No Place to Hide Read online

  But before I could get to those interviews, we were diverted by a call at 5:00 a.m.—just hours after the Snowden article was published—from a longtime reader of mine who lives in Hong Kong, with whom I had been communicating periodically throughout the week. On this early-morning call, he pointed out that the entire world would soon be looking for Snowden in Hong Kong, and he insisted that Snowden urgently needed to retain well-connected lawyers in the city. He had two of the best human-rights lawyers standing by, willing to represent him. Could the three of them come over to my hotel right away?

  We agreed to meet a short time later, at around 8:00 a.m. I slept for a couple of hours until he called, an hour early, at 7:00 a.m.

  “We’re already here,” he said, “downstairs in your hotel. I have the two lawyers with me. Your lobby is filled with cameras and reporters. The media is searching for Snowden’s hotel and will find it imminently, and the lawyers say that it’s vital they get to him before the media finds him.”

  Barely awake, I threw on the nearest clothes I could find and I stumbled to the door. As soon as I opened it, the flashes from multiple cameras went off in my face. The media horde had obviously paid off someone on the hotel staff to get my room number. Two women identified themselves as Hong Kong–based Wall Street Journal reporters; others, including one with a large camera, were from Associated Press.

  They hurled questions and formed a moving half-circle around me as I walked to the elevator. They pushed their way into the elevator with me, asking one question after the next, most of which I answered with short, curt, unhelpful replies.

  Down in the lobby, a new swarm of cameras and reporters joined the group. I tried to look for my reader and the lawyers but could not move two feet without having my path blocked.

  I was particularly concerned that the swarm would try to follow me and make it impossible for the lawyers to get to Snowden. I finally decided to hold an impromptu press conference in the lobby, answering questions so that the reporters would go away. After fifteen minutes or so, most of them dispersed.

  I was then relieved to stumble into Gill Phillips, the Guardian’s chief lawyer, who had stopped in Hong Kong on her way from Australia to London to provide Ewen and me with legal counsel. She said she wanted to explore all possible ways for the Guardian to protect Snowden. “Alan is adamant that we give him all the support we legally can,” she said. We tried to talk more but had no privacy with the last few reporters lurking.

  I finally found my reader, along with the two Hong Kong lawyers he had brought with him. We plotted how we could speak without being followed, and all decamped for Gill’s room. Still trailed by a handful of reporters, we shut the door in their faces.

  We got right down to business. The lawyers wished urgently to speak to Snowden to get his formal permission to represent him, at which point they could begin acting on his behalf.

  Gill frantically used her phone to investigate these lawyers, whom we had only just met, before turning Snowden over to them. She was able to determine that they were indeed well-known and established in the human rights and asylum community and seemed quite well connected politically in Hong Kong. As Gill performed her impromptu due diligence, I signed on to the chat program. Both Snowden and Laura were online.

  Laura, who was now staying at Snowden’s hotel, was certain that it was only a matter of time before the reporters found their location, too. Snowden was clearly eager to leave. I told him about the lawyers, who were ready to go to his hotel room. Snowden said they should pick him up and bring him to a safe place. It was, he said, “time to enter the part of the plan where I ask the world for protection and justice.”

  “But I need to get out of the hotel without being recognized by reporters,” he said. “Otherwise they’ll just follow me wherever I go.”

  I conveyed these concerns to the lawyers. “Does he have any ideas how to prevent that?” one of them asked.

  I passed the question on to Snowden.

  “I’m in the process of taking steps to change my appearance,” he said, clearly having thought about this previously. “I can make myself unrecognizable.”

  At that point, I thought the lawyers should speak to him directly. Before being able to do so, they needed Snowden to recite a formalistic phrase about hereby retaining them. I sent Snowden the phrase and he then typed it back to me. The lawyers then took over the computer and began speaking with Snowden.

  After ten minutes, the two lawyers announced they were heading over to his hotel immediately to meet Snowden as he attempted to leave the hotel undetected.

  “What do you intend to do with him after that?” I asked.

  They would likely take him to the UN mission in Hong Kong and formally seek the UN’s protection from the US government, on the grounds that Snowden was a refugee seeking asylum. Or, they said, they would try to arrange a “safe house.”

  But how to get the lawyers out of the hotel without being followed? We came up with a plan: I would walk out of the hotel room with Gill and go down to the lobby to lure the reporters, still waiting outside our door, to follow me. The lawyers would then wait for a few minutes and exit the hotel, hopefully without being noticed.

  The ruse worked. After thirty minutes of chatting with Gill in a mall attached to the hotel, I went back up to my room and anxiously called one of the lawyers on his cell phone.

  “He got out right before journalists started swarming the floor,” he said. “We met him in his hotel room and then we crossed a bridge into an adjacent mall”—in front of the room with the alligator where Snowden had first met us, I later learned—“and then into our waiting car. He’s with us now.”

  Where were they taking him?

  “It’s best not to talk about that on the phone,” the lawyer replied. “He’ll be safe for now.”

  I was immensely relieved that Snowden was in good hands, but we knew there was a strong chance we might never see or speak to him again, at least not as a free man. Most likely, I thought, we would next see him on television, dressed in an orange prison jumpsuit and wearing shackles, inside a US courtroom, being arraigned on espionage charges.

  As I digested the news, there was a knock on my door. It was the general manager of the hotel, who had come to tell me that the phone was ringing nonstop for my room (I had given an instruction to the front desk to block all calls). There were also throngs of reporters, photographers, and camera people down in the lobby waiting for me to appear.

  “If you like,” he said, “we can take you out a back elevator and through an exit nobody will see. And the Guardian’s lawyer has made a reservation for you at another hotel under a different name, if that’s what you want to do.”

  That was clearly hotel-manager-ese for: we want you to leave because of the ruckus you are creating. I knew it was a good idea anyway: I wanted to continue to work with some privacy and was still hoping to maintain contact with Snowden. So I packed my bags, followed the manager out the back exit, met Ewen in a waiting car, and then checked into a different hotel under the name of the Guardian’s lawyer.

  The first thing I did was sign on to the Internet, hoping to hear from Snowden. Several minutes later, he appeared online.

  “I’m fine,” he told me. “In a safe house for now. But I have no idea how safe it is, or how long I’ll be here. I’ll have to move from place to place, and my Internet access is unreliable, so I don’t know when or how often I’ll be online.”

  He was obviously reluctant to give any details about his location and I did not want them. I knew that my ability to be involved in his hiding was very limited. He was now the world’s most wanted man by the world’s most powerful government. The United States had already demanded that Hong Kong authorities arrest him and turn him over to American custody.

  So we spoke briefly and vaguely, expressing mutual hope that we would be in touch. I told him to stay safe.

  * * *

  When I finally got to the studio for the interviews for Morning Joe an
d the Today show, I noticed immediately that the tenor of the questioning had changed significantly. Rather than dealing with me as a reporter, the hosts preferred to attack a new target: Snowden himself, now a shadowy figure in Hong Kong. Many US journalists resumed their accustomed role as servants to the government. The story was no longer that reporters had exposed serious NSA abuses but that an American working for the government had “betrayed” his obligations, committed crimes, and then “fled to China.”

  My interviews with both hosts, Mika Brzezinski and Savannah Guthrie, were acrimonious and acerbic. Sleep-deprived for more than a full week now, I had no patience for the criticisms of Snowden embedded in their questions: journalists, I felt, should be celebrating, not demonizing someone who had brought more transparency to the national security state than anyone in years.

  After a few more days of interviews, I decided it was time to leave Hong Kong. Clearly, it would now be impossible to meet or otherwise help Snowden from Hong Kong, and at that point I was completely exhausted, physically, emotionally, and psychologically. I was eager to return to Rio.

  I thought about flying home through New York and stopping for one day to do interviews—just to make the point that I could and would. But I was advised by a lawyer against doing so, arguing that it made little sense to take legal risks of that sort until we knew how the government planned to react. “You’ve just enabled the biggest national security leak in US history and gone all over TV with the most defiant message possible,” he said. “It will only make sense to plan a trip to the US once we get a sense of the Justice Department’s response.”

  I didn’t agree: I thought it was unlikely in the extreme that the Obama administration would arrest a journalist in the middle of such high-profile reporting. But I was too drained to argue or take the risk. So I had the Guardian book my flight back to Rio through Dubai, nowhere near the United States. For the moment, I reasoned, I had done enough.

  3

  COLLECT IT ALL

  The archive of documents Edward Snowden had assembled was stunning in both size and scope. Even as someone who had spent years writing about the dangers of secret US surveillance, I found the sheer vastness of the spying system genuinely shocking, all the more so because it had clearly been implemented with virtually no accountability, no transparency, and no limits.

  The thousands of discrete surveillance programs described by the archive were never intended by those who implemented them to become public knowledge. Many of the programs were aimed at the American population, but dozens of countries around the planet—including democracies typically considered US allies, such as France, Brazil, India, and Germany—were also targets of indiscriminate mass surveillance.

  Snowden’s archive was elegantly organized, but its size and complexity made it extremely difficult to process. The tens of thousands of NSA documents in it had been produced by virtually every unit and subdivision within the sprawling agency, and it also contained some files from closely aligned foreign intelligence agencies. The documents were startlingly recent: mostly from 2011 and 2012, and many from 2013. Some even dated from March and April of that year, just months before we met Snowden in Hong Kong.

  The vast majority of the files in the archive were designated “top secret.” Most of those were marked “FVEY,” meaning that they were approved for distribution only to the NSA’s four closest surveillance allies, the “Five Eyes” English-speaking alliance composed of Britain, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. Others were meant for US eyes only, marked “NOFORN” for “no foreign distribution.” Certain documents, such as the FISA court order allowing collection of telephone records and Obama’s presidential directive to prepare offensive cyber-operations, were among the US government’s most closely held secrets.

  Deciphering the archive and the NSA’s language involved a steep learning curve. The agency communicates with itself and its partners in an idiosyncratic language of its own, a lingo that is bureaucratic and stilted yet at times boastful and even snarky. Most of the documents were also quite technical, filled with forbidding acronyms and code names, and sometimes required that other documents be read first before they could be understood.

  But Snowden had anticipated the problem, providing glossaries of acronyms and program names, as well as internal agency dictionaries for terms of art. Still, some documents were impenetrable on the first, second, or even third reading. Their significance emerged only after I had put together different parts of other papers and consulted with some of the world’s foremost experts on surveillance, cryptography, hacking, the history of the NSA, and the legal framework governing American spying.

  Compounding the difficulty was the fact that the mountains of documents were often organized not by subject but by branch of the agency where they had originated, and dramatic revelations were mixed in with large amounts of banal or highly technical material. Although the Guardian devised a program to search through the files by keyword, which was of great help, that program was far from perfect. The process of digesting the archive was painstakingly slow, and many months after we first received the documents, some terms and programs still required further reporting before they could be safely and coherently disclosed.

  Despite such problems, though, Snowden’s files indisputably laid bare a complex web of surveillance aimed at Americans (who are explicitly beyond the NSA’s mission) and non-Americans alike. The archive revealed the technical means used to intercept communications: the NSA’s tapping of Internet servers, satellites, underwater fiber-optic cables, local and foreign telephone systems, and personal computers. It identified individuals targeted for extremely invasive forms of spying, a list that ranged from alleged terrorists and criminal suspects to the democratically elected leaders of the nation’s allies and even ordinary American citizens. And it shed light on the NSA’s overall strategies and goals.

  Snowden had placed crucial, overarching documents at the front of the archive, flagging them as especially important. These files disclosed the agency’s extraordinary reach, as well as its deceit and even criminality. The BOUNDLESS INFORMANT program was one of the first such revelations, showing that the NSA counts all the telephone calls and emails collected every day from around the world with mathematical exactitude. Snowden had placed these files so prominently not only because they quantified the volume of calls and emails collected and stored by the NSA—literally billions each day—but also because they proved that NSA chief Keith Alexander and other officials had lied to Congress. Repeatedly, NSA officials had claimed that they were incapable of providing specific numbers—exactly the data that BOUNDLESS INFORMANT was constructed to assemble.

  For the one-month period beginning March 8, 2013, for example, a BOUNDLESS INFORMANT slide showed that a single unit of the NSA, Global Access Operations, had collected data on more than 3 billion telephone calls and emails that had passed through the US telecommunications system. (“DNR,” or “Dialed Number Recognition,” refers to telephone calls; “DNI,” or “Digital Network Intelligence,” refers to Internet-based communications such as emails.) That exceeded the collection from the systems each of Russia, Mexico, and virtually all the countries in Europe, and was roughly equal to the collection of data from China.

  Overall, in just thirty days the unit had collected data on more than 97 billion emails and 124 billion phone calls from around the world. Another BOUNDLESS INFORMANT document detailed the international data collected in a single thirty-day period from Germany (500 million), Brazil (2.3 billion), and India (13.5 billion). And yet other files showed collection of metadata in cooperation with the governments of France (70 million), Spain (60 million), Italy (47 million), the Netherlands (1.8 million), Norway (33 million), and Denmark (23 million).

  Despite the NSA’s statutorily defined focus on “foreign intelligence,” the documents confirmed that the American public was an equally important target for the secret surveillance. Nothing made that clearer than the April 25, 2013, top secret order from t
he FISA court compelling Verizon to turn over to the NSA all information about its American customers’ telephone calls, the “telephony metadata.” Marked “NOFORN,” the language of the order was as clear as it was absolute:

  This bulk telephone collection program was one of the most significant discoveries in an archive suffused with all types of covert surveillance programs—from the large-scale PRISM (involving collection of data directly from the servers of the world’s biggest Internet companies) and PROJECT BULLRUN, a joint effort between the NSA and its British counterpart, the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), to defeat the most common forms of encryption used to safeguard online transactions, to smaller-scale enterprises with names that reflect the contemptuous and boastful spirit of supremacy behind them: EGOTISTICAL GIRAFFE, which targets the Tor browser that is meant to enable anonymity in online browsing; MUSCULAR, a means to invade the private networks of Google and Yahoo!; and OLYMPIA, Canada’s program to surveil the Brazilian Ministry of Mines and Energy.

  Some of the surveillance was ostensibly devoted to terrorism suspects. But great quantities of the programs manifestly had nothing to do with national security. The documents left no doubt that the NSA was equally involved in economic espionage, diplomatic spying, and suspicionless surveillance aimed at entire populations.

  Taken in its entirety, the Snowden archive led to an ultimately simple conclusion: the US government had built a system that has as its goal the complete elimination of electronic privacy worldwide. Far from hyperbole, that is the literal, explicitly stated aim of the surveillance state: to collect, store, monitor, and analyze all electronic communication by all people around the globe. The agency is devoted to one overarching mission: to prevent the slightest piece of electronic communication from evading its systemic grasp.