By John Pickard
Edward Snowden’s autobiography, Permanent Record, is an account of how a fairly ordinary and ‘patriotic’ American youth came to be one the most famous whistle-blowers of modern times. It is also a serious reminder to all internet and social media users that The Man is watching you.
Snowden didn’t set out to spill the beans on the US National Security Agency and the rest of the Intelligence Community. As his book shows, after 9/11 he was carried along with the same wave of outraged patriotism as the big majority of Americans. So much so, that he disappointed his parents by enlisting in the US Army. It was only as a result of an accident in training that his military career was cut short after a few months.
Finding his way into the world of Information Technology, he eventually began working on contracts for different parts of the US state’s security apparatus. This vast security machine has many different branches, but the three best-known are the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the National Security Agency (NSA). It was the latter two with which Snowden’s work was most closely related and in whose facilities he worked, usually as a contractor.
The story of the contracting-out of state IT work is a story in itself. Imagine asking for a salary of $30,000 and being offered $60,000! “I only later discovered, Snowden explained, “…that some of the contracts were of the type that’s called ‘cost-plus’. This means that the middle-men contractors billed the agencies for whatever an employee got paid, plus a fee of 3 or 5 per cent of that every year. Bumping up salaries was in everyone’s interest – everyone’s, that is, except the taxpayer’s.” As it is in Britain and elsewhere, the state, among other things, acts as a lucrative and never-ending source of contracts and exorbitant profits for big business. In the UK, think of the ballooning costs in Defence contracts. Think of HS2.
“At the CIA, we try to collect everything…”
Among the documents Snowden provided to journalists was the so-called black budget. “This is a classified budget in which over 68 per cent of its money, $52.6bn, was dedicated to the IC, including funding for 107,035 IC employees – more than a fifth of whom, some 21,800 people, were full-time contractors. And that number doesn’t even include the tens of thousands more employed by companies that have signed contracts (or subcontracts) with the agencies for a specific service or project.”
Having found his way into the world of the Intelligence Community (IC) , Snowden’s IT skills soon pushed him higher and higher so by the time of the financial crash in 2008, he was already earning $60,000, which was already a huge sum compared to most earners.
But his extensive contacts and networking within the IC soon led him to realise the extent to which the various branches of the state’s security apparatus had the ability to keep tabs on anyone, anywhere. As he came near to a clearer understanding of the scale of the state’s intelligence gathering, he even came across a video of a lecture given by the chief technology officer of the CIA, Gus ‘Ira’ Hunt, in 2013. “At the CIA” Hunt said, “we fundamentally try to collect everything and hang on to it forever.”
There are many varied aspects of the IC’s spying capability and many different branches of the US Intelligence Community, but the NSA listening capability is centred on a programme called PRISM. This programme, Snowden explains, “enabled the NSA to routinely collect data from Microsoft, Yahoo!, Google, Facebook, Paltalk, YouTube, Skype, AOL and Apple, including e-mail, photos, video and audio chats, web-browsing content, search-engine queries, and all other data on their clouds, transforming the companies into witting co-conspirators.”
As we discovered at the time that PRISM was exposed in The Guardian and other newspapers, it can spy on you whether or not your phone is switched on and it even works through some TV sets.
It is important to make the point also that United States have up till now utterly dominated global IT structures with giant companies like IBM, Dell, Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple, Intel. Qualcom and Cisco. These companies are subject to American law, Snowden points out. “The problem is, they’re also subject to classified American policies that pervert law and permit the US government to surveil virtually every man, woman, and child who has ever touched a computer or picked up a phone.”
Justification is always the threat of ‘terrorism’
Much of the friction between the Unites States today is not really over the balance of trade so much as the fear on the part of the USA of China catching up technologically with the USA. In the long run, high technological capability translates into high military capability and the Sino-US differences are a geopolitical not a trading issue.
Where is all this data held? Among other places, Snowden described the Mission Data Repository being constructed in the state of Utah. “The MDR was projected to contain a total of four twenty-five-thousand-square-foot halls, filled with servers. It could hold an immense amount of data, basically a rolling history of the entire planet’s pattern of life, insofar as life can be understood through the connection of payments to people, people to phones, phones to calls, calls to networks, and the synoptic array of Internet activity moving along those networks’ lines.”
Snowden came to realise that he personally – like other security-cleared IC employees – could spy on anyone, anywhere. “I sat at a terminal from which I had practically unlimited access to the communications of nearly every man, woman and child on earth who’d ever dialled a phone or touched a computer.”
The justification for snooping on everyone was, as it is in the UK, the ‘threat of terrorism’. “the repeated evocations of terror by the political class,” Snowden writes, “were not a response to any specific threat or concern but a cynical attempt to turn terror into a permanent danger that required permanent vigilance enforced by unquestionable authority.”
It has to be taken as read that the other four members of the ‘Five Eyes’ security treaty, UK (whose GCHQ is the closest collaborator of the NSA), Canada, Australia and New Zealand, are able to surveil their population in exactly the same way and to share international data with each other and the USA.
Snowden ended up in Moscow by accident
Eventually, Snowden thought he had no option but to go public and he arranged (very, very carefully) to extract the proof from the NSA system and meet journalists in Hong Kong. From that point on there was no going back.
There was such a furore that new congressional acts were passed to limit the surveillance of US citizens, but given that the NSA were always outside the law in the first place, there is no guarantee whatsoever that they are abiding by the new laws and legal ‘oversight’. On the contrary, in all likelihood, they aren’t; they have the ability to see everything you do and they are probably keeping tabs on you as you read this on line now.
A useful outcome of the Snowden revelations, besides alerting us to the ubiquity of state surveillance is the growth of new open-source (and therefore free of private or state control) applications that are encrypted. Signal is an application you can put on your smart phone and it works like WhatsApp, but is encrypted. When there are big social movements in places like Iraq, Iran, South Africa and elsewhere, one of the first things the government will do is shut down the internet, rather than just rely on surveillance.
Snowden ended up in Moscow, but that was by accident. He was going to go to Ecuador, via Moscow and via Havana, but on his stopover in Moscow, he learned that the USA had cancelled his passport so he could not travel any further. After spending forty days in the airport, and being refused asylum by dozens of states terrified of US retribution, he was given asylum in Russia. Snowden’s original decision to go public was a complete surprise to his family and his girlfriend and it must have taken a special kind of personal courage and commitment to do what he did. He has now been living in Moscow for over six years but has at least been joined there by his girlfriend, now his wife.
Permanent Record, is an interesting book, easy to read and digest, dealing as it does with what started out as an ‘ordinary’ life. But its subject matter in the end is very hard to swallow and it carries serious implications for socialists and activists in the labour movement. We can and we should use the internet and social media to develop, extend and consolidate our movement; but in the final analysis we can only succeed as a movement of people not e-mails or IP addresses.
January 23, 2020
