Will The Washington Post Give Back Its Pulitzer And Stand Trial With Snowden?

from the senseless dept

We already know that the Washington Post editorial board has some cognitive dissonance when it comes to Ed Snowden. Three years ago, right after the Washington Post itself, via reporter Barton Gellman, broke a bunch of the initial stories around the Ed Snowden documents -- including the first public report on the Section 702 PRISM program -- the editorial board wrote a piece condemning Snowden's leaks. Now, it's true (as many point out) that the editorial board is separate from the reporters who work at the paper, but it still is really quite amazing that the editorial board would not only burn a source like that but basically complain about its own journalism.

It appears that three years later, the Post's editorial board has not changed its perspective. In response to the campaign to pardon Snowden, the Washington Post has come out with a tone deaf editorial against pardoning Snowden, calling for him to be prosecuted, and insisting that Snowden caused real harm with the revelations. Here's the really incredible part. The Post focuses its complaint on the revelation of the PRISM program -- and that is the story that the Post broke. Glenn Greenwald and the Guardian had the first story, about the Section 215 mass phone records surveillance program. But it was the Post that had the first story about PRISM. And yet, the Washington Post now says that while revealing the 215 program may have been a public service, revealing PRISM was a crime.

The complication is that Mr. Snowden did more than that. He also pilfered, and leaked, information about a separate overseas NSA Internet-monitoring program, PRISM, that was both clearly legal and not clearly threatening to privacy. (It was also not permanent; the law authorizing it expires next year.) Worse — far worse — he also leaked details of basically defensible international intelligence operations: cooperation with Scandinavian services against Russia; spying on the wife of an Osama bin Laden associate; and certain offensive cyber operations in China. No specific harm, actual or attempted, to any individual American was ever shown to have resulted from the NSA telephone metadata program Mr. Snowden brought to light. In contrast, his revelations about the agency’s international operations disrupted lawful intelligence-gathering, causing possibly “tremendous damage” to national security, according to a unanimous, bipartisan report by the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. What higher cause did that serve?

Except it wasn't Ed Snowden who publicly revealed information about PRISM. It was the Washington Post. And it won a freaking Pulitzer Prize for that reporting as well. And now it says that the revelation of that program should never have happened?

Really?

Remember that, while many people falsely think that Snowden is the one who revealed these programs to the public, that's not the case. He gave the documents to certain journalists, saying that he trusted them to sort through them and determine what was newsworthy, what was not, and what should be kept secret. It was the Washington Post that determined the PRISM program -- which is still subject to legal challenges (though so far has been found to be legal) -- was serious enough for news coverage. Not Ed Snowden. And yet now the Post says Snowden should be prosecuted for the journalistic decision it made, which earned it a Pulitzer.

Yes, the Post editorial board is free to make such a stupid decision, but it's only going to harm its journalistic staff. What source is going to go to the Washington Post now, when it's the very paper that took all the glory from publishing stories from a source -- and then called for him to be thrown in jail?

Here's what the Washington Post's Executive Editor Marty Baron said about the Pulitzer Prize when it was announced:

Post Executive Editor Martin Baron said Monday that the reporting exposed a national policy “with profound implications for American citizens’ constitutional rights” and the rights of individuals around the world.

“Disclosing the massive expansion of the NSA’s surveillance network absolutely was a public service,” Baron said. “In constructing a surveillance system of breathtaking scope and intrusiveness, our government also sharply eroded individual privacy. All of this was done in secret, without public debate, and with clear weaknesses in oversight.”

Baron added that without Snowden’s disclosures, “we never would have known how far this country had shifted away from the rights of the individual in favor of state power. There would have been no public debate about the proper balance between privacy and national security. As even the president has acknowledged, this is a conversation we need to have.”

Hmm. That doesn't seem to fit with what his own editorial board is now saying about Snowden's revelations. When asked about this now, in response to the editorial, Baron suddenly came down with a case of the "no comments."

In an email response to Fortune, Post editor-in-chief Marty Baron said: “I don’t comment on editorials. As you know, that department is entirely separate from the newsroom. You should contact Bart Gellman.”

Gellman, of course, is the reporter who wrote those stories for the Post and who has said he "profoundly" disagrees with the Post's editorial.

As he should, because the editorial is not just tone deaf and ridiculous, it's cowardly bullshit that massively harms the reputation of the Post itself, and certainly undermines its credibility with sources.

Filed Under: 702, barton gellman, ed snowden, editorial board, journalism, mass surveillance, pardon snowden, sources
Companies: washington post

House Intelligence Committee's List Of 'Snowden's Lies' Almost Entirely False

from the and-it-took-'em-two-years dept

So, last week, I wrote up a long analysis of the House Intelligence Committee's ridiculous smear campaign against Ed Snowden, highlighting a bunch of misleading to false statements that the report made in trying to undermine Snowden's credibility as he seeks a pardon from President Obama. The Committee insisted that it had spent two years working on the report, but it seems like maybe they just needed all that time because they couldn't find any actual dirt on Snowden.

In my analysis, I pointed to some of Snowden's public responses, highlighting how the House Intel Committee was either completely misinformed or lying about Snowden. But Barton Gellman, one of the four reporters who Snowden originally gave his documents to, and who has done some amazing reporting on the Snowden leaks (not to mention, who is writing a book about Snowden) has responded to the report as well, and highlights just how incredibly dishonest the report is.

Gellman focuses on just one section -- the weird section that tries to make out Snowden as a "serial exaggerator and fabricator." Here's that paragraph again:

Fourth, Snowden was, and remains, a serial exaggerator and fabricator. A close review of Snowden's official employment records and submissions reveals a pattern of intentional lying. He claimed to have left Army basic training because of broken legs when in fact he washed out because of shin splints. He claimed to have obtained a high school degree equivalent when in fact he never did. He claimed to have worked for the CIA as a "senior advisor," which was a gross exaggeration of his entry-level duties as a computer technician. He also doctored his performance evaluations and obtained new positions at NSA by exaggerating his resume and stealing the answers to an employment test. In May 2013, Snowden informed his supervisor that he would be out of the office to receive treatment for worsening epilepsy. In reality, he was on his way to Hong Kong with stolen secrets.

As we noted on Friday, Snowden disputed almost everything in this paragraph, saying that it would be "extremely unwise" for them to say he didn't have a GED, and (more importantly) pointed out that it wasn't shin splints that kept him out of the Army, and that the "doctored performance evaluation" was actually him showing (as requested by his managers) a "proof of concept" of a vulnerability in the CIA's computer system.

Gellman takes all of these points even deeper and debunks the House Intelligence Committee's findings with checkable facts. The "shin splints" claim? Gellman has reviewed Snowden's Army paperwork. It wasn't shin splints.

This is verifiably false for anyone who, as the committee asserts it did, performs a “close review of Snowden’s official employment records.” Snowden’s Army paperwork, some of which I have examined, says he met the demanding standards of an 18X Special Forces recruit and mustered into the Army on June 3, 2004. The diagnosis that led to his discharge, on crutches, was bilateral tibial stress fractures.

A shin splint comes from the muscles and bone tissue around the tibia being overworked, often by repetitive injury. It's true that tibia stress fractures are sometimes confused with shin splints, but an actual fracture is much more serious (and doctors will sometimes check to see if shin splints are really a stress fracture if they're not going away). If Snowden was in the hospital and on crutches with bilateral tibial stress fractures, that's way past shin splints. The House Intel Committee was either lied to or is lying here to the public -- ironically in the section they claim is about Snowden's fabrications and exaggerations.

How about the claim that he never got his GED? It turns out that Gellman actually has the evidence:

I do not know how the committee could get this one wrong in good faith. According to the official Maryland State Department of Education test report, which I have reviewed, Snowden sat for the high school equivalency test on May 4, 2004. He needed a score of 2250 to pass. He scored 3550. His Diploma No. 269403 was dated June 2, 2004, the same month he would have graduated had he returned to Arundel High School after losing his sophomore year to mononucleosis. In the interim, he took courses at Anne Arundel Community College.

So, again, in the section on fabrications and exaggerations, the House Intel Committee appears to be the one fabricating stuff. It again raises the question of whether or not they were lied to or just failed to do basic due diligence into the truth of the claim.

What about the claim about his level in the CIA? Again, Gellman to the rescue with evidence:

Judge for yourself. Here are the three main roles Snowden played at the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). (1) His entry level position, as a contractor, was system administrator (one among several) of the agency’s Washington metropolitan area network. (2) After that he was selected for and spent six months in training as a telecommunications information security officer, responsible for all classified technology in U.S. embassies overseas. The CIA deployed him to Geneva under diplomatic cover, complete with an alias identity and a badge describing him as a State Department attache. (3) In his third CIA job, the title on his Dell business card was “solutions consultant / cyber referent” for the intelligence community writ large—the company’s principal point of contact for cyber contracts and proposals. In that role, Snowden met regularly with the chiefs and deputy chiefs of the CIA’s technical branches to talk through their cutting edge computer needs.

Gellman also has more detail on that whole "doctoring his performance evaluation" claim, noting how the House Intel Committee was clearly exaggerating the truth:

Truly deceptive, this. I will tell the story in my book. Suffice to say that Snowden discovered and reported a security hole in the CIA’s human resources intranet page. With his supervisor’s permission, he made a benign demonstration of how a hostile actor could take control. He did not change the content of his performance evaluation. He changed the way it displayed on screen.

Gellman has a few more in his post as well, but the short version is that "four of the six claims are egregiously false, and a fifth is hard to credit." Oh, and the one "true" claim? That he lied to his bosses saying he was going for epilepsy treatment when he was really heading off to hand over the files to reporters.

And so we're left with the question: how the hell did the House Intelligence Committee spend two years... to get everything so incredibly wrong? And will anyone actually call them on this?

Filed Under: barton gellman, ed snowden, house intelligence committee, pardon snowden, smear campaign

Purdue University Completely Freaks Out Because Bart Gellman's Speech Shows Classified Snowden Docs Already Seen By Millions

from the academia! dept

When Ed Snowden first gave his cache of documents to reporters, there were two sets handed out. Most famously, one set went to Glenn Greenwald, Laura Poitras and Ewan MacAskill, who went to Hong Kong on behalf of the Guardian. And the other set went to Bart Gellman, who wrote up reports on them (technically as a freelancer) for the Washington Post. Yesterday, Gellman wrote about a crazy story in which Purdue University absolutely freaked out, after it realized that Gellman gave a keynote speech -- for an event organized by the University President, and which Gellman had been specifically asked to give -- that showed some of the previously released Snowden documents during his presentation. Despite promising Gellman that the talk had been recorded and a link and a copy of the video would be sent to him, instead, Purdue ended up deleting the whole thing and basically stopped responding to him.

The reason? Apparently Purdue has a deal with the US government, in order to perform classified research on behalf of the government. To do this, the university had to get "facility security clearance." And, in order to keep that status, it has to abide by certain rules on "classified information spillage." Apparently, some at Purdue decided to overreact entirely, which Gellman discovered as soon as the Q&A section opened up:

If I had the spider sense that we journalists like to claim, I might have seen trouble coming. One of the first questions in the Q & A that followed my talk was:

"In the presentation you just gave, you were showing documents that were TS/SCI [top secret, sensitive compartmented information] and things like that. Since documents started to become published, has the NSA issued a declass order for that?"

I took the opportunity to explain the government’s dilemmas when classified information becomes available to anyone with an internet connection. I replied:

"These documents, by and large, are still classified. And in many cases, if you work for the government and you have clearance, you’re not allowed to go look at them…"

"Now, it’s perfectly rational for them to say, we’re not going to declassify everything that gets leaked because otherwise we’re letting someone else decide what’s classified and what’s not. But it gets them wound up in pretty bad knots."

By way of example, I mentioned that the NSA, CIA, and Office of the Director of National Intelligence “have steadfastly refused to give me a secure channel to communicate with them” about the Snowden leaks. Bound by rules against mingling classified and unclassified communications networks, they will not accept, for example, encrypted emails from me that discuss Top Secret material. In service of secrecy rules, they resort to elliptical conversation on open telephone lines.

My remarks did not answer the question precisely enough for one post-doctoral research engineer. He stood, politely, to nail the matter down.

“Were the documents you showed tonight unclassified?” he asked.

“No. They’re classified still,” I replied.

“Thank you,” he said, and resumed his seat.

And all of that apparently set off a chain reaction where some people freaked out and alerted Purdue's "Information Assurance Officer" who then told Purdue's representative at the Defense Security Service, leading to an escalation that resulted in a DELETE EVERYTHING FREAKOUT. Of course, once Gellman published his blog post making Purdue look silly, it quickly backtracked:

In an overreaction while attempting to comply with regulations, the video was ordered to be deleted instead of just blocking the piece of information in question. Just FYI: The conference organizers were not even aware that any of this had happened until well after the video was already gone.

I’m told we are attempting to recover the video, but I have not heard yet whether that is going to be possible. When I find out, I will let you know and we will, of course, provide a copy to you.

We've talked about this a few times before, and the head in sand approach the government takes to pretending that publicly available leaked classified information is still secret. Government employees are regularly told they cannot look at such documents even if those documents are splashed across the pages of the Washington Post, the NY Times or other news sources. The rationale for this is that it takes away at least some incentive for people to force declassification by leaking documents. But it doesn't really. It just makes everyone look foolish. In the business world, most standard non-disclosure agreements include a clause that says that if the material becomes public through other means, the agreement no longer applies. It's ridiculous that the same is not true for classified information as well.

Perhaps even more ridiculous is how the University responded to Gellman's questions prior to him posting the blog post about Purdue's overreaction:

I left word for Mitch Daniels, the former Indiana governor who became Purdue’s president two years ago. Daniels had introduced my talk and asked me to speak again for guests at a dinner he held that night. He was a delightful, well-read and open-minded host, but he has not returned my messages either. I sent one last note, detailing my main points here, to Purdue’s assistant vice president for strategic communications. I’ll update with her reply if she sends one.

The irony is that the Dawn or Doom colloquium was Daniels’s own personal project. Two of the organizers told me he is fascinated by the contradictory responses – from celebration to alarm – that tend to accompany big technological advances. He proposed to convene Purdue faculty members and leading national experts to explore the risks and promises of artificial intelligence, robotics, and Big Data surveillance, among other developments.

In his own view, Dawn or Doom is not a hard question. Daniels and I chatted about that theme as we stood in the wings off stage, shortly before my talk.

“The answer always turns out to be, it’s dawn,” he said.

Except when his own university overreacts. Gellman also notes that this suggests that this whole situation speaks ill of Purdue as an institute of higher learning:

Purdue has compromised its own independence and that of its students and faculty. It set an unhappy precedent, even if the people responsible thought they were merely following routine procedures.

Think of it as a classic case of mission creep. Purdue invited the secret-keepers of the Defense Security Service into one cloistered corner of campus (“a small but significant fraction” of research in certain fields, as the university counsel put it). The trustees accepted what may have seemed a limited burden, confined to the precincts of classified research.

Now the security apparatus claims jurisdiction over the campus (“facility”) at large. The university finds itself “sanitizing” a conference that has nothing to do with any government contract. Where does it stop? Suppose a professor wants to teach a network security course, or a student wants to write a foreign policy paper, that draws on the rich public record made available by Snowden and Chelsea Manning? Those cases will be hard to distinguish from mine.

The backtracking now that the university is embarrassed is better than ignoring the issue, but it's ridiculous that it got this far in the first place.

Filed Under: barton gellman, classified information, facility security clearance, head in sand, speech
Companies: purdue university

The Guardian And Washington Post Win Pulitzers For Snowden Coverage

from the good-for-them dept

While various arbitrary prizes and awards may not mean much in the grand scheme of things, it's still quite heartening to see that the Guardian and the Washington Post were awarded a Pulitzer for public service for their reporting on the NSA via the Ed Snowden documents.

For a distinguished example of meritorious public service by a newspaper or news site through the use of its journalistic resources, including the use of stories, editorials, cartoons, photographs, graphics, videos, databases, multimedia or interactive presentations or other visual material, a gold medal.

Awarded to The Washington Post for its revelation of widespread secret surveillance by the National Security Agency, marked by authoritative and insightful reports that helped the public understand how the disclosures fit into the larger framework of national security.

and

Awarded to The Guardian US for its revelation of widespread secret surveillance by the National Security Agency, helping through aggressive reporting to spark a debate about the relationship between the government and the public over issues of security and privacy.

Glenn Greenwald, Laura Poitras, Bart Gellman and Ewan McCaskill (among others at both publications) should be congratulated for the work they put into the original stories and for all of the followup in the face of ridiculous levels of criticism from those who were embarrassed by Snowden's whistleblowing. Separately, with the Pulitzers recognizing that such reporting was a public service, can we finally stop people from claiming that Snowden was a "traitor" and admit that what he did was clearly whistleblowing in the furtherance of the public interest?

Filed Under: barton gellman, ed snowden, ewan mccaskill, glenn greenwald, laura poitras, pulitzer prizes
Companies: the guardian, washington post

James Clapper Admits In Private That He's Really Not Too Concerned About Terrorists Changing Communications After Snowden

from the faux-outrage dept

We already covered Barton Gellman's fascinating interview with Ed Snowden, but there are some other interesting tidbits I wanted to cover in separate posts. In particular, Gellman reveals, via an anonymous source, that Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, has admitted in private that he's not actually too concerned about terrorists changing their communications habits in the wake of the Snowden revelations. Basically, he recognizes that there are lots of ways to track and to find terrorists, and if they want to communicate efficiently, sooner or later they're going to trip up and reveal themselves:

Clapper has said repeatedly in public that the leaks did great damage, but in private he has taken a more nuanced stance. A review of early damage assessments in previous espionage cases, he said in one closed-door briefing this fall, found that dire forecasts of harm were seldom borne out.

“People must communicate,” he said, according to one participant who described the confidential meeting on the condition of anonymity. “They will make mistakes, and we will exploit them.”

Of course, this is quite different than the influx of reports from reporters quoting "anonymous administration officials" in late June, who kept insisting that the NSA was somehow damaged beyond all belief because terrorists were changing how they communicated. That was clearly overblown from the very beginning for a variety of reasons. First, the serious terrorists already suspected any such communications systems were compromised and weren't using them (see, for example, how bin Laden refused to use the internet at all). Second, the claim that officials knew terrorists had changed how they communicated showed that they were able to observe the new form of communication as well, suggesting no actual (or at least no significant) loss in ability to monitor.

Either way, it's interesting to see confirmed what most of us knew: that Clapper and the other NSA defenders have known pretty much all along that Snowden didn't do any real "harm," but they had no problem fanning the flames of misleading claims to make him out to have caused serious damage.

Filed Under: barton gellman, communications, ed snowden, james clapper, nsa, surveillance

Ed Snowden: I'm Still Working For The NSA; They Are The Only Ones Who Don't Realize It

from the the-interview dept

Barton Gellman, one of the three reporters who received the original stash of documents from Ed Snowden apparently just spent some time in Russia with Snowden, and has published a fantastic interview with Snowden, weaving in various other parts of the story of everything that's happened concerning the NSA and surveillance over the past few months. It's well worth reading in its entirety (so go check it out), but we'll highlight a few key points -- many of which further debunk the claims of the NSA's defenders.

On the question of his motivations, he's clear:

"I didn't want to change society. I wanted to give society a chance to determine if it should change itself."

"All I wanted was for the public to be able to have a say in how they are governed," he said. "That is a milestone we left a long time ago. Right now, all we are looking at are stretch goals."

This is entirely consistent with what he's claimed in the past about his motives. People who keep trying to make something more of his intent have yet to show any evidence to support their wild conspiracy theories.

On the repeated claim that Snowden "broke his oath," this point has been long debunked. Former covert CIA operative, now author, Barry Eisler had debunked that one within days of Snowden revealing himself, but still people repeat that myth. Snowden more or less repeats exactly what Eisler had said back in June:

In his interview with The Post, Snowden noted matter-of-factly that Standard Form 312, the ­classified-information nondisclosure agreement, is a civil contract. He signed it, but he pledged his fealty elsewhere.

“The oath of allegiance is not an oath of secrecy,” he said. “That is an oath to the Constitution. That is the oath that I kept that Keith Alexander and James Clapper did not.”

Indeed.

On the question of whether or not he is trying to "bring down the NSA," his response is quite similar to what plenty of people have said concerning the claim that Snowden is "against America." Working to improve and reform something isn't being against it -- quite the opposite:

“I am not trying to bring down the NSA, I am working to improve the NSA,” he said. “I am still working for the NSA right now. They are the only ones who don’t realize it.”

Perhaps the most interesting sections reveal that, contrary to the claims of many -- including House Intelligence Committee boss Rep. Mike Rogers just two days ago, Snowden notes that he tried multiple times to raise his concerns internally, to no avail.

Beginning in October 2012, he said, he brought his misgivings to two superiors in the NSA’s Technology Directorate and two more in the NSA Threat Operations Center’s regional base in Hawaii. For each of them, and 15 other co-workers, Snowden said he opened a data query tool called BOUNDLESSINFORMANT, which used color-coded “heat maps” to depict the volume of data ingested by NSA taps.

His colleagues were often “astonished to learn we are collecting more in the United States on Americans than we are on Russians in Russia,” he said. Many of them were troubled, he said, and several said they did not want to know any more.

“I asked these people, ‘What do you think the public would do if this was on the front page?’ ” he said. He noted that critics have accused him of bypassing internal channels of dissent. “How is that not reporting it? How is that not raising it?” he said.

By last December, Snowden was contacting reporters, although he had not yet passed along any classified information. He continued to give his colleagues the “front-page test,” he said, until April.

In the interview, he gives at least one other example of him raising a concern -- this time about how easy it was to take documents without anyone noticing, saying he pushed for two-man control -- the security setup that the NSA has finally started implementing because of Snowden's situation. In other words, he blew the whistle internally on this massive security flaw, noting how it could be used for actual espionage, and when that failed to do anything, he used the same flawed security he warned about to leak a bunch of documents to the public.

The NSA, when contacted about these claims, had a spokesperson say that "there is no record of these conversations," which is the sort of cop out you'd expect from the NSA. It doesn't mean they didn't happen.

Snowden has a good response to the silly argument that tech companies collect all sorts of data on users as well, so why is anyone worried about the government doing the same thing:

At the NSA, he said, “there are people in the office who joke about, ‘We put warheads on foreheads.’ Twitter doesn’t put warheads on foreheads.”

Separately, Snowden notes that a key reason for the American war for independence was to rid ourselves of "general warrants" from England, allowing vast suspicionless searches, and he notes it's difficult to see how that's different than the authority the FISA Court now grants the NSA:

Snowden likened the NSA’s powers to those used by British authorities in Colonial America, when “general warrants” allowed for anyone to be searched. The FISA court, Snowden said, “is authorizing general warrants for the entire country’s metadata.”

“The last time that happened, we fought a war over it,” he said.

While there had been various reports that Snowden had set up a dead man's switch, to reveal documents in the event of his untimely demise, Snowden himself explained to Gellman why that would be stupid:

Some news accounts have quoted U.S. government officials as saying Snowden has arranged for the automated release of sensitive documents if he is arrested or harmed. There are strong reasons to doubt that, beginning with Snowden’s insistence, to this reporter and others, that he does not want the documents published in bulk.

If Snowden were fool enough to rig a “dead man’s switch,” confidants said, he would be inviting anyone who wants the documents to kill him.

Asked about such a mechanism in the Moscow interview, Snowden made a face and declined to reply. Later, he sent an encrypted message. “That sounds more like a suicide switch,” he wrote. “It wouldn’t make sense.”

On the claim that many have been making that he "defected" to Russia, Snowden points out that Russia was not where he intended to go at all, and he wouldn't be there if the US hadn't pulled his passport as he was traveling to Latin America. He insisted that he has no relationship with the Russian government at all, and explained:

“If I defected at all,” Snowden said, “I defected from the government to the public.”

I'm sure Snowden critics will dismiss pretty much all of this, but the thing that's telling to me is that it's almost entirely consistent with what he's said in the past and what all the evidence has shown so far. It's possible that he can keep up a charade for so long, but most people who are telling that kind of story slip and slip repeatedly, and Snowden doesn't seem to be slipping at all.

Oh and as for that silly prediction from former CIA and NSA boss Michael Hayden that Snowden was likely to become an alcoholic who was "isolated, bored, lonely and depressed"? None of that seems to be happening. Snowden describes how he spends much of his time online, communicating with others and following the latest news. As for the silly based-on-nothing alcoholism prediction?

To this, Snowden shrugged. He does not drink at all. Never has.

There's a lot more in there that's worth reading. Go check it out.

Filed Under: barton gellman, ed snowden, nsa

Reporter Barton Gellman Explains Why It's Extremely Unlikely The Russians Or Chinese Have Snowden's Documents

from the he-knows-what-he's-doing dept

Wednesday's Fresh Air on NPR was devoted entirely to a wonderful interview with Barton Gellman, one of the three reporters (along with Laura Poitras and Glenn Greenwald) who Edward Snowden initially gave his complete set of documents to. The whole interview is interesting, though if you've been following this story for the last few months, you'll have heard much of it before. Perhaps the two most interesting sections, however, are his discussions on Edward Snowden's intentions with all of this. Many have ascribed comically nefarious intent. Gellman has a fairly compelling explanation for why that's unlikely. First, he explains that Snowden could have easily just dumped all of these documents somewhere public:

"[Snowden] gave these documents, ultimately, to only three journalists. What he said he wanted was for us to use our own judgment and to make sure that his bias was kept out of it so that we could make our own judgment about what was newsworthy and important for the public to know. And he said we should also consider how to avoid harm.

"Now, in case anyone doubts his intentions, let's consider what he could've done. If Chelsea [aka Bradley] Manning was able to exfiltrate and send to WikiLeaks and publish in whole half a million U.S. government documents, Edward Snowden — who is far, far more capable [and] had far greater access, certainly knows how to transmit documents — he could've sent them to WikiLeaks. He could've set up and mirrored around the Internet in a way that could not have been taken down. All of the documents could be public right now and they're not. ... He told us not to do it."

Elsewhere in the discussion, he goes further:

Writing an editorial about the risk that Snowden... or that implies that Snowden is about to or may already have handed over all of his information to Wikileaks or to the Russians is entirely without evidence. It is pure speculation. There is strong evidence, now three months after his first disclosures, and more than three months after he started giving information to journalists, that he does not intend to make the whole pile public. He could have done it on the first day. He could have done it months before I ever heard of him.

He then goes on to explain why it's incredibly unlikely that Snowden gave the documents to the Russians or the Chinese, despite many assuming that to be the case.

As far as the speculation that the Chinese or Russian governments have obtained access to this information -- that they have the whole pile, so that this alleged judiciousness by the journalists is pointless -- that is not only speculative, I think I have very strong evidence that it is not the case. I know how Snowden operates. I've disclosed some of it. I have not disclosed all of it -- just because he has unmasked himself doesn't mean that there are no confidences left in the relationship.

He is exceptionally skilled at digital self-defense. In fact, one of his jobs, while he was at the NSA, and while he was employed by the CIA, was to teach courses to US national security officials about how to operate in a high-threat digital environment even on untrusted hardware -- essentially how you do secret business overseas without being surveilled by the other side.

I believe that he has rendered himself incapable of opening the archive while in Russia. That is to say, it's not only that he doesn't have the key anymore. It's that there's nothing for the key to open any more. It's that he has rendered the encrypted information literally impossible to open with what he has in his possession. He has told a former Senator in a letter that even under torture he couldn't give the information to the Russians. And that's not a boast about his alleged ability to withstand torture. That is a statement of fact about his capabilities. He simply can't open it. And that means that the Russians can't get it.

Terry Gross then asks about the claim by some that it's hypocritical of Snowden to talk up freedoms and openness... and then run to China and end up getting (temporary) asylum in Russia. Gellman explains, as we and others have in the past, how much of that is due to necessity, in part because of the US government's own bumbling response. But he also notes something more interesting and a bit deeper about Snowden's intent:

I've not heard any statement from Snowden that talks about Russia as some bastion of freedom. He has very practical reasons for being there. I mean, if he flies to some western democracy, he's going to be extradited. He doesn't want to be. It's not, purely, a question of self-preservation, although everyone has those motives. He said early on that he would like not only to expose behavior that he thinks is wrong and dangerous to American democracy, but that he also wanted to set a new kind of model for whistleblowing.

There has never been someone who came out and raised his hand and said "I did it." And there is, for practical purposes, never been someone who did this without having his life pretty much destroyed for a period of time or for a very long time. And he wanted to say "it is possible -- and here's how -- to make public disclosures that you're not authorized to make, and live a full and normal life afterwards." Not necessarily in the United States, but you can start a debate -- that many many people regard as a legitimate debate -- and find refuge somewhere. He obviously did not intend to go to Russia, he told me his first choice, if he had a choice, was Iceland, which is a very freedom protective society. He's in Russia because he got stuck there. In fact, Russian President Putin said that the United States made an elementary error of tradecraft in withdrawing his passport at the moment he was in transit to Russia. The United States actually trapped him there. He did not intend to stay.

Again, some of these answers we've heard or discussed before, including Snowden's letter to former Senator Gordon Humphrey about why the Russians could never get the information out of him. While some people bizarrely assumed this meant he thought he could resist torture, I think most people realized this meant he no longer had access to the documents himself, and thus couldn't give them up.

There's a lot more in the interview, and I highly recommend taking a listen. If only NPR had an embed feature, I'd embed it here.

Filed Under: barton gellman, china, ed snowden, encryption, russia