Vale a leitura!
Big Brothers
Edward Snowden’s memoir reveals some (but not all)
From his refuge in Russia, the wanted spy looks back on the controversy he caused
Sep 13th 2019
SPIES DO NOT usually want to be famous. But in 2013 Edward Snowden, then 30 years old, briefly became one of the best-known people in the world. Living in a hotel room in Hong Kong, working with journalists and armed with reams of documents belonging to the National Security Agency (NSA), America’s main electronic-spying organisation, he laid bare that agency's efforts to build a system of enormous, indiscriminate, global surveillance.
Now living in exile in Russia, Mr Snowden’s autobiography is an account of how he became the world’s most famous secret agent. It is well-written, frequently funny, and suffers from one glaring omission. Even so, in a world much more attuned to the downsides of digitisation than it was in 2013, it offers a useful reminder of the god-like omniscience that digital data can bestow on those with the power to collect it all.
Mr Snowden was one of the facilitators of that omniscience. An ordinary childhood was marked by two things. One was the arrival of the internet in its original, pre-corporate form, the version which inspired the utopian dreaming that surrounded technology in the 1990s. The other was his family’s long tradition of government civil service. His father was in the Coast Guard; his mother worked for a time as an NSA administrator.
The September 11th attacks inspired Mr Snowden to join up, he writes. But his brief stint in the army was ended by a training injury. While he was convalescing, he decided to put his technical abilities in service of an American intelligence community traumatised by its inability to prevent the attacks. As part of the merry-go-round of private contractors to whom much of America’s electronic intelligence work has been farmed out, Mr Snowden’s role as a systems administrator and computing whizz let him see virtually everything the spy agencies were doing.
The more he learned, the more uncomfortable he became. Mr Snowden does not spend many pages describing the various surveillance systems he disclosed—which, after all, were widely reported at the time. But his descriptions of the real impact of those systems—stripped of abstract concepts and technical jargon—are some of the most disturbing parts of the book.
He describes XKEYSCORE, a sort of private search engine fuelled by the NSA’s spying efforts. It allows analysts, operating with little oversight, to view at will the private emails, chats, images, and files of almost anyone with an internet connection, up to and including Supreme Court justices and the president himself. He describes watching an Indonesian engineer through the webcam of his computer, as the man’s infant son sat on his lap and batted at the keyboard. Mr Snowden calls XKEYSCORE as “the closest thing to science fiction I’ve ever seen”. Employees of the NSA, he says, saw it in less elevated terms: one popular pastime was to use it for “LOVEINT”, rifling through the online lives of former or potential lovers—cyber-stalking backed by the full power of a modern intelligence agency. Intercepted nudes, he says, were an office currency.
The press, he notes, mostly missed a story that was squatting right out in the open. Why else would the NSA build what was originally called the Massive Data Repository, a colossal data-storage facility in the Utah desert? He cites an unclassified presentation given by Ira Hunt, then the chief technologist at the CIA, in which he blithely told a crowd of conference attendees and journalists that “it is nearly within our grasp to compute on all human-generated information”, and that the spooks could eavesdrop on every one of their communications and track their smartphones even when they were switched off. Appalled by the power and intrusiveness of a mass-surveillance system that had been developed without public consent, Mr Snowden says, he began organising one of the largest leaks in the history of American spying.
This is Mr Snowden’s account of an episode that still provokes powerful emotions. He says mass surveillance directly contradicts both the spirit and letter of America’s constitution, which is designed to protect its citizens from an over-mighty government. His former employers decry him as a traitor. Western officials have alleged that China and Russia have managed to decrypt some of the cache of documents he took, something that, on Mr Snowden's telling, should be impossible. For now at least, the truth remains unknowable.
His detractors’ most powerful weapon is the fact that Mr Snowden has ended up living in Russia. He argues that this is America’s fault: the State Department cancelled Mr Snowden’s passport while he was in the air, en route from Hong Kong to Ecuador, where he planned to apply for asylum. When he landed in Moscow to change planes, that left him unable to move on. Unwilling to return to America, because its espionage laws prevent public interest being used as a defence in court, he applied for asylum to dozens of countries. But, he says, all were too worried about American reprisals to grant the request, especially after an extraordinary incident in which a Bolivian plane carrying Evo Morales, that country’s president, was forced to land in Austria and searched in case Mr Snowden was on board.
He recounts being met by the FSB—Russia’s main intelligence agency—and claims he refused to cooperate with them. But little more is said of the events of the past six years. The book ends in 2013, with Mr Snowden leaving a Moscow airport after weeks in limbo, eventually accepting an offer of asylum in Russia because, he claims, of a lack of any alternative. What role, if any, his Russian handlers had in the emergence of his memoir is not specified.
Mr Snowden’s critique of government overreach is powerful. But whether through his own fault or otherwise, it is one made from a compromising location. Whatever his relationship with the Russian authorities, and whenever it began, everything he says in “Permanent Record”—about himself, and about America—must be seen through the prism of his dependence on the Kremlin. As he admits thinking before he ignited the scandal, were he to end up in Russia, the American government “wouldn’t have to do anything to discredit me other than point at a map”.
Big Brothers
Edward Snowden’s memoir reveals some (but not all)
From his refuge in Russia, the wanted spy looks back on the controversy he caused
Sep 13th 2019
SPIES DO NOT usually want to be famous. But in 2013 Edward Snowden, then 30 years old, briefly became one of the best-known people in the world. Living in a hotel room in Hong Kong, working with journalists and armed with reams of documents belonging to the National Security Agency (NSA), America’s main electronic-spying organisation, he laid bare that agency's efforts to build a system of enormous, indiscriminate, global surveillance.
Now living in exile in Russia, Mr Snowden’s autobiography is an account of how he became the world’s most famous secret agent. It is well-written, frequently funny, and suffers from one glaring omission. Even so, in a world much more attuned to the downsides of digitisation than it was in 2013, it offers a useful reminder of the god-like omniscience that digital data can bestow on those with the power to collect it all.
Mr Snowden was one of the facilitators of that omniscience. An ordinary childhood was marked by two things. One was the arrival of the internet in its original, pre-corporate form, the version which inspired the utopian dreaming that surrounded technology in the 1990s. The other was his family’s long tradition of government civil service. His father was in the Coast Guard; his mother worked for a time as an NSA administrator.
The September 11th attacks inspired Mr Snowden to join up, he writes. But his brief stint in the army was ended by a training injury. While he was convalescing, he decided to put his technical abilities in service of an American intelligence community traumatised by its inability to prevent the attacks. As part of the merry-go-round of private contractors to whom much of America’s electronic intelligence work has been farmed out, Mr Snowden’s role as a systems administrator and computing whizz let him see virtually everything the spy agencies were doing.
The more he learned, the more uncomfortable he became. Mr Snowden does not spend many pages describing the various surveillance systems he disclosed—which, after all, were widely reported at the time. But his descriptions of the real impact of those systems—stripped of abstract concepts and technical jargon—are some of the most disturbing parts of the book.
He describes XKEYSCORE, a sort of private search engine fuelled by the NSA’s spying efforts. It allows analysts, operating with little oversight, to view at will the private emails, chats, images, and files of almost anyone with an internet connection, up to and including Supreme Court justices and the president himself. He describes watching an Indonesian engineer through the webcam of his computer, as the man’s infant son sat on his lap and batted at the keyboard. Mr Snowden calls XKEYSCORE as “the closest thing to science fiction I’ve ever seen”. Employees of the NSA, he says, saw it in less elevated terms: one popular pastime was to use it for “LOVEINT”, rifling through the online lives of former or potential lovers—cyber-stalking backed by the full power of a modern intelligence agency. Intercepted nudes, he says, were an office currency.
The press, he notes, mostly missed a story that was squatting right out in the open. Why else would the NSA build what was originally called the Massive Data Repository, a colossal data-storage facility in the Utah desert? He cites an unclassified presentation given by Ira Hunt, then the chief technologist at the CIA, in which he blithely told a crowd of conference attendees and journalists that “it is nearly within our grasp to compute on all human-generated information”, and that the spooks could eavesdrop on every one of their communications and track their smartphones even when they were switched off. Appalled by the power and intrusiveness of a mass-surveillance system that had been developed without public consent, Mr Snowden says, he began organising one of the largest leaks in the history of American spying.
This is Mr Snowden’s account of an episode that still provokes powerful emotions. He says mass surveillance directly contradicts both the spirit and letter of America’s constitution, which is designed to protect its citizens from an over-mighty government. His former employers decry him as a traitor. Western officials have alleged that China and Russia have managed to decrypt some of the cache of documents he took, something that, on Mr Snowden's telling, should be impossible. For now at least, the truth remains unknowable.
His detractors’ most powerful weapon is the fact that Mr Snowden has ended up living in Russia. He argues that this is America’s fault: the State Department cancelled Mr Snowden’s passport while he was in the air, en route from Hong Kong to Ecuador, where he planned to apply for asylum. When he landed in Moscow to change planes, that left him unable to move on. Unwilling to return to America, because its espionage laws prevent public interest being used as a defence in court, he applied for asylum to dozens of countries. But, he says, all were too worried about American reprisals to grant the request, especially after an extraordinary incident in which a Bolivian plane carrying Evo Morales, that country’s president, was forced to land in Austria and searched in case Mr Snowden was on board.
He recounts being met by the FSB—Russia’s main intelligence agency—and claims he refused to cooperate with them. But little more is said of the events of the past six years. The book ends in 2013, with Mr Snowden leaving a Moscow airport after weeks in limbo, eventually accepting an offer of asylum in Russia because, he claims, of a lack of any alternative. What role, if any, his Russian handlers had in the emergence of his memoir is not specified.
Mr Snowden’s critique of government overreach is powerful. But whether through his own fault or otherwise, it is one made from a compromising location. Whatever his relationship with the Russian authorities, and whenever it began, everything he says in “Permanent Record”—about himself, and about America—must be seen through the prism of his dependence on the Kremlin. As he admits thinking before he ignited the scandal, were he to end up in Russia, the American government “wouldn’t have to do anything to discredit me other than point at a map”.
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