“No Clemency For Snowden”: His Behavior Is More About Promoting Himself Than Promoting Privacy
The word “whistle-blower” conjures up a certain kind of individual and circumstance. One imagines a workaday, dedicated employee who comes to realize that there is corruption or grave misconduct, dangerous to the public good, happening at his or her workplace. The employee may or may not go to superiors at the company or agency (depending on fears of losing one’s job). If that is not an option, the next move is a prosecutor (in case of illegal activity), oversight agencies and sympathetic members of Congress. If none of that works – and it’s nearly unfathomable that no one at any of those institutions would take an interest – the whistle-blower can go to the press.
This is not what happened with Edward Snowden. Snowden took an oath, when he joined the national security community, to keep national secrets secret. There is a legitimate argument to be had over whether too much is classified. But that is an argument someone with national security clearance can have internally. If you take the pledge, you take the pledge. Snowden broke it when he collected massive amounts of classified information and released it to the media.
Breaking the law would be more forgivable if it was both targeted and a last resort. Neither of those things is true in Snowden’s case. He told the South China Morning Post that he got a job with government contractor Booz Allen Hamilton for the purpose of collecting information on federal surveillance. This is like saying you took a job as a construction contractor so you could rob people’s homes.
Nor did Snowden make an effort to go to Congress with his concerns – an outlet where there are certainly members who would bring Snowden’s concerns to light in a responsible way. But that avenue would have made the issue about, well, the issue, and not about Snowden – which seems to be Snowden’s main concern.
Had Snowden gone into the national security business, become alarmed and disillusioned at what he saw as unwarranted invasion of Americans’ privacy, and then made efforts to expose that troubling practice in a targeted and responsible way, he would be a more sympathetic character. But what Snowden did – amass huge amounts of information, then leave the country as he watched U.S. officials squirm over how much Snowden knew and what he would tell – is proof that his behavior was more about promoting himself than promoting privacy. And piously warning New Year’s babies about the loss of privacy is pretty rich, considering that Snowden made his name by stealing secrets and making them public.
Blowing town doesn’t add to Snowden’s credibility. A real whistle-blower or practitioner of civil disobedience waits around and takes the fallout. They don’t hightail it out of the country and shop around for exile – most laughably, in places where civil liberties are not respected.
The New York Times editorial board has called on President Obama to engage in clemency talks with Snowden. That would be a reasonable suggestion if Snowden had made a very targeted release of information after first trying other avenues. It would be reasonable if Snowden had had the courage to stay in the country he purports to be protecting from tyranny and take the heat from his illegal behavior. But he didn’t. Clemency would just make national security oaths and laws a joke.
It’s a good thing that Americans know about the vast information-collecting the U.S. government has been doing on its own citizens (though there’s been something of an over-reaction by people who think the government is reading through everyone’s emails and listening to everyone’s calls). Congress – which, notably, gave intelligence-gathering authorities the right to do such data-mining in the hysteria after 9/11 – ought to re-examine what we allow our own government to do in the name of public security. But that’s not what Snowden’s behavior was about. It was all about Edward Snowden.
By: Susan Milligan, Washington Whispers, U. S. News and World Report, January 2, 2014
“Edward Snowden, Devious And Calculating”: How Can I Forget You If You Don’t Go Away?
Throughout the NSA/Snowden saga, critics of the government’s surveillance programs have often accused defenders of these programs of focusing on the motives of Snowden himself (or of the journalists who have publicized his revelations) rather than what he has revealed.
That’s a fair and important point. But we are fast approaching the time where this complaint should be addressed more to Snowden than to his enemies.
As McClatchey’s Hannah Allam aptly notes, Snowden’s serial self-revelations (and his actual and potential travel itineraries) have kept the spotlight on him in ways that have undermined his credibility:
Even as Snowden is stuck in the transit lounge of a Moscow airport, his public image is constantly evolving, through the publication of his Internet chat logs, statements from his father, live online conversations and an interview he gave to a Chinese newspaper.
Snowden undoubtedly remains a polarizing figure, but both his supporters and detractors have received some curveballs as details of his life are revealed and in many ways eclipse the trove of government secrets he risked everything to expose.
Most unsettling in terms of his initial reputation as a man driven to whistle-blowing by the enormity of what he was asked to do by his superiors has evolving doubts about when he began gathering the information he is disclosing:
While pro-transparency activists were quick to bestow Snowden with the title of “whistleblower,” that might be a stretch given some of his admissions to a Chinese newspaper. While in transit in Hong Kong, Snowden told the South China Morning Post, an English-language publication, that he’d staked out a job as a contractor at the firm of Booz Allen Hamilton in order to gain “access to lists of machines all over the world the NSA hacked,” the Morning Post quoted him as saying. The interview, said Aftergood of the Project on Government Secrecy, “did not strengthen his case. It made him look devious and calculating rather than conscience-driven.”
One might add that it made him look more like a spy than a whistle-blower, an impression that is strengthened by his semi-public negotiations for asylum with various countries hostile to his own. It’s hard not to observe that had Snowden put as much time and effort into disappearing as he did into preparing the rollout of his revelations, we might be far more focused on NSA than on him.
I keep half-expecting to see protesters of this or that government here or abroad begin replacing their Guy Fawkes’ masks with the visage of Edward Snowden. But in terms of converting his leaks into an effective lever to bring more transparency and accountability to NSA and other purveyors of questionable U.S. policies and practices, I don’t think a Snowden cult of personality is going to be terribly helpful.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Washington Monthly Political Animal, July 1, 2013
“Access Granted Vs Access Gained?”: Did Edward Snowden Overstate Claims On National Security Agency Leaks?
Security experts questioned Monday how, three years after Army Pfc. Bradley Manning downloaded a trove of secret material, low-level computer specialist Edward Snowden was able to copy documents that are far more sensitive and walk them out of his National Security Agency workplace in Hawaii.
After Manning released hundreds of thousands of classified documents — for which he is now being court-martialed — government officials vowed to curtail the broad access to intelligence that came into being after the Sept. 11 attacks. But Snowden appeared to have access to far more sensitive secrets, including the first order from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to be leaked in its 35-year history.
“I do think it raises questions about how good our controls are on our system,” said Stewart Baker, a former general counsel for the NSA. “Because anything that he was able to move to a thumb drive to exfiltrate could also be exfiltrated by Russian or Chinese hackers.”
Snowden is almost certainly facing serious charges related to espionage and the conveyance of national defense information, said a former senior FBI official who would not be quoted by name because of the sensitive subject matter.
The FBI is interviewing Snowden’s family members, as it would in any similar investigation, to “gain insight into his motivation and mind-set, to include communications, emails, phone calls, writings,” and also to determine whether he was communicating with a foreign power or had been recruited by an intelligence service, the former FBI official said. He said Snowden’s choice of Hong Kong as a refuge raises questions about possible cooperation with China.
After acquiring a government security clearance when he worked for the CIA, Snowden moved into a contractor job with his clearance still active. Most recently, before decamping for Hong Kong, he was working for government contractor Booz Allen Hamilton in Hawaii.
“The question that a lot of people are asking is why did the CIA grant him a clearance,” said a former senior government official who demanded anonymity because he was not authorized to speak about the case.
Snowden described himself to the Guardian newspaper in London, which first published details of a massive telephone-data collection program, as a computer systems administrator who performed technical rather than operational functions. His job, however, gave him access to a wide swath of secrets.
Baker pointed out that computer network maintenance jobs “are self-taught jobs in some respects, and the guy is clearly an impressive autodidact.”
But analysts said that Snowden seems to have greatly exaggerated the amount of information available to him and people like him.
Any NSA analyst “at any time can target anyone, any selector, anywhere,” Snowden told the Guardian. “I, sitting at my desk, certainly had the authorities to wiretap anyone from you or your accountant to a federal judge to even the president if I had a personal email.”
Robert Deitz, a former top lawyer at the NSA and CIA, called the claim a “complete and utter” falsehood.
“First of all it’s illegal,” he said. “There is enormous oversight. They have keystroke auditing. There are, from time to time, cases in which some analyst is [angry] at his ex-wife and looks at the wrong thing and he is caught and fired,” he said.
NSA analysts who have the authority to query databases of metadata such as phone records — or Internet content, such as emails, videos or chat logs — are subject to stringent internal supervision and also the external oversight of the foreign surveillance court, former NSA officials said.
“It’s actually very difficult to do your job,” said a former senior NSA operator, who also declined be quoted by name because of the sensitive nature of the case. “There are all these checks that don’t allow you to move agilely enough.”
For example, the former operator said, he had go through an arduous process to obtain FISA court permission to gather Internet data on a foreign nuclear weapons proliferator living abroad because some of the data was passing through U.S. wires.
“When he’s saying he could just put any phone number in and look at phone calls, it just doesn’t work that way,” he said. ” It’s absurd. There are technical limits, and then there are people who review these sorts of queries.”
He added, “Let’s say I have your email address. In order to get that approved, you would have to go through a number of wickets. Some technical, some human. An individual analyst can’t just say, ‘Oh, I found this email address or phone number.’ It’s not simple to do it on any level, even for purely foreign purposes.”
The former senior government official said that as a computer expert, Snowden could have gained access on the NSA computer network to some of the documents he purportedly leaked. But other documents he claims that he provided to the Guardian and the Washington Post, such as the FISA order, are in theory supposed to be kept more tightly held, he said.
One of the issues investigators will be examining is “what access was he granted and what access did he gain” himself in order to obtain the documents, the former official said.
By: Ken Dilanian and Barbara Demick, Los Angeles Times, Washington Bureau, June 10, 2013
“It’s Your Money”: How Private Contractors Like Booz Allen Cost Taxpayers More
When the National Security Administration (NSA) leaker outed himself over the weekend, Edward Snowden revealed that he was most recently an employee of Booz Allen Hamilton, a private sector contractor that works with the federal government on a variety of projects, including national security. As the New York Times reported on Monday, the company has grown over the last decade in large part thanks to the expansion of these projects in the post-9/11 era, raking in $1.3 billion, or nearly a quarter of its total revenue, from government intelligence work in the most recent fiscal year.
Other companies like Lockheed Martin and the Computer Sciences Corporation also get paid well by the government for information gathering and analysis like the kind described in Snowden’s leak. The NSA used to work with a handful of firms but now works with hundreds. These companies were brought in during the post-9/11 intelligence boom to keep up with the expansion. But they cost much more than having government employees do the work themselves.
While the total budget for intelligence work is kept secret, as Hayes Brown wrote earlier on ThinkProgress, “For Fiscal Year 2014, the Obama administration requested $48.2 billion for the National Intelligence Program, encompassing ‘six Federal departments, the Central Intelligence Agency, and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.’ Of that amount, according to a 2007 article, an amazing 70 percent goes towards private contractors.” That’s a lot of money.
Those high costs may be thanks to the higher cost of paying a contract employee over a federal worker. As Brown wrote:
Many former government employees make the switch into private contracting, which can serve to drive up the amount they wind up costing the American taxpayer. A 2007 report to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence found that the average government employee working as an intelligence analyst cost $126,500, while the same work performed by a contractor would cost the government an average $250,000 including overhead.
The Office of the Director of National Intelligence reports that the government pays intelligence contractors 1.66 times what it costs to have the work done by federal employees. Yet it has outsourced 28 percent of the intelligence workforce.
In a testimony before the Senate Committee on Homeland Security, the Project on Government Oversight (POGO) similarly reported that outsourcing intelligence functions to private contractors costs taxpayers 83 percent more on average than having a federal employee do the work. While competition between contracts can allow the government to bargain for lower prices, POGO asked, “Is the government actually making contracting decisions based on cost-saving concerns?”
Overall, a 2011 report from POGO found that the federal government pays contractors 1.83 times what it pays federal employees for the same services and more than two times standard pay in the private sector.
Meanwhile, the reliance on these workers for government functions is growing. More than 530,000 defense contracting jobs are in Virginia, where most of the federal level workers are located. The POGO study reports that while the federal workforce has remained flat since 1999, the contractor workforce has shot up from 4.4 million then to 7.6 million in 2007, four times larger than the number of government employees.
By: Bryce Covert, Think Progress, June 10, 2013
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