Snowden, Greenwald & the NSA

This evening, Rob and I watched NBC’s anchor, Brian Williams, interview Edward Snowden, the first interview for American TV that Snowden has done. And he came across exactly as Glenn Greenwald, the journalist who broke the story, described him in his book No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the U.S. Surveillance State. He seemed completely at peace with what he’d done.

Snowden was articulate, calm, pensive, and utterly convincing in his reasons for having taken thousands of NSA documents and fleeing the country with them. As he noted, sometimes to do the right thing, you have to break the law. And, according to the U.S. government he definitely broke the law, has been called a traitor for “compromising the security of the U.S,” and there were outcries that he should return to this country and be tried for what he did.

But if Snowden returned to the U.S., he would end up like Bradley Manning, the soldier who turned over documents to Julian Assange and was sentenced to 35 years. He would be instantly silenced, like Bradley. He’s a whistleblower, not a traitor.

“Can you show that I have damaged my government?” he said to Williams.

Williams asked what his life was like as an exile in Russia. Snowden commented on the irony that he had ended up in Russia, a country not exactly known for democracy. It sounded like the dark synchro trickster was at work with that one.

One of the most interesting segments of the interview involved a phone. Williams remarked that he’d read that a simple cell phone could be turned on remotely by intelligence agencies in the U.S. China, Russia. He brought out his “burner” phone that he’d carried to Russia with him to cover the Olympics. A “burner” is typically used by drug dealers.

Williams admitted that he’d used the phone once to check on the score for a sports game in the U.S. Snowden looked at the phone and sort of laughed. “It’s an expensive burner. But any intelligence agency can own that phone as soon as it connects with their network,” And the fact that Williams had used it to check on the score for a sports game would tell any intelligence agency quite a bit about his lifestyle, his psychological profile, who he is. That’s part of what systems analysts do.

The capabilities of the NSA are uncontrolled and unregulated, Snowden said, and the extent to which this appears to be true is staggering. A recent article in the Huffington Post certainly underscored that point. And according to Greenwald’s book, for a one-month period beginning on March 8, 2013, BOUNDLESS INFORMANT, one of the NSA’s data mining programs, collected data on more than 97 billion emails and 124 billion phone calls from around the world.

When I first saw those numbers, I thought, well, there’s no way they can sift through all that data in this lifetime, so my privacy is safe. But what do I have to hide? Zip. Nothing. But that really isn’t the point.  Even though the NSA’s focus is defined by statute on “foreign intelligence,” some of the documents Snowden took clearly show otherwise. On April 25, 2013, a top secret order from the FISA court was issued, “compelling Verizon to turn over to the NSA all information about its American customers’ telephone calls,” Greenwald wrote.

This bulk telephone collection program was just one of the Orwellian atrocities established under the Bush administration and expanded under Obama. PRISM collects data directly from the servers of the Internet’s largest companies. MUSCULAR was a surveillance program intended to invade private networks of Google and Yahoo.

“Taken in its entirety,” Greenwald writes, “the Snowden archive led to an ultimate simple conclusion: the U.S. government had built a system that has as its goal the complete elimination of electronic privacy worldwide…The agency is devoted to one overarching missions: to prevent the slightest piece of electronic communication from evading its systemic grasp.”

And it’s all done in the name of the war against terrorism, as a result of 9-11. Snowden notes that he was inspired by Obama’s call for change. But the change never happened.

I voted for Obama – twice. I believed in his call for change. I believed what he said. Our situation now would have been far worse under either McCain/Palin (wink, wink)  or  Romney/Ryan (Atlas Shrugged is my bible, Ayn Rand is my god) but none of that excuses Obama’ expansion of Bush’s programs. None of his rhetoric explains why no one in the Bush administration was charged with war crimes. Snowden notes some of this in his interview with Williams and Greenwald discusses it in his book, which reads like a political thriller.

Snowden’s leaks caused not only a political firestorm, but triggered conversations nationwide about privacy in the age of the Internet. About how the world has changed since 9-11. Conversation is good; it bring the darkness out into the open and demands an explanation.

But the bottom line is that Orwell’s novel, 1984, was right, just 30 years too early. If you or I run a stoplight now, a camera mounted above the road records it and in a couple of weeks, we receive a ticket in the mail. If I Google you or you Google me, you can find out if I have an arrest record, my marital status, the names of my parents, where I went to college, where I was born, and whether I own my home. If you’re robbed in the parking lot of your mall, it will be on a security tape somewhere.

Our daughter’s twenty something friends routinely run Google checks on guys they meet to find out if they’re who they say they are. In her generation, you become a couple via Facebook – and break up the same way. Publicly, explicitly.

I think of Robert DeNiro in the comedy Meet the Frockers. He plays an anxious father who looks at his daughter’s fiancé (Ben Stiller) and brings his index and third fingers just under his eyes, then points them at Stiller. I’m watching you.

 Hello, Big Brother.