The main US agency for setting security norms in cyberspace is the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). It appears the NSA has corrupted this, too. A Snowden document reveals that in 2006 the NSA put a back door into one of the institute’s main encryption standards. (The standard generates random prime numbers used to encode text.) The agency then encouraged another international standards body – and the rest of the world – to adopt it, boasting: ‘Eventually the NSA became the sole editor.’
Both US and UK agencies have also devoted considerable efforts to cracking Tor, the popular tool to protect online anonymity. Ironically, the US government is one of Tor’s biggest backers. The State Department and the Department of Defense – which houses the NSA – provide around 60 per cent of its funding. The reason is simple: journalists, activists and campaigners in authoritarian countries such as Iran use Tor to protect themselves from political reprisals and online censorship.
Thus far, however, the NSA and GCHQ have been unable to de-anonymise most Tor traffic. Instead, the agencies have attacked web browsers such as Firefox, which allows them control over a target’s end computer. They have also developed the ability to ‘stain’ some traffic as it bounces around the Tor system.
Despite their best endeavours, the truth appears to be that NSA and GCHQ have not yet won cryptography’s new civil war. With the right training and some technical expertise, corporations and individuals (as well, no doubt, as terrorists and paedophiles) are still successfully using cryptography to protect their privacy.
In a Q&A with Guardian readers while in hiding in Hong Kong, Snowden himself said: ‘Encryption works. Properly implemented strong crypto systems are one of the few things that you can rely on.’
And he should know.
11
FLIGHT
‘We always imagine eternity as something beyond our conception, something vast. But why must it be vast? Instead of all that, what if it’s one little room, like a bath house in the country, black and grimy and spiders in every corner, and that’s all eternity is?’
Ed Snowden went underground after hastily checking out of the Mira Hotel in Hong Kong. His local legal team, barrister Robert Tibbo and solicitor Jonathan Man, knew where he was. So did someone else. Snowden had a mystery guardian angel – a well-connected Hong Kong resident. The American’s interest in China was long-standing, dating back to his time with the CIA in Geneva and his support for the Free Tibet movement.
The precise details are murky. But it appears this benefactor invited Snowden to stay with one of his friends. Another lawyer, Albert Ho, says that Snowden shifted between several homes, staying in at least one house in the New Territories area, close to the border with mainland China. He was lost in a densely packed metropolis of seven million people.
Tibbo, a human rights lawyer, was used to dealing with clients in bad situations. A Canadian by nationality, with a pleasant manner, a smart blazer and a receding hairline, Tibbo represented the vulnerable and the downtrodden – Sri Lankans facing deportation, Pakistanis wrongly denied asylum, abused refugees.
One of his cases dated back to the darkest chapter of the Tony Blair era. In 2004, the Libyan Islamist Sami al-Saadi arrived in Hong Kong with his wife and family. He thought he was travelling back to the UK, his old home. Instead, MI6, working closely with Muammar Gaddafi’s intelligence services, bundled him on a plane back to Tripoli. There, Saadi was interrogated, tortured and imprisoned. Shortly afterwards, Blair, the then British prime minister, struck a deal with the Libyan dictator. MI6’s discreditable role in the affair emerged after Gaddafi’s 2011 fall.
Like Saadi, Snowden was another client whom, he feared, western intelligence services would render and then imprison in a dark, damp hole. Tibbo and Snowden first met after he slipped out of the Mira Hotel. The lawyer refuses to talk about the details, citing client confidentiality. But he evidently considered Snowden to be bright, a rational actor who was making his own conscience-driven choices. And a young man in a whole pile of trouble. Over the next two weeks Tibbo would juggle his regular case-load while working on Snowden’s behalf, often through the night.
The lawyers were soon sucked into Snowden’s cloak-and-dagger world. Albert Ho describes a rendezvous. He got into a car one night at an agreed spot and found Snowden inside, wearing a hat and sunglasses. Snowden didn’t speak, the lawyer told the Washington Post. When they arrived at the home where Snowden was staying he whispered that everyone had to hide their phones in the refrigerator. Over the next two hours the lawyers went through his options with him. Ho brought dinner: pizza, sausages and chicken wings, washed down with Pepsi. ‘I don’t think he ever had a well-thought-out plan. I really think he’s a kid,’ Ho said afterwards.
The lawyers’ assessment was negative. It was possible that Snowden might eventually prevail in a battle against US extradition. But in the meantime the most likely option was that he would sit in jail while the Hong Kong courts considered his asylum claim. This legal tussle could drag on for years. Snowden was horrified to discover that behind bars he would have no access to a computer.
He didn’t mind being confined in a small room. But the idea of being exiled from the internet was repugnant to him. ‘He didn’t go out, he spent all his time inside a tiny space, but he said it was OK because he had his computer,’ Ho told the New York Times. ‘If you were to deprive him of his computer, that would be totally intolerable.’
After the meeting, Ho was asked to take soundings from the Hong Kong government. Would Snowden get bail if arrested? Could he somehow flee the country? The whistleblower presented a dilemma for Hong Kong’s administrators. The territory is part of China but governed under the ‘one country, two systems’ framework; it has notional autonomy but Beijing retains ultimate responsibility for foreign affairs.
On the one hand, China’s spies would certainly be interested in keeping Snowden, if they could get access to his tens of thousands of highly sensitive NSA documents, revealing the ambit and protocols of American surveillance. On the other hand, if Hong Kong refused to repatriate him, this would place Sino–American relations under great strain. Already the US was piling on the pressure. A major international row would be an unwelcome distraction.
There were other factors, too. Snowden’s case might raise uncomfortable questions at home for the Chinese authorities. Many Chinese citizens were unaware that their own security services also engaged in domestic spying, with phone hacking, email and postal interception rampant, not to mention censorship. Holding on to Snowden could set off an uncomfortable internal debate over matters currently under the table.
Hong Kong’s chief executive Leung Chun-ying held numerous meetings with his top advisers, it was reported, struggling to decide what to do over a thorny US request for Snowden’s detention.
Public opinion in Hong Kong was largely pro-Snowden, boosted by some carefully targeted disclosures. On 12 June Snowden gave an interview from hiding to the South China Morning Post. In it, he revealed that the US hacked millions of China’s private text messages. ‘The NSA does all kinds of things like hack Chinese mobile phone companies to steal all of your SMS data,’ he told the paper. The agency had also, he alleged, attacked China’s prestigious Tsinghua University, the hub of a major digital network from which the data on millions of Chinese citizens could be harvested.