Fred Kaplan
By Fred Kaplan
I regard Daniel Ellsberg as an American patriot. I was one of the first columnists to write that Director of National Intelligence James Clapper should be fired for lying to Congress. On June 7, two days after the first news stories based on Edward Snowden’s leaks, I wrote a column airing (and endorsing) the concerns of Brian Jenkins, a leading counterterrorism expert, that the government’s massive surveillance program had created “the foundation of a very oppressive state.”
And yet I firmly disagree with The New York Times’ Jan 1 editorial (“Edward Snowden, Whistle-Blower”), calling on President Obama to grant Snowden “some form of clemency” for the “great service” he has done for his country.
It is true that Snowden’s revelations about the National Security Agency’s surveillance of American citizens — far vaster than any outsider had suspected, in some cases vaster than the agency’s overseers on the secret FISA court had permitted — have triggered a valuable debate, leading possibly to much-needed reforms.
If that were all that Snowden had done, if his stolen trove of beyond-top-secret documents had dealt only with the NSA’s domestic surveillance, then some form of leniency might be worth discussing. But Snowden did much more than that. The documents that he gave The Washington Post’s Barton Gellman and the Guardian’s Glenn Greenwald have, so far, furnished stories about the NSA’s interception of email traffic, mobile phone calls and radio transmissions of Taliban fighters in Pakistan’s northwest territories; about an operation to gauge the loyalties of CIA recruits in Pakistan; about NSA email intercepts to assist intelligence assessments of what’s going on inside Iran; about NSA surveillance of cellphone calls “worldwide,” an effort that (in the Post’s words) “allows it to look for unknown associates of known intelligence targets by tracking people whose movements intersect.”
In his first interview with the South China Morning Post, Snowden revealed that the NSA routinely hacks into hundreds of computers in China and Hong Kong.
These operations have nothing to do with domestic surveillance or even spying on allies. They are not illegal, improper, or (in the context of 21st-century international politics) immoral. Exposing such operations has nothing to do with “whistle-blowing.”
There are no such extenuating circumstances favouring forgiveness of Snowden. The Times editorial paints an incomplete picture when it claims that he “stole a trove of highly classified documents after he became disillusioned with the agency’s voraciousness.” In fact, as Snowden himself told the South China Morning Post, he took his job as an NSA contractor, with Booz Allen Hamilton, because he knew that his position would grant him “access to lists of machines all over the world [that] the NSA hacked.” He stayed there for just three months, enough to do what he came to do.
Mark Hosenball and Warren Strobel of Reuters later reported, in an eye-opening scoop, that Snowden gained access to his cache of documents by persuading 20 to 25 of his fellow employees to give him their logins and passwords, saying he needed the information to help him do his job as systems administrator.
Whistleblowers have large egos by nature, and there is no crime or shame in that. But one gasps at the megalomania and delusion in Snowden’s statements, and one can’t help but wonder if he is a dupe, a tool, or simply astonishingly naïve.
Along these same lines, it may be telling that Snowden did not release — or at least the recipients of his cache haven’t yet published — any documents detailing the cyber-operations of any other countries, especially Russia or China, even though he would have had access to the NSA’s after-action reports on the hundreds or thousands of hacking campaigns that they too have mounted over the years.
This leads to the ultimate question of what to do with Edward Snowden should the Russians spit him out when his asylum status expires and no other country picks him up. I should note that I do not side with the national-security extremists on this matter — former CIA Director James Woolsey’s thunderous remark on Fox News that Snowden “should be hanged by his neck until he is dead” or columnist Max Boot’s jibe that the only kind of plea bargain offered to Snowden should be “one that allows him to serve life in a maximum-security prison rather than face the death penalty for his treason.”
In his end-of-year news conference, President Barack Obama distanced himself from Ledgett’s remarks, which were rather vague to begin with. (For one thing, it’s unclear how Snowden would go about securing the documents.) Still, prosecutors make deals with criminals all the time in exchange for their help in catching bigger fish or solving bigger problems.
Here are some questions that prosecutors or senior officials might ask Snowden — hooked up to a lie detector — as part of the preliminary steps in a “conversation” about a plea bargain (which, they’d no doubt make clear, would still involve several years in prison).
First, why did Snowden go to Hong Kong? Why did he go from there to Moscow? (Supposedly he had planned to catch a connecting flight to Havana and, from there, to Ecuador, but there are many ways to get from Hong Kong to Havana without going through Moscow.)
Second, according to the Russian newspaper Kommersant, Snowden spent three days at the Russian consulate in Hong Kong before booking his flight to Moscow. Is this true? What did he do there? Snowden later told The New York Times’ James Risen that he took no classified documents into Russia. Assuming that’s true, did he give them to Russian officials in Hong Kong? What did he talk to the Russians about? Did he request asylum, or did they offer it? (Kommersant quoted some Russian officials claiming the former, others the latter.)
If it turned out that Snowden did give information to the Russians or Chinese (or if intelligence assessments show that the leaks did substantial damage to national security, something that hasn’t been proved in public), then I’d say all talk of a deal is off — and I assume the Times editorial page would agree.
Third, whatever Snowden said or didn’t say to the Russians, they must have asked him a lot of questions — if not during his mysterious stay in Moscow (or wherever they’re currently keeping him), then during the month he spent in the transit lounge of Sheremetyevo Airport.
Fourth, Snowden claimed in an interview with the Post’s Gellman that he raised concerns about widespread domestic surveillance with several of his colleagues and superiors in the NSA’s technological directorate.
NSA spokesmen subsequently commented that they had “not found any evidence” supporting this contention, but this is hardly a definitive denial.
Snowden should provide the names of those colleagues and superiors, and assurances should be offered that they not be in any way punished. If Snowden’s claim is true, at least that would show he tried to fix things from the inside before going out in the cold. That would offer something in support of his plea for whistleblower status.
But it’s unlikely that any of this will come to pass. Unless Snowden changes his stripes dramatically, he doesn’t seem inclined to cooperate with his former masters, whom he now depicts as threats to world peace.
Nor, I suspect, would the US government be inclined to cooperate with the likes of Snowden, especially given this administration’s intolerance of far less ambitious leakers and — more to the point — the deep layers of secrecy surrounding everything about the NSA.
My guess is, Snowden will spend a very long time in Russia, in some other country ruled by an even more unpleasantly authoritarian regime, or in an American prison. At this point, the choice of where, or for how long, is up to him. WP-BLOOMBERG
By Fred Kaplan
I regard Daniel Ellsberg as an American patriot. I was one of the first columnists to write that Director of National Intelligence James Clapper should be fired for lying to Congress. On June 7, two days after the first news stories based on Edward Snowden’s leaks, I wrote a column airing (and endorsing) the concerns of Brian Jenkins, a leading counterterrorism expert, that the government’s massive surveillance program had created “the foundation of a very oppressive state.”
And yet I firmly disagree with The New York Times’ Jan 1 editorial (“Edward Snowden, Whistle-Blower”), calling on President Obama to grant Snowden “some form of clemency” for the “great service” he has done for his country.
It is true that Snowden’s revelations about the National Security Agency’s surveillance of American citizens — far vaster than any outsider had suspected, in some cases vaster than the agency’s overseers on the secret FISA court had permitted — have triggered a valuable debate, leading possibly to much-needed reforms.
If that were all that Snowden had done, if his stolen trove of beyond-top-secret documents had dealt only with the NSA’s domestic surveillance, then some form of leniency might be worth discussing. But Snowden did much more than that. The documents that he gave The Washington Post’s Barton Gellman and the Guardian’s Glenn Greenwald have, so far, furnished stories about the NSA’s interception of email traffic, mobile phone calls and radio transmissions of Taliban fighters in Pakistan’s northwest territories; about an operation to gauge the loyalties of CIA recruits in Pakistan; about NSA email intercepts to assist intelligence assessments of what’s going on inside Iran; about NSA surveillance of cellphone calls “worldwide,” an effort that (in the Post’s words) “allows it to look for unknown associates of known intelligence targets by tracking people whose movements intersect.”
In his first interview with the South China Morning Post, Snowden revealed that the NSA routinely hacks into hundreds of computers in China and Hong Kong.
These operations have nothing to do with domestic surveillance or even spying on allies. They are not illegal, improper, or (in the context of 21st-century international politics) immoral. Exposing such operations has nothing to do with “whistle-blowing.”
There are no such extenuating circumstances favouring forgiveness of Snowden. The Times editorial paints an incomplete picture when it claims that he “stole a trove of highly classified documents after he became disillusioned with the agency’s voraciousness.” In fact, as Snowden himself told the South China Morning Post, he took his job as an NSA contractor, with Booz Allen Hamilton, because he knew that his position would grant him “access to lists of machines all over the world [that] the NSA hacked.” He stayed there for just three months, enough to do what he came to do.
Mark Hosenball and Warren Strobel of Reuters later reported, in an eye-opening scoop, that Snowden gained access to his cache of documents by persuading 20 to 25 of his fellow employees to give him their logins and passwords, saying he needed the information to help him do his job as systems administrator.
Whistleblowers have large egos by nature, and there is no crime or shame in that. But one gasps at the megalomania and delusion in Snowden’s statements, and one can’t help but wonder if he is a dupe, a tool, or simply astonishingly naïve.
Along these same lines, it may be telling that Snowden did not release — or at least the recipients of his cache haven’t yet published — any documents detailing the cyber-operations of any other countries, especially Russia or China, even though he would have had access to the NSA’s after-action reports on the hundreds or thousands of hacking campaigns that they too have mounted over the years.
This leads to the ultimate question of what to do with Edward Snowden should the Russians spit him out when his asylum status expires and no other country picks him up. I should note that I do not side with the national-security extremists on this matter — former CIA Director James Woolsey’s thunderous remark on Fox News that Snowden “should be hanged by his neck until he is dead” or columnist Max Boot’s jibe that the only kind of plea bargain offered to Snowden should be “one that allows him to serve life in a maximum-security prison rather than face the death penalty for his treason.”
In his end-of-year news conference, President Barack Obama distanced himself from Ledgett’s remarks, which were rather vague to begin with. (For one thing, it’s unclear how Snowden would go about securing the documents.) Still, prosecutors make deals with criminals all the time in exchange for their help in catching bigger fish or solving bigger problems.
Here are some questions that prosecutors or senior officials might ask Snowden — hooked up to a lie detector — as part of the preliminary steps in a “conversation” about a plea bargain (which, they’d no doubt make clear, would still involve several years in prison).
First, why did Snowden go to Hong Kong? Why did he go from there to Moscow? (Supposedly he had planned to catch a connecting flight to Havana and, from there, to Ecuador, but there are many ways to get from Hong Kong to Havana without going through Moscow.)
Second, according to the Russian newspaper Kommersant, Snowden spent three days at the Russian consulate in Hong Kong before booking his flight to Moscow. Is this true? What did he do there? Snowden later told The New York Times’ James Risen that he took no classified documents into Russia. Assuming that’s true, did he give them to Russian officials in Hong Kong? What did he talk to the Russians about? Did he request asylum, or did they offer it? (Kommersant quoted some Russian officials claiming the former, others the latter.)
If it turned out that Snowden did give information to the Russians or Chinese (or if intelligence assessments show that the leaks did substantial damage to national security, something that hasn’t been proved in public), then I’d say all talk of a deal is off — and I assume the Times editorial page would agree.
Third, whatever Snowden said or didn’t say to the Russians, they must have asked him a lot of questions — if not during his mysterious stay in Moscow (or wherever they’re currently keeping him), then during the month he spent in the transit lounge of Sheremetyevo Airport.
Fourth, Snowden claimed in an interview with the Post’s Gellman that he raised concerns about widespread domestic surveillance with several of his colleagues and superiors in the NSA’s technological directorate.
NSA spokesmen subsequently commented that they had “not found any evidence” supporting this contention, but this is hardly a definitive denial.
Snowden should provide the names of those colleagues and superiors, and assurances should be offered that they not be in any way punished. If Snowden’s claim is true, at least that would show he tried to fix things from the inside before going out in the cold. That would offer something in support of his plea for whistleblower status.
But it’s unlikely that any of this will come to pass. Unless Snowden changes his stripes dramatically, he doesn’t seem inclined to cooperate with his former masters, whom he now depicts as threats to world peace.
Nor, I suspect, would the US government be inclined to cooperate with the likes of Snowden, especially given this administration’s intolerance of far less ambitious leakers and — more to the point — the deep layers of secrecy surrounding everything about the NSA.
My guess is, Snowden will spend a very long time in Russia, in some other country ruled by an even more unpleasantly authoritarian regime, or in an American prison. At this point, the choice of where, or for how long, is up to him. WP-BLOOMBERG
