It has been a month since the Guardian and Washington Post newspapers began releasing articles based upon leaked information reputedly from a source inside the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA). I have waited to say much about the NSA leaks, which have been focused primarily on the heretofore-unknown PRISM program, largely because, despite the enormous volume of reporting and opinion generated on it and the leaker, there is very little factual information for the public to consider. That should change.
I was incredibly surprised to see Glenn Greenwald, the Guardian columnist who broke the NSA surveillance story, appear from Hong Kong on the morning political shows on Sunday, June 9, the day after the Obama-Xi summit in California. When Edward Snowden revealed himself as the NSA leaker later that day from the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, Greenwald and Snowden were together on Chinese soil. How strange. Had Snowden defected to China? Do people still defect at all?
Since then, Snowden has moved on to Russia, a place that saw its share of U.S. defectors earlier in the Cold War. The defection of NSA mathematicians William H. Martin and Bernon F. Mitchell to the Soviet Union in 1960 makes for interesting reading, and several journalists have picked up their case in study of Snowden. One of the more meaningful comments on the Martin-Mitchell defection was their surprise that the Soviet Union was not willing to pull them into meaningful work despite their cryptographic knowledge. It does not appear that Snowden intends to defect and does want to remain very much plugged into cyberspace.
Things have been getting rather nutty in and out of Russia regarding Snowden. Vladimir Putin stated of the former NSA contractor: “If he wants to stay here, there is one condition: he must stop his activities aimed at inflicting damage to our American partners, no matter how strange it may sound on my lips.” When rumor spread of Snowden being aboard Bolivian president Evo Morales’s plane, it was forced to land in Austria after being denied landing rights in Portugal or access to French airspace.
Edward Snowden apparently remains in transit. We are left to figure out how right or wrong Snowden has been, how right or wrong the U.S. government monitoring has been, and how flawed the process of monitoring the Internet to collect intelligence (something I call webtapping) has been with regard to the liberties of U.S. citizens and the billions of users around the globe of computing and information technologies designed, constructed, and managed by U.S. firms. We are at the point of asking, to what degree has the U.S. government eroded privacy in the interest of collecting intelligence designed to prevent terror attacks and is it worth it?
I echo the call my colleague Joe Barnes made in asking for more information to inform our citizenry about what sort of intelligence we are getting for our butter. September 11 caused many things to change in the way the organs of national security function in the United States. The most important shift was in moving the focus of intelligence analysis from the leaders, diplomats and soldiers of countries to the more loosely affiliated terror groups and radicalized individuals. Those efforts have been fairly successful. I still believe what I told Scientific American’s Erin Brodwin in regard to the efficacy of continued drone strikes in Pakistan, Somalia, Yemen and other semi-governed places: “The U.S. has managed the terrorism problem effectively for over a decade now.” Now the nation is asking to what degree this is all necessary, which is a good debate to be had. With haste, I encourage everyone with a Facebook account to read that company’s terms of service before calling their elected officials, the NSA and the rest of the intelligence community to the mat. Ask what government has stolen from you, and what you have given away.
Christopher Bronk is the Baker Institute fellow in information technology policy. He previously served as a career diplomat with the U.S. Department of State on assignments in Mexico, overseas and Washington, D.C.