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.
10
DON’T BE EVIL
‘Until they become conscious, they will never rebel.’
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.