“The journalists’ “sugar daddies,” as you call them, will have to get in line if they want to exploit Snowden’s revelations against us.”
By Frank Snepp
Your post admirably demonstrates why “boiling” figures in the title of your blog. Your outrage burns like a cascading incendiary right through the entire piece.
You perform an invaluable service in showing how the documents-count for Snowden’s boost has dramatically altered — from Glenn Greenwald’s July cite to der Spiegel of 9,000-10,000, to his claim of 20,000 to the Brazilian Senate, to the UK/David Miranda takedown count of 58,000, to the NSA quote of 1.7 million.
You also make an extremely important point in noting that the “spider-crawler” technology that Snowden apparently used to “scrape” up files at Booz Allen couldn’t possibly have allowed for the kind of judicious scrutiny and selection that he originally claimed for himself. He made this claim early on, as you’ll recall, when he tried to separate himself from Bradley Manning and his grab-bag approach to the military files he plundered for Wikileaks. Based on a New York Times story of February 9, the technology he and Manning used was roughly the same. So Snowden exaggerates or prevaricates in pretending he was somehow more careful and discreet than Manning (now Chelsea Manning).
As for the discrepancies you’ve noted in the Snowden documents-count, they dazzle the imagination with possibilities.
In a New York Times magazine piece published by Peter Maas on August 18, Greenwald is quoted as saying that Poitras had documents with her when she joined him for their flight to Hong Kong last summer. Thus she went into their meeting with Snowden after having already received some material from him.
By the time Greenwald and the Guardian’s Hugh MacAskell left Hong Kong on or about June 10, according to one of your previous BFP posts, Greenwald was ready to maintain that he had received everything Snowden had to give them.
But on June 12, Snowden made comments to the South China Morning Post in Hong Kong that indicated he still had a stash with him. So clearly, by his own perhaps unwitting acknowledgement, he had NOT given all copies to Greenwald by that point.
In his interview with the Hong Kong reporter Snowden revealed that NSA was surveilling Chinese targets on the island and the mainland. Greenwald seems to have been caught by surprise by these revelations for he later acknowledged publicly that he probably wouldn’t have published these leaks himself and felt Snowden had done so to ingratiate himself with the Chinese. Greenwald’s alleged aversion to exposing such operations is laughable given his later willingness to blow equally sensitive secrets. But it does appear that he realized that Snowden was off on his own track.
According to the Maas article, Poitras slipped out of Hong Kong on June 15. She may have been carrying the very documents Greenwald later claimed had been transferred to them both, or even files he had not seen. Indeed it is possible that Greenwald had none or only a portion of the Snowden stash upon his own departure from Hong Kong and meant to pick the rest up later from Poitras.
His decision to send his partner David Miranda to Germany in August to link up with Poitras and collect 58,000 documents from her strengthens the likelihood that she was, until then, the main custodian of the Snowden files, whatever their number.
Either way, it is apparent 1) that more documents are circulating than Greenwald originally claimed; 2) that Snowden wasn’t the discreet security-minded thief he originally pretended to be; and 3) that Poitras is the wild card in all the confusion. She accompanied Greenwald to Hong Kong with more documents than he had previously seen, and later, and after returning to Germany, she retained more documents that he had carried with him out of Hong Kong.
It is impossible to sort out from all this whether the 58,000 documents that Miranda was carrying when detained at Heathrow in August were part of Snowden’s original handoff in Hong Kong, were an additional dollop that Poitras had separately gotten from him, or represented everything the two journalists now describe as the Snowden file.
To further complicate things, the NSA’s pilfered-documents count of 1.7 million may be a guestimate of how many files Snowden’s spider-crawler had access to, rather than a tally of what was actually stolen.
Bottom line: Greenwald and Poitras are in a position to clarify much of this, and if they were objective journalists truly committed to transparency and accountability, they would do so in a heartbeat. But they haven’t.
While we’re doling out journalistic responsibilities, let’s not forget Barton Gellman of the Washington Post and Hugh MacAskell of the Guardian, both of whom were part of the original Snowden daisy chain.
Gellman apparently received his own share of the Snowden files from Poitras directly or via the encrypted conferencing system that she and Snowden set up during the time he was pilfering the Booz Allen/NSA mother lode in Hawaii. She was close enough to Gellman to share a by-line with him on his own original Snowden story for the Post, and, as Greenwald revealed to Peter Maas, she was the technical mastermind behind the transfer of the Snowden files to his journalist-collaborators.
Did Gellman get copies of some, all or more of what was handed to Greenwald, Poitras and MacAskell in Hong Kong, or later? Did MacAskill get copies of all of the stuff that Greenwald and Poitras pocketed? Are his copies the ones the Guardian later shared with the New York Times? And how reflective are they of what Greenwald and Poitras now control?
One thing seems fairly certain in all this: Gellman’s package included documents he was initially led to believe were his alone to exploit. They had to do with the NSA internet surveillance program codenamed Prism. According to his and Greenwald’s published accounts, Gellman was originally given the Prism documents as a Post exclusive. When the Post balked at Snowden’s prepublication demands, copies of these documents – or at least permission to report on them — went to Greenwald. He would later file a story about Prism just moments after Gellman surfaced his own in the Post.
In a follow-up “explainer” (that didn’t explain much) Gellman glossed over Poitras’ role in the Snowden leak-fest and treated Greenwald as a late arrival to the game. As Gellman told it, once the Post rebuffed Snowden’s demands, the leaker “made contact with Glenn Greenwald of the British newspaper the Guardian.”
Not so. Poitras had already brought Greenwald into her dialogue with Snowden. Once again she is the wild card.
Presumably Poitras knew all along what Gellman was up to since she shared a by-line with him on his Prism story. But she evidently kept from him her previous months-long interplay with Snowden and the Guardian reporter. Otherwise Gellman, in his explainer, wouldn’t have characterized Greenwald as a Johnny-come-lately, and Greenwald wouldn’t have responded as he did, announcing tartly via Twitter, “Bart Gellman’s claims about Snowden’s interactions with me – when, how and why – are all false.”
Any attempt to account for the Snowden documents, their whereabouts and number, must also contend with other imponderables.
For instance, Greenwald told the Daily Beast that some number of Snowden’s still unpublished stash have been handed over under a password arrangement to parties unknown, and will be released as payback to the powers-that-be if anything happens to the leaker. What are these Armageddon files, who’s got them, what’s their number, and why hasn’t Greenwald, the “objective” journalist, revealed all this rather than play bullyboy messenger on Snowden’s behalf?
Moreover, as Peter Maas reported in his Times magazine article, at least some information relating to NSA’s surveillance deal with Verizon – the subject of Greenwald’s first leak story – is floating out in the ether somewhere, thanks to his and Poitras’ impatience with the Guardian newspaper.
“When The Guardian didn’t move as quickly as they wanted with the first article on Verizon,” Maas wrote, “Greenwald discussed taking it elsewhere, sending an encrypted draft to a colleague at another publication.”
Who is that “colleague,” where is that draft, and was any of the supporting documentation attached? The “colleague” apparently is the kind of journalist Greenwald is, and is keeping what he knows from the public.
Finally, because of all the questions surrounding disposition of the Snowden files – who received, or shared, which files, and when – there are monumental chain-of-custody and verification problems.
Anywhere along the Snowden-Greenwald-Poitras-MacAskell-Gellman-Miranda-Guardian-New York Times transmission belt, glitches, whiteouts and blackouts could have occurred. Documents could have dropped out, fabricated ones could have been added, amendments or distortions could have been slipped in – all without Snowden being aware. Whatever his original password precautions, he collected far more documents than he could ever have read or vetted in their entirety, and he has abdicated too much control over them since then to be certain of what is now being distributed in his name.
I am almost beginning to feel sorry for the NSA damage assessment team tasked with figuring out just what kind of havoc Snowden has wrought.
If what we do know is any predictor, neither the NSA nor any of us will ever be sure which documents Snowden stole, what their numbers are, or where they have ended up.
I do believe the jury is still out regarding one thread of your blog – your concern that the free-floating Snowden files might somehow compromise our privacy or allow the journalists’ billionaire patrons, Pierre Omidyar of eBay-PayPal or Jeff Bezos of Amazon-Washington Post, to do so.
True, the files apparently contain a great deal of information about cyber warfare and the defenses the NSA has erected, or attempted to penetrate, and this may contain enough to allow expert hackers to dig into very private stuff here, there and everywhere.
But let’s face it, what the Snowden files confirm beyond all question is that the Russians and the Chinese are already deep into this racket. To the extent that Snowden’s leaks have strengthened their hand, or weakened our firewalls against them, he will also have deepened our exposure to privacy violations by our sworn competitors and enemies. The journalists’ “sugar daddies,” as you call them, will have to get in line if they want to exploit Snowden’s revelations against us.
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*Frank Snepp is a Peabody-Award winning investigative journalist, author of two CIA memoirs, and focus of a major U.S. Supreme Court decision dealing with national security and the First Amendment. He posts on franksnepp.com.
**To read Sibel Edmonds’ latest article on Snowden-Greenwald Click Here