Edward Snowden’s NSA leaks have few if any precedents in American history. Where past whistleblowers like Daniel Ellsberg exposed specific instances of wrongdoing, Snowden pulled back the curtain on an entire culture of mass surveillance the likes of which have never been known even in the world’s most totalitarian countries. Here’s a look back some of the stories that emerged this year in the wake of the Snowden leaks.
Verizon hands over full records, tech corps + NSA = PRISM
The first big story to come from the Snowden leaks was Verizon’s compelled cooperation in giving up the full records for all the calls passing through its telephone systems every day. Soon afterward came the first description of the NSA’s PRISM program, which counted major American tech corporations like Microsoft, Apple, Google, Yahoo, and Facebook among its partners.
Meet Edward Snowden
Most whistleblowers look for ways to remove themselves from the equation as much as possible, remaining anonymous if at all possible. Edward Snowden upturned that paradigm by coming out in early June as the source of the Verizon and PRISM stories, as captured in this short film by Laura Poitras. Filmed in Hong Kong, it laid out who he was (former NSA contractor), what he’d done (downloaded hundreds of thousands if not millions of NSA files), and why he’d done it (to provoke discussion over secret government surveillance programs).
Snowden made clear that he wanted the focus of the media attention to be on the substance of the stories that would come from his leaks. Of course the government and its media mouthpieces wasted no time in trying to make it all about him, from the fact that he dropped out of high school years before, to him leaving his stripper girlfriend alone in Hawaii when he fled to Hong Kong ahead of revealing his identity to the world, to his acceptance of asylum from Russia. But the cascading stories that continue today have overshadowed him just like he had hoped in the beginning.
A pattern of official deception and misdirection
The NSA has tried to reassure the American public by noting that it only collects metadata, not the content of calls. But research has shown that just metadata can be used to accurately predict a large number of things about a given person’s life, including who you’re dating. They’ve also tried to reassure the public by claiming that their limitation of three degrees of separation protects civil liberties, but again, research has shown that as few as two degrees of separation could connect the entire American population if creatively applied. They repeatedly said the NSA doesn’t collect cell-phone location data from all Americans – but that also turned out not to be true.
The cornerstone of the NSA’s case for its behavior is its repeated claim that bulk surveillance programs have thwarted numerous terrorist attacks. But D.C. District Court Judge Richard J. Leon – an appointee of President George W. Bush – recently rejected those claims outright in a decision declaring those programs unconstitutional, noting that the government “does not cite a single instance in which analysis of the NSA’s bulk metadata collection actually stopped an imminent attack, or otherwise aided the Government in achieving any objective that was time-sensitive in nature. In fact, none of the three ‘recent episodes’ cited by the Government that supposedly ‘illustrate the role that telephony metadata can play in preventing and protecting against terrorist attack’ involved any apparent urgency.” The agency continued its attempts to control the narrative through deception this past Sunday when 60 Minutes ran an interview with Gen. Keith Alexander, head of the NSA, that allowed numerous dubious assertions to go completely unchallenged.
NSA GCHQ SOS
The NSA and GCHQ operate as separate entities but share a common cause, leading to close ongoing collaborations like their joint attack on the Tor anonymizing network. Along with Australia, Canada, and New Zealand, they comprise the Five Eyes coalition of English-speaking countries who collect and share signals intelligence from listening posts worldwide. These countries were fully compliant with the NSA – Canada allowed spying on the G-8 and G-20 summits held there, and Australia offered to share data on its citizens with the partners. (That didn’t mean the NSA didn’t consider unilaterally collecting such information itself.)
The NSA has also shared its data with other foreign countries, most prominently Israel. That secret deal places no limits on the Israelis’ use of the data they receive from NSA, which contains domestic American communications.
The long arm of the NSA
The NSA’s array of snooping programs is staggering. TEMPORA taps internet traffic on the fiberoptic cables that run beneath the world’s oceans. ECHELON intercepts civil satellite communications. XKEYSCORE gives analysts real-time monitoring capabilities, without requiring a warrant. It has also tried to build backdoors into encryption standards.
Parallel construction
The NSA regularly hands over data from its surveillance programs to domestic agencies like the DEA and IRS. These agencies then engage in what’s known as parallel construction, in which they concoct cover stories for the data the NSA gives them. It’s like money laundering, but for intelligence – and it’s justified by promises only to use it against bad people.
NSA spies on foreign citizens’, leaders’ communications
The NSA not only monitors domestic communications in the United States but also does so in allied countries like France. What’s more, the NSA monitors the personal communications of national leaders from around the world. Leaders of 35 nations have been subjected to such surveillance, including allies of the United States, though a complete list of the individual countries hasn’t been published. It’s unclear just how deep the spying into foreign governments goes. German Chancellor Angela Merkel had been on the watch list since 2002, long before she rose to power, and remained there until the surveillance was uncovered this fall.
NSA piggybacks on Google cookies
Google’s entire business model is built upon the use of cookies, which allow the internet giant to track online behavior and sell finely targeted ads. It’s such a good way to identify people that the NSA uses Google’s cookies to pinpoint particular targets’ devices and later infiltrate them through malware.
Extent Of Leaks Immeasurable
An internal NSA review to determine just how much data was taken started not too long after the first revelations from the leaks, and to this point the agency still hasn’t determined the extent of the leaks. Just this past weekend the head of that inquiry, Rick Ledgett, said he believes that Snowden still has access to documents he took that have not yet been revealed by the journalists working with him. Interestingly, Ledgett also said he would consider recommending amnesty for Snowden in exchange for those documents, though such a recommendation would have to be executed by the president. That would be a far cry from Obama’s collected statements on Snowden to date – but a very welcome development if it should indeed come to pass. Otherwise we’re likely to continue hearing about the NSA’s secret programs well into 2014.
