter of 2016. It was just the kind of R&D expertise which US intelligence highlighted as important to acquire from countries like Brazil. The government guarded the information carefully, using virtual private networks (VPNs) – not part of the national communications grid – to communicate, reducing the chance that data transmissions involving vital information might be intercepted. They were also concerned about protecting the details of exactly where new oil fields – some of the world’s largest ever off shore discoveries – were located.
It was just four months after the oil discovery that the NSA document showed the Brazilian Embassy in Washington being bugged by the NSA’s Sigads program to gather signals intelligence. Exactly why they had targeted the Brazilians was not clear at the time, but the circumstantial evidence suggested that there might be a connection between Brazil’s new oil wealth and the technology it was using to extract it. If there was doubt about what the NSA was up to before, there is no doubt that the NSA had made up its mind by the southern autumn of 2012.
A Top-Secret document dated May 2012 reveals that the NSA was training its officers to spy on private computer systems. The internal networks of companies, governments, and financial institutions, sometimes called VPNs, are designed for maximum security to protect highly important information. The documents reveal how the NSA set about breaking into those systems. High on the list under the headline ‘Many Targets Use Private Networks’ appears the name of Brazil’s state-owned petrochemical giant and largest company, Petrobras.
Other targets included French diplomats – with access to the private network of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of France – and the SWIFT network, the security system that unites over 10,000 banks in 212 countries and provides communications that enable international financial transactions.
The name Petrobras appeared on several slides, as the training explained how data from the target companies could be monitored and stored. Individual folders were created for each target, containing the intercepted communications and IP addresses – the identification of each computer on the network. The Brazilian newspaper Fantastico broke the story, working with Glenn Greenwald, who discovered the document among the trove handed to him by Edward Snowden; Fantastico asked Paulo Pagliusi, an author with a PhD in information security, to analyse whether or not the documents were merely examples for training purposes. Pagliusi pointed out that the networks in the presentation all belonged to real companies.
‘These are not made-up situations,’49 he said. Some details of telephone numbers were blacked out. ‘Why would they be blacked out if they weren’t real?’50 he asked. The NSA instructors did not want the trainees to see details of the documents which revealed a programme of systematic spying. ‘You don’t obtain all of this in a single run,’ he said. ‘From what I see, this is a very consistent system that yields powerful results; it’s a very efficient form of spying.’51
Much of the data held by Petrobras, including seismic research which evaluated oil reserves from samples collected at sea, was stored on two supercomputers – used mainly for seismic research. They were vital for the company’s mapping of the pre-salt layer, which revealed the largest discovery of new oil reserves in the world in recent years.
There is no information on the extent of the spying, nor on whether it managed to access the data contained in the company’s computers. It is clear Petrobras was a target, but no documents show exactly what information the NSA searched for. What we do know is that Petrobras’s computerised records contained information about deals involving billions of dollars, including the Libra Field, in the Bay of Santos, part of the pre-salt bonanza.
Former Petrobras Director Roberto Villa pointed out the sensitivity of the information held by Petrobras: everybody knew where the oil fields were, the question was which ones were the richest. Only Petrobas knew, he asserted. ‘Petrobras knows. And I hope only they know.’52 In an act of understatement, he said that anyone who managed to discover that information will ‘know where to invest and where not to. It’s a handy little secret.’ Another former Petrobras director, Antonio Menezes, said that commercially and internationally, the Brazilian oil business was now a ‘game with marked cards’.53
The NSA presentation contains documents prepared by GCHQ, the British spying organisation, revealing how two spy programs operate together. Known as ‘Flying Pig’ and ‘Hush Puppy’,54 they monitor private networks which carry secure information.
The presentation also gives an indication how the NSA intercepted the data, through an attack known as ‘Man in the Middle’.55 In this case, data is rerouted to the NSA central server, and then relayed to its destination, without either end noticing.
A few pages later, the document asks, ‘Results – what do we find?’ … ‘Foreign government networks’, ‘airlines’, ‘energy companies – like Petrobras – and ‘financial organisations’.56
How the NSA responded to being caught engaging in industrial espionage would be in keeping with the assurances James Clapper, the US director of National Intelligence, gave to Senator Ron Wyden when questioned during an open congressional hearing about surveillance of US citizens: ‘We don’t hold data on US citizens’ and ‘the story that we have dossiers on millions or hundreds of millions of people is absolutely false’.57 Wyden publicly accused Clapper of a ‘deliberate decision to lie to the American people about what their government was doing’.58
In the case of the Petrobras revelations, Clapper declared that the agency collected information in order to give the US and their allies early warning of international financial crises which could negatively impact the global economy and also to provide insight into other countries’ economic policy or behaviour which could affect global markets.
The statement also stressed that the collected intelligence was not used ‘to steal the trade secrets of foreign companies on behalf of – or give intelligence we collect to – US companies to enhance their international competitiveness or increase their bottom line’.59
The fact is that according to much of the available evidence, stealing trade secrets and helping the US economy to beat competition from foreign companies is exactly where the US intelligence community expends much of its effort. The massive data collection and the billions of dollars spent gathering every scrap of information and storing it in huge depots the size of several football fields around the world, it seems, is primarily focused on supporting the economies of the English speaking Five Eyes countries.
It is hardly a new concept. Nations have been spying on each other for commercial and trade advantage for centuries, but what is different now is the scale of the espionage and the public denial of the agencies’ real purpose. The fear of terrorism is being used to deceive a susceptible public into squandering untold billions – often paid in secret – to publicly unaccountable agencies, while at the same time building a global intelligence network with terrifying power.
The hysterical response to terrorism has been supported and encouraged by many politicians who genuinely fear the consequences of an attack – and at the same time play to those fears for political gain. As Duncan Campbell told me: ‘Just as there is a blurring of the lines between military and civilian activities in the US, there is a vagueness about what it is a legitimate target and what is not’60 The notion expounded by the NSA to ‘collect it all’ has produced the largest concentration of personal information ever assembled. The question is: what is it for? And how effective is it in helping an intelligence agency to do its job?
One person who has first-hand experience of how the system works is Bill Binney, a former senior NSA analyst. As he tells it, he had been working on a system called ThinThread which would correlate data from financial transactions, travel records, Web searches, and other inputs that might identify the ‘bad guys’.61 Binney says that by 2000 he had set up a computer network that could construct a ‘social network’ picture of people in real time: where they travelled, who they met and sometimes even what they said. According to Jane Mayer writing in the New Yorker ‘it also turned the NSA’s data collection paradigm upside down’62 Instead of vacuuming up information around the world and then sending it all back to headquarters for analysis, ThinThread processed information as it was collected – discarding useless material on the spot and avoiding the overload problem that plagued centralised systems. Binney explained that
ThinThread [was] designed to be able to look into massive amounts of data and only pull out things that were relevant to spot individuals engaged in criminal activities, like terrorism or drug smuggling or money laundering. That was a very selected, targeted and focused programme.63
Pilot tests of ThinThread proved almost too successful, according to a former intelligence expert who analysed it. ‘It was nearly perfect,’ the official said.64 Though ThinThread was intended to intercept foreign communications, it continued documenting signals when a trail crossed into the U.S. This was a big problem: federal law forbade the monitoring of domestic communications without a court warrant. And a warrant could not be issued without probable cause and a known suspect. In order to comply with the law, Binney installed privacy controls and added an ‘anonymizing feature’65 so that all American communications would be encrypted until a warrant was issued.
Binney said the material was encrypted, so the NSA ‘couldn’t tell who it was’,66 yet it was still possible to see the networks and if granted a court order the agency could unscramble the coded messages and examine the social connections. The system was so sophisticated it would alert NSA officers when a pattern looked suspicious enough to justify a warrant, according to Binney.
Binney says his team at the NSA proposed deploying ThinThread to 18 sites that were ‘producing information on terrorism’.67 It was, he said, comparatively easy to install. Using a simple software download it would have taken about a day to become operational and would have been comparatively easy for NSA analysts to isolate the 9–11 hi-jackers before they struck. ‘They couldn’t have done anything this system wouldn’t have picked up,’68 he said.
Frustrated at a lack of progress, Binney tried to argue with his superiors at the NSA that ThinThread was much more effective than another system they had poured billions into, and at US$9.5 million, a fraction of the price, but they ignored him. In theory, there was a system he might have been able to use. Known as the Whistleblower Protection Act (1989,) it covers ‘disclosures of illegality’ in all areas of government, including intelligence agencies. But as many have discovered before, it is a flawed piece of legislation. All references to possible wrongdoing are first investigated internally by the very organisation against which the complaint has been made. After that the only credible recourse for grievances rests with the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence – responsible for oversight of the FBI, the CIA and the NSA.
Binney, who had worked at the agency for more than 30 years, went to the committee soon after the 2001 terrorist attacks. The story he told them bore a striking resemblance to what Snowden would reveal more than a decade later: the NSA was gathering information on American citizens using a system that he said was not only unconstitutional but also ineffective. He explained that, even more unsettlingly, the NSA had rejected an interception system which allowed the NSA to sift information on targets in real time, only collecting the material it needed.
Binney says that the September 11 attacks ‘brought a complete change in the approach of the NSA toward doing its job’.69 He said that the FISA (Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act) court ‘ceased to be an operative concern, and the individual liberties preserved in the U.S. Constitution were no longer a consideration’.70 It was at that time that the NSA began to implement the group of intelligence activities now known as the President’s Surveillance Program (PSP), turning the NSA to spy on the US population under presidential direction. It seemed that because of its extraordinary capability parts of the ThinThread program were now co-opted into the domestic surveillance programme without any of the privacy protections. Binney was not alone in trying to sound the alarm with congressional committees. Others attempted to work within the system. Computer expert Thomas Drake, who also worked on ThinThread, thought blowing the whistle on what he considered unconstitutional NSA programs would lead to an investigation and changes in the organisation, but that is not what happened. In the end the only person who was investigated, prosecuted, charged in secret, then indicted, and who faced a trial and 35 years in prison was Drake.
Like Binney, Drake had taken his case both to the NSA and to Congress. After concluding his complaints were going nowhere, he showed unclassified information from the NSA to a newspaper reporter. For that he was charged with violating the Espionage Act of 1917. The FBI raided his home. Four months earlier the FBI had raided Binney’s home after he publicly criticised the NSA. As is so frequently the case with whistleblowers, both Drake and Binney suffered the consequences of challenging the system. ‘Your life’s never the same,’71 said Drake. ‘All your colleagues and people you used to work with all disappear. You’re persona non grata, you’re radioactive.’72 Though charges were brought against both Binney and Drake the Justice Department did not pursue them through the courts. No explanation was given but the administration may have been fearful of what might have transpired during any hearing, although much of it would have been in secret. Certainly, it is possible any court case would have addressed the actions of the NSA and its director General Michael Hayden who turned down ThinThread for the ‘collect it all’ system known as Trailblazer, which was finally abandoned after costing in excess of US$1 billion.
Binney is convinced that the NSA systems which gather so much information are ‘doomed to fail, because they are locked into the concept that they have to collect everything, and that just makes it impossible’.73 Binney said the NSA was ‘very good at collecting data, but they haven’t made any improvements at all in trying to figure out what they have in the data they’ve collected’.74
Even industrial espionage on a grand scale would require some form of focus, but there’s another possibility. Describing Edward Snowden as an infrastructure analyst is curious. Snowden isn’t saying exactly what he did, but he was assigned to a contract called Signals Development Support (SDS2), part of a Booz Allen team, within the NSA. Snowden’s role, it appears, involved analysing what are known as digital infrastructures: entire computer systems of nations. He was not directly involved in the interception of data and telephone transmissions. While the other parts of the NSA were working to ‘collect it all’, Snowden’s job would be important in tracking down the source of a cyber aggressor, or seeking out an adversary’s weakness. What the NSA had created was a kind of surveillance time machine, with information stored in the purpose-built compounds scattered around the world in Five Eyes countries. In one 30-day period between December 2012 and January 2013, one collection program, Muscular, jointly run by GCHQ and the NSA, scooped up more than 14 billion records. The information, which can include voice recordings, is normally held for only seven to ten days because of the amount of storage space required. Other collection systems, which archive only snippets of the identifying material such as email addresses, use less space and can thus be stored for much longer, possibly up to three months. If the NSA decide the information is important enough it can be held for five years.
One possibility is that the NSA used this huge archival collection to identify the hackers of the Democratic National Committee emails, including Hilary Clinton’s, during the 2016 US election campaign. ‘You didn’t know it was coming,’75 I was told by a former NSA employee who asked not to be named.
You don’t know who did it but you get notification that it happened within that period where you still have the internet buffer. You can go back in time and see exactly what happened. It is like a security camera for the entire internet.’76 It was possible that the material, which would identify the hackers, had ‘rolled out of the buffer’ but, if not, the source believed the ‘NSA could plausibly know who is behind these attacks’.77
It may explain the certainty with which all the US security organisations pointed to Russia as being the culprit for the hack. It was a powerful weapon the US, in particular, was disinclined to put down.
The UN Special Rapporteur on the right to privacy (SRP), Professor Joe Cannataci, whose job it was to investigate the possibility of controlling surveillance in cyber space, said without naming the countries involved, that ‘a tiny minority of states’78 had tried to discourage him from attempting to find solutions to privacy issues. ‘Approximately 15–25 states treat the Internet as their own playground over which they can squabble for spoils,’79 he said.
But as a Rapporteur it was his duty to report back that these seemed to be the only people who did not wish to have internationally enforceable safeguards and remedies on the internet. Civil society and large corporations were in favour, he said. By not taking action, Snowden believed the large industrial nations were ‘setting off an arms race in the context of the violation of human rights and mass surveillance’,80 which might prove to be unstoppable.
The vacuuming up of vast amounts of information might have been an understandable knee-jerk reaction for the US post 9/11; none of the intelligence agencies wanted to miss anything, even if it meant breaking the law. But did this action catch terrorists? And if the ‘catch it all’ mantra of the NSA was not about catching terrorists it might explain why Binney’s ThinThread system, which specifically targeted individuals and did not gather and store masses of information, was of little use to the agency. While the NSA argued it was not breaking the law and that everything had been legally scrubbed down by the White House lawyers, we now know that the NSA did in fact break the law, over a prolonged period until the Snowden revelations and even now there are doubts that what the NSA is doing is legal. Left to themselves, as we saw earlier with the lies told by the NSA’s James Clapper, there is often little they will not do, if they can get away with it. Sussex University’s Paul Lashmar, who spent much of his life reporting on intelligence matters for Britain’s Observer newspaper, told me:
Having watched intelligence agencies for 40 years and know them historically, I know that on every occasion when they are left to themselves they have abused their power, because no one has come up with a really effective means of accountability.81
And any journalists trying to hold them to account, or to expose their wrongdoing, should prepare themselves to be treated like criminals. There is a long history of governments using national security as a pretext for attempting to silence journalists.
Notes
1 Lashmar, P. 2016. Interview.
2 Lobster Magazine. 1988. Wallace Clippings Planted on Chapman Pincher [online]. Available at www.lobster-magazine.co.uk/intro/search.cgi?zoom_query=pincher [Accessed 15 November, 2016].
3 Lobster Magazine. 1988. Wallace Clippings Planted on Chapman Pincher [online]. Available at www.lobster-magazine.co.uk/intro/search.cgi?zoom_query=pincher [Accessed 15 November, 2016].
4 Brooks, R. 9th August, 2016. Blurred Lines: An Interview with Georgetown International Law Professor Rosa Brooks. Spy Museum, Washington, DC [online]. Available at www.spymuseum.org/multimedia/spycast/episode/blurred-lines-an-interview-with-georgetown-international-law-professor-rosa-brooks/ [Accessed 30 January, 2017].
5 Brooks, R. 9th August, 2016. Blurred Lines: An Interview with Georgetown International Law Professor Rosa Brooks. Spy Museum, Washington, DC [online]. Available at www.spymuseum.org/multimedia/spycast/episode/blurred-lines-an-interview-with-georgetown-international-law-professor-rosa-brooks/ [Accessed 30 January, 2017].
6 Brooks, R. 9th August, 2016. Blurred Lines: An Interview with Georgetown International Law Professor Rosa Brooks. Spy Museum, Washington, DC [online]. Available at www.spymuseum.org/multimedia/spycast/episode/blurred-lines-an-interview-with-georgetown-international-law-professor-rosa-brooks/ [Accessed 30 January, 2017].
7 Brooks, R. 9th August, 2016. Blurred Lines: An Interview with Georgetown International Law Professor Rosa Brooks. Spy Museum, Washington, DC [online]. Available at www.spymuseum.org/multimedia/spycast/episode/blurred-lines-an-interview-with-georgetown-international-law-professor-rosa-brooks/ [Accessed 30 January, 2017].
8 Brooks, R. 9th August, 2016. Blurred Lines: An Interview with Georgetown International Law Professor Rosa Brooks. Spy Museum, Washington, DC [online]. Available at www.spymuseum.org/multimedia/spycast/episode/blurred-lines-an-interview-with-georgetown-international-law-professor-rosa-brooks/ [Accessed 30 January, 2017].
9 Brooks, R. 9th August, 2016. Blurred Lines: An Interview with Georgetown International Law Professor Rosa Brooks. Spy Museum, Washington, DC [online]. Available at www.spymuseum.org/multimedia/spycast/episode/blurred-lines-an-interview-with-georgetown-international-law-professor-rosa-brooks/ [Accessed 30 January, 2017].
10 Brooks, R. 9th August, 2016. Blurred Lines: An Interview with Georgetown International Law Professor Rosa Brooks. Spy Museum, Washington, DC [online]. Available at www.spymuseum.org/multimedia/spycast/episode/blurred-lines-an-interview-with-georgetown-international-law-professor-rosa-brooks/ [Accessed 30 January, 2017].
11 Brooks, R. 9th August, 2016. Blurred Lines: An Interview with Georgetown International Law Professor Rosa Brooks. Spy Museum, Washington, DC [online]. Available at www.spymuseum.org/multimedia/spycast/episode/blurred-lines-an-interview-with-georgetown-international-law-professor-rosa-brooks/ [Accessed 30 January, 2017].
12 Brooks, R. 2016. How Everything Became War and the Military Became Everything. Simon & Schuster, New York, New York.
13 Brooks, R. 2016. How Everything Became War and the Military Became Everything. Simon & Schuster, New York, New York.
14 Huq, A. and Ginsburg, T. 20th January, 2017. How to Lose Constitutional Democracy. Chicago Law School [online]. Available at https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2901776 [Accessed 21 July, 2017].
15 Eisenhower, D. 17th January, 1961. Farewell Address. The Eisenhower Project [online]. Available at http://eisenhowerproject.org [Accessed 20 September, 2016].
16 Huq, A. and Ginsburg, T. 20th January, 2017. How to Lose Constitutional Democracy. Chicago Law School [online]. Available at https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2901776 [Accessed 21 July, 2017].
17 Huq, A. and Ginsburg, T. 20th January, 2017. How to Lose Constitutional Democracy. Chicago Law School [online]. Available at https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2901776 [Accessed 21 July, 2017].
18 Huq, A. and Ginsburg, T. 20th January, 2017. How to Lose Constitutional Democracy. Chicago Law School [online]. Available at https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2901776 [Accessed 21 July, 2017].
19 Huq, A. and Ginsburg, T. 20th January, 2017. How to Lose Constitutional Democracy. Chicago Law School [online]. Available at https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2901776 [Accessed 21 July, 2017].
20 Huq, A. and Ginsburg, T. 20th January, 2017. How to Lose Constitutional Democracy. Chicago Law School [online]. Available at https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2901776 [Accessed 21 July, 2017].
21 Huq, A. and Ginsburg, T. 20th January, 2017. How to Lose Constitutional Democracy. Chicago Law School [online]. Available at https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2901776 [Accessed 21 July, 2017].
22 Office of the Director of National Intelligence. 22nd January, 2009. Alternative Futures the IC Could Face [online]. Available at https://fas.org/irp/dni/qicr.pdf [Accessed 26 October, 2016].
23 Gellman, B. and Miller, G. 29th August, 2013. Black Budget Summary Details US Spy Network’s Successes, Failures and Objectives. Washington Post [online]. Available at www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/black-budget-summary-details-us-spy-networks-successes-failures-and-objectives/2013/08/29/7e57bb78-10ab-11e3-8cdd-bcdc09410972_story.html?utm_term=.c32a0513882d [Accessed 25 October, 2016].
24 Snowden, E. 17th, December, 2013. Snowden’s Open Letter to Brazil. Read the Text [online]. Available at www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/snowdens-open-letter-to-brazil-read-the-text/2013/12/17/9bf1342a-6727-11e3-8b5b-a77187b716a3_story.html?utm_term=.783b2273910a [Accessed 12 July, 2016].
25 Office of the Director of National Intelligence. 22nd January, 2009. Alternative Futures the IC Could Face [online]. Available at https://cryptome.org/2014/09/dni-qicr-2009-the-intercept-14-0905.pdf [Accessed 26 October, 2016].
26 Office of the Director of National Intelligence. 22nd January, 2009. Alternative Futures the IC Could Face [online]. Available at https://cryptome.org/2014/09/dni-qicr-2009-the-intercept-14-0905.pdf [Accessed 26 October, 2016].
27 Office of the Director of National Intelligence. 22nd January, 2009. Alternative Futures the IC Could Face [online]. Available at https://cryptome.org/2014/09/dni-qicr-2009-the-intercept-14-0905.pdf https://fas.org/irp/dni/qicr.pdf [Accessed 26 October, 2016].
28 Office of the Director of National Intelligence. 22nd January, 2009. Alternative Futures the IC Could Face [online]. Available at https://fas.org/irp/dni/qicr.pdf [Accessed 26 October, 2016].
29 Office of the Director of National Intelligence. 22nd January, 2009. Alternative Futures the IC Could Face [online]. Available at https://fas.org/irp/dni/qicr.pdf [Accessed 26 October, 2016].
30 Office of the Director of National Intelligence. 22nd January, 2009. Alternative Futures the IC Could Face [online]. Available at https://fas.org/irp/dni/qicr.pdf [Accessed 26 October, 2016].
31 Office of the Director of National Intelligence. 22nd January, 2009. Alternative Futures the IC Could Face [online]. Available at https://fas.org/irp/dni/qicr.pdf [Accessed 26 October, 2016].
32 Office of the Director of National Intelligence. 22nd January, 2009. Alternative Futures the IC Could Face [online]. Available at https://fas.org/irp/dni/qicr.pdf [Accessed 26 October, 2016].
33 Office of the Director of National Intelligence. 22nd January, 2009. Alternative Futures the IC Could Face [online]. Available at https://fas.org/irp/dni/qicr.pdf [Accessed 26 October, 2016].
34 Office of the Director of National Intelligence. 22nd January, 2009. Alternative Futures the IC Could Face [online]. Available at https://cryptome.org/2014/09/dni-qicr-2009-the-intercept-14-0905.pdf [Accessed 26 October, 2016].
35 Office of the Director of National Intelligence. 22nd January, 2009. Alternative Futures the IC Could Face [online]. Available at https://cryptome.org/2014/09/dni-qicr-2009-the-intercept-14-0905.pdf [Accessed 26 October, 2016].
36 Office of the Director of National Intelligence. 22nd January, 2009. Alternative Futures the IC Could Face [online]. Available at https://cryptome.org/2014/09/dni-qicr-2009-the-intercept-14-0905.pdf [Accessed 26 October, 2016].
37 Office of the Director of National Intelligence. 22nd January, 2009. Alternative Futures the IC Could Face [online]. Available at https://cryptome.org/2014/09/dni-qicr-2009-the-intercept-14-0905.pdf [Accessed 26 October, 2016].
38 Office of the Director of National Intelligence. 22nd January, 2009. Alternative Futures the IC Could Face [online]. Available at https://cryptome.org/2014/09/dni-qicr-2009-the-intercept-14-0905.pdf [Accessed 26 October, 2016].
39 Office of the Director of National Intelligence. 22nd January, 2009. Alternative Futures the IC Could Face [online]. Available at https://cryptome.org/2014/09/dni-qicr-2009-the-intercept-14-0905.pdf [Accessed 26 October, 2016].
40 Office of the Director of National Intelligence. 22nd January, 2009. Alternative Futures the IC Could Face [online]. Available at https://cryptome.org/2014/09/dni-qicr-2009-the-intercept-14-0905.pdf [Accessed 26 October, 2016].
41 Office of the Director of National Intelligence. 22nd January, 2009. Alternative Futures the IC Could Face [online]. Available at https://cryptome.org/2014/09/dni-qicr-2009-the-intercept-14-0905.pdf [Accessed 26 October, 2016].
42 Office of the Director of National Intelligence. 22nd January, 2009. Alternative Futures the IC Could Face [online]. Available at https://cryptome.org/2014/09/dni-qicr-2009-the-intercept-14-0905.pdf [Accessed 26 October, 2016].
43 Snowden Archives. 10th September 2010. Close Access Sigads [online]. Available at https://snowdenarchive.cjfe.org/greenstone/collect/snowden1/index/assoc/HASH01da/d86eda87.dir/doc.pdf [Accessed 30 November, 2016].
44 Snowden Archives. 10th September 2010. Close Access Sigads [online]. Available at https://snowdenarchive.cjfe.org/greenstone/collect/snowden1/index/assoc/HASH01da/d86eda87.dir/doc.pdf [Accessed 30 November, 2016].
45 Snowden Archives. 10th September 2010. Close Access Sigads [online]. Available at https://snowdenarchive.cjfe.org/greenstone/collect/snowden1/index/assoc/HASH01da/d86eda87.dir/doc.pdf [Accessed 30 November, 2016].
46 WikiLeaks. 4th, July, 2015. Bugging Brazil [online]. Available at https://wikileaks.org/nsa-brazil/ [Accessed 4 July, 2016].
47 Fantastico, Brazil. 8th September, 2013. NSA Documents Show United States Spied [on] Brazilian Oil Giant [online]. Available at http://g1.globo.com/fantastico/noticia/2013/09/nsa-documents-show-united-states-spied-brazilian-oil-giant.html [Accessed 12 June, 2016].
48 Petrobras. [No date]. Important Achievements [online]. Available at www.petrobras.com.br/en/our-activities/performance-areas/oil-and-gas-exploration-and-production/pre-salt/ [Accessed 27 October, 2016].
49 Fantastico, Brazil. 8th September, 2013. NSA Documents Show United States Spied [on] Brazilian Oil Giant [online]. Available at http://g1.globo.com/fantastico/noticia/2013/09/nsa-documents-show-united-states-spied-brazilian-oil-giant.html [Accessed 12 June, 2016].
50 Fantastico, Brazil. 8th September, 2013. NSA Documents Show United States Spied [on] Brazilian Oil Giant [online]. Available at http://g1.globo.com/fantastico/noticia/2013/09/nsa-documents-show-united-states-spied-brazilian-oil-giant.html [Accessed 12 June, 2016].
51 Fantastico, Brazil. 8th September, 2013. NSA Documents Show United States Spied [on] Brazilian Oil Giant [online]. Available at http://g1.globo.com/fantastico/noticia/2013/09/nsa-documents-show-united-states-spied-brazilian-oil-giant.html [Accessed 12 June, 2016].
52 Fantastico, Brazil. 8th September, 2013. NSA Documents Show United States Spied [on] Brazilian Oil Giant [online]. Available at http://g1.globo.com/fantastico/noticia/2013/09/nsa-documents-show-united-states-spied-brazilian-oil-giant.html [Accessed 12 June, 2016].
53 Fantastico, Brazil. 8th September, 2013. NSA Documents Show United States Spied [on] Brazilian Oil Giant [online]. Available at http://g1.globo.com/fantastico/noticia/2013/09/nsa-documents-show-united-states-spied-brazilian-oil-giant.html [Accessed 12 June, 2016].
54 Fantastico, Brazil. 8th September, 2013. NSA Documents Show United States Spied [on] Brazilian Oil Giant [online]. Available at http://g1.globo.com/fantastico/noticia/2013/09/nsa-documents-show-united-states-spied-brazilian-oil-giant.html [Accessed 12 June, 2016].
55 Fantastico, Brazil. 8th September, 2013. NSA Documents Show United States Spied [on] Brazilian Oil Giant [online]. Available at http://g1.globo.com/fantastico/noticia/2013/09/nsa-documents-show-united-states-spied-brazilian-oil-giant.html [Accessed 12 June, 2016].
56 Fantastico, Brazil. 8th September, 2013. NSA Documents Show United States Spied [on] Brazilian Oil Giant [online]. Available at http://g1.globo.com/fantastico/noticia/2013/09/nsa-documents-show-united-states-spied-brazilian-oil-giant.html [Accessed 12 June, 2016].
57 Ackerman, S. 13th June, 2013. Senators Challenge NSA’s Claims to Have Foiled ‘Dozens’ of Terror Attacks. The Guardian [online]. Available at www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jun/13/senators-challenge-nsa-surveillance-terrorism [Accessed 28 October, 2016].
58 Wyden, R. 17th November, 2016. Wyden Statement on Director Clapper’s Resignation [online]. Available at www.wyden.senate.gov/news/press-releases/-wyden-statement-on-director-clappers-resignation [Accessed 24 December, 2016].
59 Fantastico, Brazil. 8th September, 2013. NSA Documents Show United States Spied [on] Brazilian Oil Giant [online]. Available at http://g1.globo.com/fantastico/noticia/2013/09/nsa-documents-show-united-states-spied-brazilian-oil-giant.html [Accessed 12 June, 2016].
60 Campbell, D. October, 2016. Interview.
61 Mayer, J. 23rd May, 2011. The Secret Sharer. The New Yorker [online]. Available at www.newyorker.com/magazine/2011/05/23/the-secret-sharer [Accessed 12 June, 2016].
62 Mayer, J. 23rd May, 2011. The Secret Sharer. The New Yorker [online]. Available at www.newyorker.com/magazine/2011/05/23/the-secret-sharer [Accessed 12 June, 2016].
63 Mayer, J. 23rd May, 2011. The Secret Sharer. The New Yorker [online]. Available at www.newyorker.com/magazine/2011/05/23/the-secret-sharer [Accessed 12 June, 2016].
64 Mayer, J. 23rd May, 2011. The Secret Sharer. The New Yorker [online]. Available at www.newyorker.com/magazine/2011/05/23/the-secret-sharer [Accessed 12 June, 2016].
65 Mayer, J. 23rd May, 2011. The Secret Sharer. The New Yorker [online]. Available at www.newyorker.com/magazine/2011/05/23/the-secret-sharer [Accessed 12 June, 2016].
66 Mayer, J. 23rd May, 2011. The Secret Sharer. The New Yorker [online]. Available at www.newyorker.com/magazine/2011/05/23/the-secret-sharer [Accessed 12 June, 2016].
67 Mayer, J. 23rd May, 2011. The Secret Sharer. The New Yorker [online]. Available at www.newyorker.com/magazine/2011/05/23/the-secret-sharer [Accessed 12 June, 2016].
68 Mayer, J. 23rd May, 2011. The Secret Sharer. The New Yorker [online]. Available at www.newyorker.com/magazine/2011/05/23/the-secret-sharer [Accessed 12 June, 2016].
69 US District Court. 28th September, 2012. Declaration of William E. Binney in Support of Plaintiffs’ Motion for Partial Summary Judgment Rejecting the Government Defendants’ Secret Defense [online]. Available at https://info.publicintelligence.net/NSA-WilliamBinneyDeclaration.pdf [Accessed 24 January, 2017].
70 US District Court. 28th September, 2012. Declaration of William E. Binney in Support of Plaintiffs’ Motion for Partial Summary Judgment Rejecting the Government Defendants’ Secret Defense [online]. Available at https://info.publicintelligence.net/NSA-WilliamBinneyDeclaration.pdf [Accessed 24 January, 2017].
71 Welna, D. 22nd July, 2014. Before Snowden: The Whistleblowers Who Tried to Lift the Veil. NPR [online]. Available at www.npr.org/2014/07/22/333741495/before-snowden-the-whistleblowers-who-tried-to-lift-the-veil [Accessed 30 June, 2016].
72 Welna, D. 22nd July, 2014. Before Snowden: The Whistleblowers Who Tried to Lift the Veil. NPR [online]. Available at www.npr.org/2014/07/22/333741495/before-snowden-the-whistleblowers-who-tried-to-lift-the-veil [Accessed 30 June, 2016].
73 Maurizi, S. 11th February, 2017. NSA Bill Binney: ‘Things Won’t Change Until We Put These People in Jail’. Repubblica [online]. Available at www.repubblica.it/esteri/2017/02/11/news/usa_nsa_bill_binney_integrale_eng-158062766/ [Accessed 7 December, 2016].
74 Maurizi, S. 11th February, 2017. NSA Bill Binney: ‘Things Won’t Change Until We Put These People in Jail’ Repubblica [online]. Available at www.repubblica.it/esteri/2017/02/11/news/usa_nsa_bill_binney_integrale_eng-158062766/ [Accessed 7 December, 2016].
75 Anonymous source. 2017. Interview.
76 Anonymous source. 2017. Interview.
77 Snowden, E. 2017. Interview.
78 Cannataci, J. 27th February, 2017. (Advanced United Version) Report of the Special Rapporteur on the Right to Privacy, Jospeh A. Cannataci. United Nations Human Rights Council. [Copy held by author].
79 Cannataci, J. 27th February, 2017. (Advanced United Version) Report of the Special Rapporteur on the Right to Privacy, Jospeh A. Cannataci. United Nations Human Rights Council. [Copy held by author].
80 Snowden, E. 2017. Interview.
81 Lashmar, P. August, 2016. Interview.