The Snowden Files: The Inside Story of the World's Most Wanted Man (20 page)

‘I’m saying this,’ Robbins agreed.

That afternoon, Jill Abramson of the
New York Times
and her managing editor, Dean Baquet, slipped into the
Guardian
’s London office.

The
Guardian
had 14 conditions, set out on a sheet of A4, for the collaboration.

They stipulated that both papers would work together on the material. Rusbridger knew the
Times
newsroom included reporters with deep expert knowledge of national security matters. ‘This guy is our source. I think you should treat him as your source,’ Rusbridger said. He added that neither Snowden nor Greenwald were exactly fans of the
Times
. British journalists would move in and work alongside their
Times
colleagues.

Abramson gave him a wry smile. She agreed to the conditions.

Later Abramson and Baquet arrived at Heathrow airport to fly home. Security officers pulled them to one side. Was this a random stop? Or were they looking for the GCHQ files? They didn’t find them. The documents had already been spirited across the Atlantic.

Rusbridger himself was due to go off to his regular summer ‘piano camp’ in the Lot Valley in central France.
He had recently published a book entitled
Play it Again
, an account of how he had combined demanding editing duties and the WikiLeaks story with learning Chopin’s most exacting work, ‘Ballade No. 1’. After consulting with Johnson, Rusbridger decided he might as well still go, despite all the dramas. He boarded the Eurostar train bound for Bordeaux. At first it was hard to concentrate on music. Soon, however, he immersed himself completely in Debussy.

As he worked on his piano technique, events in London now moved towards what Rusbridger would later describe as one of the strangest episodes in the
Guardian
’s long history. Robbins reappeared. ‘He was punctiliously polite, very well-mannered. There was no obvious aggression,’ Johnson says. But the official said the government wanted to seize the
Guardian
’s computers and subject them to forensic analysis. Johnson refused. He cited a duty to Snowden and to
Guardian
journalists. The deputy editor offered another way forward: to avoid being closed down, the
Guardian
would bash up its own ‘war room’ computers under GCHQ’s tutelage. Robbins agreed.

It was a parody of Luddism: men were sent in to smash the machines.

On Friday 19 July two men from GCHQ paid a visit to the
Guardian
. Their names were ‘Ian’ and ‘Chris’. They met with
Guardian
executive Sheila Fitzsimons. The Kremlin was apparently capable of techniques straight from the pages of James Bond, Ian told her: ‘You have got plastic cups on your table. Plastic cups can be turned
into microphones. The Russians can send a laser beam through your window and turn them into a listening device.’ The
Guardian
nicknamed the pair the hobbits.

Two days later the hobbits came back, this time with Robbins and a formidable civil servant called Kata. Ian, the senior of the two, was short, bubbly and dressed in shirt and chinos. His accent hinted at south Wales. Chris was taller and more taciturn. They carried a large and mysterious rucksack. Neither had previously spent any time with journalists; this was a new experience for them. In normal circumstances fraternising with the media was forbidden.

Ian explained how he would have broken into the
Guardian
’s secret war room: ‘I would have given the guard £5k and got him to install a dummy keyboard. Black ops would have got it back. We would have seen everything you did.’ (The plan made several wildly optimistic assumptions.) At this Kata shook her head: apparently Ian’s
Boy
’s
Own
contribution was unwelcome.

Ian then asked: ‘Can we have a look at the documents?’ Johnson said he couldn’t.

Next, the GCHQ team opened up their rucksack. Inside was what looked like a large microwave oven. This strange object was a degausser. Its purpose is to destroy magnetic fields, thereby erasing hard drives and data. The electronics company Thales made it. (Degaussers were named after Carl Friedrich Gauss, who gave his name to the Gauss unit of magnetism.)

The pair were not so much good cop/bad cop – more bad cop/silent cop.

Ian: ‘You’ll need one of these.’

Johnson: ‘We’ll buy our own degausser, thanks.’

Ian: ‘No you won’t. It costs £30,000.’

Johnson: ‘OK, we probably won’t then.’

The
Guardian
did agree to purchase everything else the government spy agency recommended: angle-grinders, Dremels – a drill with a revolving bit, masks. ‘There will be a lot of smoke and fire,’ Ian warned, adding, with grim relish: ‘We can call off the black helicopters now …’

At midday the next day, Saturday 20 July, the hobbits came back again. They joined Johnson, Blishen and Fitzsimons in a windowless concrete basement three floors down. The room was unoccupied, but crowded with relics from a bygone newspaper age: linotype machines used for setting pages in the 1970s, and giant letters spelling ‘The Guardian’ which had once adorned the paper’s old office in the Farringdon Road.

Dressed in jeans and T-shirts and directed by Ian, the three
Guardian
staff took it in turns to smash up bits of computer: black squares, circuit boards, chips. It was sweaty work. Soon there were sparks and flames. And a lot of dust.

Ian lamented that because of the GCHQ revelations he would no longer be able to tell his favourite joke. Ian used to go to graduate recruitment fairs looking to attract bright candidates to a career in government spying. He wrapped up his speech by saying: ‘If you want to take it further, telephone your mum and tell her. We will do the rest!’ Now, he complained, the spy agency’s press office had forbidden the gag.

As the bashing and deconstruction continued, Ian revealed he was a mathematician – and a pretty exceptional one. He said that 700 people had applied the year he joined GCHQ, 100 had been interviewed, and just three hired. ‘You must be quite clever,’ Fitzsimons observed. ‘Some people say so,’ Ian answered. Chris rolled his eyes. The two GCHQ men took photos with their iPhones. When the smashing was finally completed, the journalists fed the pieces into the degausser, like small children posting shapes into a box. Everyone stood back. Ian bent forward and watched. Nothing happened. And still nothing. Then finally a loud pop.

It had taken three hours. The data was destroyed, beyond the reach of Russian spies with trigonometric lasers. The hobbits were pleased. Blishen felt wistful. ‘There was this thing we had been protecting. It had been completely trashed,’ he says. The spooks and the
Guardian
team shook hands; Ian dashed off. (He said he was in a bit of a rush, because he had a wedding the next day.) The hobbits obviously didn’t come down to London often. They left carrying bags of shopping: presents for their families.

‘It was an extremely bizarre situation,’ Johnson says. The British government had compelled a major newspaper to smash up its own computers. This extraordinary moment was half pantomime, half-Stasi. But it was not yet the high tide of British official heavy-handedness. That was still to come.

It was an iconic commercial. To accompany the launch of the Macintosh in 1984, Steve Jobs created an advert that would captivate the world. It would take the theme of George Orwell’s celebrated dystopian novel and recast it – with Apple as Winston Smith. His plucky company would fight the tyranny of Big Brother.

As Walter Isaacson recounts in his biography of Jobs, the Apple founder was a child of the counterculture. He practised Zen Buddhism, smoked pot, walked around barefoot and pursued faddish vegetarian diets. He embodied the ‘fusion of flower power and processor power’. Even as Apple grew into a multi-billion dollar corporation, Jobs continued to identify with computing’s early subversives and long-haired pioneers – the hackers, pirates, geeks and freaks that made the future possible.

Ridley Scott of
Blade Runner
fame directed the commercial. It shows Big Brother projected on a screen, addressing lines of workers. These skinhead drones wear
identical uniforms. Into the grey nightmare bursts an attractive young woman. She wears orange shorts and a white tank top. She is carrying a hammer! Police in riot gear run after her. As Big Brother announces ‘We shall prevail’, the heroine hurls the hammer at him. The screen explodes in a blaze of light; the workers are open-mouthed. A voice announces smoothly: ‘On January 24th, Apple Computer will introduce Macintosh. And you’ll see why 1984 won’t be like
1984
.’

The 60-second advert was screened to nearly 100 million Americans during the Super Bowl, and was subsequently hailed as one of the best ever. Isaacson writes: ‘Initially the technologists and hippies didn’t interface well. Many in the counterculture saw computers as ominous and Orwellian, the province of the Pentagon and the power culture.’

The commercial asserted the opposite – that computers were cool, revolutionary and empowering, instruments of self-expression. The Macintosh was a way of asserting freedom against an all-seeing state.

Almost 30 years later, following Jobs’s death in 2011, an NSA analyst came up with a smirking rejoinder. He prepared a top-secret presentation and, to illustrate the opening slide, he pulled up a couple of stills from Jobs’s commercial – one of Big Brother, the other of the blonde heroine with the hammer and the orange shorts.

Under the heading ‘iPhone Location Services’ he typed:

‘Who knew in 1984 …’

The next slide showed the late Jobs, holding up an iPhone.

‘… that this would be Big Brother …’

A third slide showed crowds of whooping customers celebrating after buying the iPhone 4; one fan had inked the name on his cheek. The analyst’s pay-off line read:

‘… and the zombies would be paying customers.’

The zombies were the public, unaware that the iPhone offered the spy agency new snooping capabilities beyond the imagination of the original Big Brother. The ‘paying customers’ had become Orwell’s mindless drones.

For anyone who thought the digital age was about creative expression and flower power, the presentation was a shocker, and an insult to Steve Jobs’s vision. It threw dirt on the hippy kaftan and trampled on the tambourine. The identity of the NSA’s analyst is unknown. But the view appeared to reflect the thinking of an agency that in the aftermath of 9/11 grew arrogant and unaccountable. Snowden called the NSA ‘self-certifying’. In the debate over who ruled the internet, the NSA provided a dismaying answer: ‘We do.’

The slides, given to Poitras and published by
Der Spiegel
magazine, show that the NSA had developed techniques to hack into iPhones. The agency assigned specialised teams to work on other smartphones too, such as Android. It targeted BlackBerry, previously regarded as the impregnable device of choice for White House aides. The NSA can hoover up photos and voicemail. It can hack Facebook, Google Earth and Yahoo Messenger. Particularly useful is geo-data, which locates where a target has been and when. The agency collects billions of records a day showing the location of mobile phone users
across the world. It sifts them – using powerful analytics – to discover ‘co-travellers’. These are previously unknown associates of a target.

Another secret program had a logo that owed a debt to the classic 1970s Pink Floyd album
Dark Side of the Moon
. It showed a white triangle splitting light into a colourful spectrum. The program’s name was PRISM. Snowden leaked a 41-slide PowerPoint presentation explaining PRISM’s function.

One slide emphasised the dates when Silicon Valley’s technology companies apparently signed up and become corporate partners of the spy agency. The first to provide PRISM material was Microsoft. The date was 11 September 2007. This was six years after 9/11. Next came Yahoo (March 2008) and Google (January 2009). Then Facebook (June 2009), PalTalk (December 2009), YouTube (September 2010), Skype (February 2011) and AOL (March 2011). For reasons unknown, Apple held out for five years. It was the last major tech company to sign up. It joined in October 2012 – exactly a year after Jobs’s death.

The top-secret PRISM program allows the US intelligence community to gain access to a large amount of digital information – emails, Facebook posts and instant messages. The rationale is that PRISM is needed to track foreign terrorists living outside the US. The data-collection program does not apparently require individual warrants. Rather, federal judges give their broad approval to PRISM under the FISA. By the time Snowden revealed PRISM, at least nine technology
companies were on board. (The slides show Dropbox was slated to join; Twitter was missing.)

The most bitter and contentious question is how the NSA accesses this personal data. The key slide claims the data is collected ‘directly from the servers’ of the nine ‘US service providers’, Google, Yahoo and the rest.

Speaking in Hong Kong, Snowden was adamant this ‘direct access’ was indeed how PRISM worked. He told Greenwald: ‘The US government co-opts US corporate power to its own ends. Companies such as Google, Facebook, Apple and Microsoft all get together with the NSA. [They] provide the NSA direct access to the backends of all of the systems you use to communicate, to store data, to put things in the cloud, and even just to send birthday wishes and keep a record of your life. They give [the] NSA direct access, so that they don’t need to oversee, so they can’t be held liable for it.’

The leaked PRISM documents come from a training manual for NSA staff. It sets out several steps. First, a complex ‘tasking’ process. Analysts use or ‘task’ PRISM to find a new surveillance target. Next, a supervisor reviews the analyst’s search terms, known as selectors. After that the supervisor then has to agree with the analyst’s ‘reasonable belief’ the target lives outside the US. (This bar is pretty low, and defined as ‘51 per cent confidence’.)