Luke Harding: The Snowden Files

A couple of users called him out on this, one posting: ‘Yeah! Fuck old people!’

TheTrueHOOHA responded with fury. He wrote: ‘You fucking retards… my grandmother is eighty fucking three this year and, you know what, she still supports herself as a goddamned hairdresser… maybe when you grow up and actually pay taxes, you’ll understand.’

Another topic made him even angrier. The Snowden of 2009 inveighed against government officials who leaked classified information to newspapers – the worst crime conceivable, in Snowden’s apoplectic view. In January of that year the New York Times published a report on a secret Israeli plan to attack Iran. It said that President Bush had ‘deflected’ a request from Israel for specialised bunker-busting bombs to carry out the risky mission. Instead Bush had told the Israelis he had authorised ‘new covert action’ to sabotage Iran’s suspected nuclear-weapons programme.

The Times said its story was based on 15 months’ worth of interviews with current and former US officials, European and Israeli officials, other experts and international nuclear inspectors.

TheTrueHOOHA’s response, published by Ars Technica, is worth quoting in full:

HOLY SHIT http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/11/washington/11iran.html?_r=1&hp

WTF NYTIMES

Are they TRYING to start a war? Jesus christ they’re like wikileaks

they’re just reporting, dude.

They’re reporting classified shit

Shrugs

about an unpopular country surrounded by enemies already engaged in a war and about our interactions with said country regarding planning sovereignty violations of another country

you don’t put that shit in the NEWSPAPER

Meh

moreover, who the fuck are the anonymous sources telling them this?

those people should be shot in the balls.

‘But the tense exchanges also prompted the White House to step up intelligence-sharing with Israel and brief Israeli officials on new American efforts to subtly sabotage Iran’s nuclear infrastructure, a major covert program that Mr. Bush is about to hand off to President-elect Barack Obama.’

HELLO? HOW COVERT IS IT NOW? THANK YOU

Meh

I wonder how many hundreds of millions of dollars they just completely blew.

You’re over-reacting. It’s fine.

It’s not an overreaction. They have a HISTORY of this shit

with flowers and cake.

these are the same people who blew the whole ‘we could listen to osama’s cell phone’ thing the same people who screwed us on wiretapping over and over and over again. Thank God they’re going out of business

the NYT?

Hopefully they’ll finally go bankrupt this year. yeah.

A few minutes later the chat continues:

It’s nice they report on stuff.

I enjoy it when it’s ethical reporting.

political corruption, sure

scandal, yes

is it unethical to report on the government’s intrigue?

VIOLATING NATIONAL SECURITY? no

meh.

national security.

Um, YEEEEEEEEEEEES.

that shit is classified for a reason

it’s not because ‘oh we hope our citizens don’t find out’

it’s because ‘this shit won’t work if iran knows what we’re doing.’

Shrugs

‘None would speak on the record because of the great secrecy surrounding the intelligence developed on Iran.’

direct. quote.

THEN WHY ARE YOU TALKING TO REPORTERS?!

‘Those covert operations, and the question of whether Israel will settle for something less than a conventional attack on Iran, pose immediate and wrenching decisions for Mr. Obama.’

THEY’RE NOT COVERT ANYMORE

Oh you’ve got to be fucking kidding me. Now the NYTimes is going to determine our foreign policy?

And Obama?

Obama just appointed a fucking POLITICIAN to run the CIA!

yes unlike every other director of CIA ever

oh wait, no

I am so angry right now. This is completely unbelievable.

The ‘fucking politician’ was Leon Panetta, appointed by Obama in 2009 despite his evident lack of intelligence background. The appointment was supposed to draw a line under the intelligence scandals of the Bush years – the renditions, the secret CIA prisons and the illegal wiretapping.

Snowden evidently knew of WikiLeaks, a niche transparency website whose story would later intersect with his own. But he didn’t like it. At this point, Snowden’s antipathy towards the New York Times was based on his opinion that ‘they are worse than Wikileaks’. Later, however, he would go on to accuse the paper of not publishing quickly enough and of sitting on unambiguous evidence of White House illegality. These are somewhat contradictory views.

Certainly Snowden’s anti-leaking invective seems stunningly at odds with his own later behaviour. But there is a difference between what the Times arguably did – reveal details of sensitive covert operations – and what Snowden would do in 2013. Snowden nowadays explains: ‘Most of the secrets the CIA has are about people, not machines and systems, so I didn’t feel comfortable with disclosures that I thought could endanger anyone.’

In fact, Snowden would trace the beginning of his own disillusionment with government spying to this time in Switzerland, and to the near-three years he spent around CIA officers. His friend Mavanee Anderson, a legal intern working for the US mission to the UN in Geneva at that time, describes him as quiet, thoughtful, introspective, and someone who carefully weighed up the consequences of any action. By the end of his Geneva stint, she claims Snowden was experiencing a ‘crisis of conscience’.

Snowden later spoke of a formative incident. He told Greenwald that CIA operatives tried to recruit a Swiss banker in order to get hold of secret financial information. Snowden said they pulled this off by getting the banker drunk and then encouraging him to drive home, which he foolishly did. The Swiss police arrested him. The undercover agent offered to help, and exploited the incident successfully to befriend and then recruit the banker.

‘Much of what I saw in Geneva really disillusioned me about how my government functions and what its impact is in the world. I realised that I was part of something that was doing far more harm than good,’ he said.

Any decision to spill US government secrets as a result was inchoate, an idea slowly forming in Snowden’s head. Nor, it appears, had he yet seen the most contentious documents he was later to leak. Snowden says that he was ready to give President Obama the benefit of the doubt, and was waiting for him to reverse the most egregious civil liberties abuses of the Bush era. They included Guantanamo Bay, a US military dumping ground for fighters rounded up on the battlefield, some of whom had no connection with extremism or al-Qaida, and yet who languished for years without trial.

Snowden wanted Obama to bring to account those from Team Bush who were responsible: ‘Obama’s campaign promises and election gave me faith that he would lead us toward fixing the problems he outlined in his quest for votes. Many Americans felt similarly. Unfortunately, shortly after assuming power, he closed the door on investigating systemic violations of law, deepened and expanded several abusive programmes, and refused to spend the political capital to end the kind of human rights violations we see in Guantanamo, where men still sit without charge.’

What did Snowden’s bosses know of his unhappy state of mind? In 2009 Snowden fell out with one of his Geneva colleagues. He gave an account of the incident to the New York Times ’s James Risen. According to Risen, Snowden was keen to get promoted but got embroiled in a ‘petty email spat’ with a superior, whose judgement he challenged. Months later, Snowden was filling in his annual CIA self-evaluation form. He detected flaws in the personnel web application and pointed those out to his boss. His boss told him to drop it but eventually agreed to allow Snowden to test the system’s susceptibility to hacking.