The Snowden Revelations

JUN 06 2013 · 12:00

Edward Snowden, the former NSA contractor whose leaks to The Guardian and Washington Post broke in June 2013. Place: The Guardian, London; The Washington Post, Washington Figures: Edward Snowden, NSA contractor · Glenn Greenwald, journalist · Laura Poitras, filmmaker · Barton Gellman, journalist · James Clapper, US Director of National Intelligence (had testified to Congress in March that the NSA did not collect data on millions of Americans) The Hong Kong Hotel Room Edward Snowden, 29 years old, an NSA infrastructure contractor with broad systems-administrator access, has been copying documents for months. He flies to Hong Kong on 20 May 2013 with four laptops of classified material. He meets Greenwald, Poitras, and Ewen MacAskill at the Mira Hotel. The first story, on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court order compelling Verizon to hand over all domestic call metadata, runs in The Guardian on 5 June. PRISM, the program collecting from Google, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft, Yahoo, YouTube, Skype, and AOL, runs in both papers on 6 June. Over the following months the revelations expand. XKeyscore (searchable surveillance of nearly all internet activity). Tempora (UK GCHQ tapping of transatlantic fiber cables). Bullrun (NSA sabotage of commercial encryption standards). The bugging of Angela Merkel's personal phone. The bugging of Dilma Rousseff's office. The bugging of UN secretariat communications, of EU offices in Washington and at the UN, of OPEC. What the Westphalian Communications Were Made Of The structural revelation is not that intelligence services spy. It is that the digital infrastructure on which contemporary Westphalian states conduct their sovereign business (Google's email, Microsoft's operating systems, Facebook's social graph, undersea fiber owned by US-listed companies) runs largely on platforms that one state's intelligence services treat, with legal sanction, as their own. Merkel's Abhören unter Freunden, das geht gar nicht (eavesdropping among friends, that simply isn't done) acknowledges that the friendship has been one-sided. Snowden, charged under the Espionage Act, flies to Moscow on 23 June. The United States revokes his passport while he is in transit. He receives Russian temporary asylum and then, after years, citizenship. Brazil and Germany jointly draft UN General Assembly resolution 68/167 on the right to privacy in the digital age. The EU passes the GDPR in 2016. End-to-end encryption deploys to Signal, then WhatsApp, then iMessage. Nothing replaces the underlying architecture. The disclosure is metabolized; the dependency remains. Video: The Guardian's first published interview with Edward Snowden, filmed in Hong Kong in June 2013 by Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras.