In Germany, state-backed Deutsche Telekom floated plans for a new national internet network. Its slogan, ‘Email made in Germany’, suggested consumers could have the same confidence in their email as they would expect to have in a German dishwasher. Emails between German users would no longer go via US servers. Traffic, mostly, would be kept within the EU’s Schengen area (which, helpfully, excluded Britain). The aspiration was to keep out the nosy Anglophone spies.
Perhaps the most unexpected corollary of the Snowden affair was the return of the typewriter. After discovering that the NSA bugged its diplomats, the Indian government turned to old technology. From the summer of 2013 the Indian High Commission in London began using typewriters again. Nothing top secret was stored in electronic form, high commissioner Jaimini Bhagwati told the Times of India. Diplomats had taken to strolling outside: ‘No highly classified information is discussed inside the embassy building. And it’s very tedious to step out into the garden every time something sensitive has to be discussed.’
The Russians had reached the same conclusion. The Kremlin’s super-secret Federal Protection Service (FSO) – a branch of the FSB, that some believe is guarding Snowden – put in a large order for typewriters.
The personal computer revolution that transformed communications had crashed to a halt. Those who cared about privacy were reverting to the pre-internet age. Typewriters, handwritten notes and the surreptitious rendezvous were back in fashion. Surely it was only a matter of time before the return of the carrier pigeon.
The NSA’s clumsy international spying operation generated much heat and light. One document revealed the agency was even spying on the pornographic viewing habits of six Muslim ‘radicalisers’, in an attempt to discredit them. None of the radicalisers were actually terrorists. The snooping – on individuals’ private browsing activities – was redolent of the kind of unjustified surveillance that led to the original Church committee.
There was a distinct sense of history repeating itself. Some old hands suggested that the US had been engaged in similar activities for decades.
Claus Arndt, a former German deputy responsible for overseeing Germany’s security services, saw echoes of previous scandals in the current Snowden one. Arndt told Der Spiegel that up until 1968 the US had behaved in West Germany like the occupying power they once had been – bugging whomever they wanted. After that, the Americans had to ask permission from German officials to conduct surveillance. In West Berlin, however, the US behaved ‘as if it had just marched in’ up until 1990, Arndt said. He recalled how one US major had a row with his girlfriend and gave an order for her phone to be tapped and her letters read. Arndt said he had had no choice but to agree the request.
What about the US’s modern methods? Arndt said indiscriminate collection was ineffective, and that evaluating a vast ‘data-heap’ was virtually impossible. Nevertheless, the Americans had always been ‘crazy about information’, he said, and were still ‘hegemons’ in his own country.
He summed up the impact of the Snowden revelations in a single phrase: ‘Theoretically we are sovereign. In practice we are not.’
13
THE BROOM CUPBOARD
‘You come here often. #nsapickuplines’
The room is a glorified broom cupboard. A few paintings belonging to the late Arthur Sulzberger, Snr, are stacked against a wall. One print shows a newspaper man puffing on a cigar; above him are the words: ‘Big Brother is watching you’. (A note says Arthur will review the paintings ‘when he returns’. He died in 2012.) There are strip lights, a small table, a couple of chairs. No windows. On a metal shelf, boxes of cream-coloured envelopes. They belong to Arthur Sulzberger, Jr, – Arthur senior’s heir – and the current publisher of the New York Times. On the corridor outside are photos of the Times’s Pulitzer Prize winners. They are a distinguished bunch. From the staff cafeteria comes the hum of intelligent chatter.
The offices of the New York Times are on Eighth Avenue, in midtown New York. The paper’s executive stationery cupboard was to play an unlikely role in the Snowden story. It was from here that the Guardian carried on its reporting of the NSA files, in partnership with the Times, after its London operation was shut down. The cupboard was pokey. It was also extremely secure. Access was highly restricted; there were guards, video cameras and other measures. Its location on US soil meant that the journalists who worked there felt they enjoyed something they didn’t have in London: the protection of the US constitution.
In the US, the Obama administration distanced itself from the destruction of the Guardian’s hard drives – an act widely condemned by EU organisations, the rest of the world, and the UN’s special rapporteur on freedom of expression. Evidently, the White House wasn’t delighted by the Snowden revelations. But it understood the first amendment guaranteed press freedom. No such smashing up could happen in America, White House officials said.
Two days after the GCHQ hobbits supervised the destruction, the British government followed up Rusbridger’s offer. It asked the Guardian to identify the paper’s US media partners. The editor told them it was working with the New York Times and the non-profit ProPublica.
But it was another three and a half weeks before the UK’s foreign office did anything about the intelligence. On 15 August, Philip Barton, Britain’s deputy ambassador in the US, finally put in a call to Jill Abramson, the Times’s executive editor. He requested a meeting. Abramson had been planning to travel to DC anyway. She had arranged to see James Clapper, the embattled director of national intelligence. Not about Snowden but about the alarming frequency with which the administration was exerting pressure on the Times’s reporters, particularly those covering intelligence matters.
‘We have decades of experience publishing sensitive stories dealing with national security,’ Abramson says. In 1972 the Times published the Pentagon Papers, during the Arthur Sulzberger era. ‘We’re never cavalier. We take them [senior administration officials] seriously. But if a war is being waged against terrorism, people need to know the dimensions of that war.’
The deputy ambassador invited Abramson to drop into the British embassy. Rusbridger advised against doing so, on grounds of spycraft. So Abramson eventually agreed to meet at the ambassador’s residence, rather than at the embassy itself, which was technically on UK soiclass="underline" who knew what British spooks might get up to there? At the meeting, Barton requested the return of the Snowden documents or their destruction. The UK-related leaks made his government uneasy, he said. Abramson neither confirmed nor denied that the Times possessed Snowden material. She promised to go away and think about it.
Two days later she called Barton back to say that the Times was declining his request. According to Abramson, ‘The meeting was a non-event. I never heard from them again.’ The British foreign office, it seemed, was merely going through the formal motions. Rusbridger had made clear that the material existed in many jurisdictions. ProPublica in New York had also been working with the Guardian for several months, as Number 10 knew. The British made no attempt to approach them.