Secrets, Surveillance and Snowden

[InfoSec News <alerts () infosecnews org>]

https://www.washingtonpost.com/magazine/2020/05/11/2013-edward-snowden-leaked-top-secret-national-security-agency-documents-showing-how-us-was-spying-its-citizens-heres-what-happened-next/

By Barton Gellman
The Washington Post
May 11, 2020

The inbox logged a message as I slept. Many hours passed before I checked. 
Probably should have kept away, but habit tugged. We had taken the channel dark 
last night. Not because we knew it was blown, but because we could not know. 
These email accounts were anonymous, encrypted, isolated from our everyday 
Internet lives. Best I could tell, there was no way to lock them down tighter. 
That thought had reassured me once.

It was the second half of May 2013. Nearly four months had passed since Laura 
Poitras, an independent filmmaker, had reached out to me for advice about a 
confidential source. Verax, as I came to know him later, had brought her an 
enigmatic tip about U.S. government surveillance. Poitras and I teamed up to 
see what would come of it. The previous night, months of suspense had come to 
an end. Verax delivered. The evidence was here. His story was real, the risks 
no longer conjecture. The FBI and the National Security Agency’s “Q Group,” 
which oversees internal security, were bound to devote sizable resources to 
this leak. For the first time in my career, I did not think it was out of the 
question that U.S. authorities would try to seize my notes and files. Without 
doubt we were about to become interesting to foreign intelligence services.

Poitras and I resolved to meet again in two days. Anything that came up sooner 
would have to wait. That plan did not last the night. I logged on the next 
morning, expecting nothing. According to the time stamp, Poitras had fired off 
a note less than four hours after we parted. She could not have slept much. I 
hadn’t either, but the fog cleared when I saw her subject line. It was our 
private signal for “urgent.” The message, once decrypted, was succinct.

I really need to show you something.

You are going to want to see it.

Odd. Very. Something to look at? After what we saw last night? Verax had sent a 
top-secret, compartmented presentation from the NSA, updated the previous 
month. Poitras and I stood over a small laptop screen past midnight, struggling 
with the jargon. The main points came through readily enough. Under the cover 
name PRISM, the NSA was siphoning data from tens of thousands of Yahoo, Google, 
Microsoft and Facebook accounts, among others. Forty-one slides and 8,000 words 
of speaker’s notes laid out the legal rationale and operating details. If 
authentic — and it sure looked that way — this briefing offered something very 
rare: an authoritative account, in near real time, of intelligence operations 
on U.S. soil that spilled far beyond the bounds acknowledged in public.

[...]

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