As soon as Snowden arrived in Russia, one question began to be asked with increasing intensity: had the Russians got hold of Snowden’s NSA documents? On 24 June, the New York Times quoted ‘two western intelligence experts’ who ‘worked for major government spy agencies’. Without offering any evidence, the experts said they believed that the Chinese government had managed to drain the contents of the four laptops Snowden brought to Hong Kong.
Snowden categorically denies these media claims, which spread rapidly. He also insists he has not shared any NSA material with Moscow. ‘I never gave any information to either government and they never took anything from my laptops,’ Snowden told Greenwald in July in two interviews. Greenwald would furiously defend Snowden against the charge.
Snowden was extremely good at digital self-defence. When he was employed by the CIA and NSA one of his jobs was to teach US national security officials and CIA employees how to protect their data in high-threat digital environments. He taught classes at the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), which provides top-grade foreign military intelligence to the US Department of Defense. Paradoxically, Snowden now found himself in precisely the kind of hostile environment he had lectured on, surrounded by agents from a foreign intelligence agency.
Snowden corresponded about this with Gordon Humphrey, a former two-term Republican senator from New Hampshire. In a letter to ‘Mr Snowden’, Humphrey wrote: ‘Provided you have not leaked information that would put in harm’s way any intelligence agent, I believe you have done the right thing in exposing what I regard as a massive violation of the United States constitution.’ (Humphrey also called Snowden a ‘courageous whistleblower’ who had unearthed the ‘growing arrogance of our government’.)
Snowden’s reply is worth quoting in fulclass="underline"
Mr Humphrey
Thank you for your words of support. I only wish more of our lawmakers shared your principles – the actions I’ve taken would not have been necessary.
The media has distorted my actions and intentions to distract from the substance of constitutional violations and instead focus on personalities. It seems they believe every modern narrative requires a bad guy. Perhaps it does. Perhaps in such times, loving one’s country means being hated by its government.
If history proves that be so, I will not shy from that hatred. I will not hesitate to wear those charges of villainy for the rest of my life as a civic duty, allowing those governing few who dared not do so themselves to use me as an excuse to right these wrongs.
My intention, which I outlined when this began, is to inform the public as to that which is done in their name and that which is done against them. I remain committed to that. Though reporters and officials may never believe it, I have not provided any information that would harm our people – agent or not – and I have no intention of doing so.
Further, no intelligence service – not even our own – has the capacity to compromise the secrets I continue to protect. While it has not been reported in the media, one of my specialisations was to teach our people at DIA how to keep such information from being compromised even in the highest-threat counter-intelligence environments (i.e. China).
You may rest easy knowing I cannot be coerced into revealing that information, even under torture.
The letter set out cardinal Snowdon themes: love of country, civic duty, a desire to protect the constitution. Its tone was high-minded and in parts melodramatic: ‘If history proves that to be so, I will not shy…’ But it left no doubt that Snowden was aware of the peril from hostile foreign intelligence agencies, and that he had taken extreme steps to keep his material safe.
Barton Gellman of the Washington Post, one of Snowden’s few early interlocutors, says that he believes Snowden had put the data beyond reach. ‘I think he rendered himself incapable of opening the archive while he is in Russia,’ Gellman told US radio network NPR. He added: ‘It isn’t that he doesn’t have the key any more. It’s that there is nothing to open any more. He rendered the encryption information impossible to open while he is in Russia.’
But none of this, of course, meant the Kremlin was uninterested in the contents of Snowden’s laptops. The FSB was adept at electronic surveillance. Like its KGB predecessor, its procedures involved bugging, hidden video cameras and entrapment. Unlike the NSA, the FSB also used what might be called ‘suspicion-ful’ surveillance. With western intelligence agencies, the idea was to monitor a target without him or her ever knowing about it. The FSB, by contrast, also engaged in ‘demonstrativnaya slezhka’, demonstrative pursuit.
Using tactics perfected by the 1970s Stasi, East Germany’s secret police, the FSB would break into the homes of so-called enemies. Typically these were western diplomats and some foreign journalists. But the FSB also played a leading role in the suppression of internal dissent, and targeted Russians too, including those working for US or British embassies. A team of agents would break into a target’s flat. They would leave clues that they had been there – open windows, central heating disconnected, mysterious alarms, phones taken off the hook, sex manuals by the side of the bed.
These methods of psychological intimidation became more pervasive during Putin’s second 2004–2008 presidential term, as Kremlin paranoia at the prospect of a pro-reform Orange-style revolution grew. In 2009 the then US ambassador John Beyrle wrote a frank cable to the US State Department, one of several thousand written from Russia and leaked by Chelsea Manning. It read: ‘Harassing activity against all embassy personnel has spiked in the past several months to a level not seen in many years. Embassy staff have suffered personally slanderous and falsely prurient attacks in the media. Family members have been the victims of psychologically terrifying assertions that their USG [United States government] employee spouses had met accidental deaths. Home intrusions have become far more common and bold, and activity against our locally engaged staff continues at a record pace. We have no doubt that this activity originates in the FSB.’
This, then, was the FSB. Ironically, the Kremlin’s security services also carried out widespread NSA-style surveillance on the Russian population.
Russia’s nationwide system of remote interception is called SORM. The KGB developed SORM’s technical foundations in the mid-1980s; it has been updated to take account of rapid technological change. SORM-1 captures telephone and mobile phone communications, SORM-2 intercepts internet traffic, and SORM-3 collects data from all communications including content and recordings, and stores them long-term.
The oversight mechanism in the US may have been broken, but in Russia it didn’t exist. Snowden’s documents showed that the NSA compelled phone operators and internet service providers to give information on their customers. Secret FISA court orders made this process legal. The companies could – and would – contest these orders in court, and argued they should be allowed to reveal more detail of what the government agencies were demanding.
In Russia FSB officers also needed a court order to eavesdrop on a target. Once they had it they didn’t need to show the warrant to anybody. Telecoms providers weren’t informed. According to Andrei Soldatov, an expert on Russia’s security services, the FSB doesn’t need to contact the ISP’s staff. Instead, the spy agency calls on the special controller at the FSB HQ that is connected by a protected cable directly to the SORM device installed on the ISP network. This system is copied all over the country: in every Russian town there are protected underground cables, which connect the local FSB department with all providers in the region. The result is that the FSB is able to intercept the email traffic of opposition activists and other ‘enemies’ without oversight.