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Snowden’s Leaks on China Could Affect Its Role in His Fate

June 14, 2013 by Leave a Comment

The South China Morning Post, a local newspaper, reported on Friday that Edward J. Snowden, the contractor, had shared detailed data showing the dates and Internet Protocol addresses of specific computers in mainland China and Hong Kong that the National Security Agency penetrated over the last four years. The data also showed whether the agency was still breaking into these computers, the success rates for hacking and other operational information.

Mr. Snowden told the newspaper that the computers were in the civilian sector. But Western experts have long said that the dividing line between the civilian sector and the government is very blurry in China. State-owned or state-controlled enterprises still control much of the economy, and virtually all are run by Communist Party cadres who tend to rotate back and forth between government and corporate jobs every few years as part of elaborate career development procedures.

Kevin Egan, a former prosecutor here who has represented people fighting extradition to the United States, said that Mr. Snowden’s latest disclosures would make it harder for him to fight an expected request by the United States for him to be turned over to American law enforcement. “He’s digging his own grave with a very large spade,” he said.

But a person with longstanding ties to mainland Chinese military and intelligence agencies said that Mr. Snowden’s latest disclosures showed that he and his accumulated documents could be valuable to China, particularly if Mr. Snowden chooses to cooperate with mainland authorities.

“The idea is very tempting, but how do you do that, unless he defects,” said the person, who spoke anonymously because of the diplomatic delicacy of the case. “It all depends on his attitude.”

The person declined to comment on whether Chinese intelligence agencies would obtain copies of all of Mr. Snowden’s computer files anyway if he were arrested by the Hong Kong police pursuant to a warrant from the United States, where the Justice Department has already been reviewing possible charges against him.

A Hong Kong Police Force spokeswoman said earlier this week that any arrest would have to be carried out by the Hong Kong police and not by foreign law enforcement. The Hong Kong police have a responsibility to share with mainland China anything of intelligence value that they find during raids or seizures of evidence, according to law enforcement experts.

Patricia Ho, a lawyer who specializes in political asylum at Daly and Associates, a Hong Kong law firm, said that if Beijing decides that it wants Mr. Snowden to stay in Hong Kong for a long time, the simplest way to do so would be for mainland officials to quietly tell Hong Kong’s government officials not to hurry the legal process.

The United States and China have long accused each other of monitoring each other’s computer networks for national security reasons. The United States has also accused China of hacking to harvest technological secrets and commercial data on a broad scale from American companies and transferring that information to Chinese companies to give them a competitive advantage.

Tom Billington, an independent cybersecurity specialist in Washington, said that mainland China could benefit by obtaining a copy of the data that Mr. Snowden gave to The South China Morning Post. The data, if independently verified, could help Chinese officials figure out which computers have been hacked, patch security holes, itemize compromised data, analyze the quality of computer security defenses and develop techniques for hardening other Chinese computers against future surveillance by the N.S.A.

“It certainly would seem valuable data for the Chinese,” Mr. Billington said.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/15/world/asia/ex-nsa-contractors-disclosures-could-complicate-his-fate.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

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How Edward J. Snowden Orchestrated a Blockbuster Story

June 10, 2013 by Leave a Comment

So three people — Glenn Greenwald, a civil-liberties writer who recently moved his blog to The Guardian; Laura Poitras, a documentary filmmaker who specializes in surveillance; and Ewen MacAskill, a Guardian reporter — flew from New York to Hong Kong about 12 days ago. They followed the directions. A man with a Rubik’s Cube appeared.

It was Edward J. Snowden, who looked even younger than his 29 years — an appearance, Mr. Greenwald recalled in an interview from Hong Kong on Monday, that shocked him because he had been expecting, given the classified surveillance programs the man had access to, someone far more senior. Mr. Snowden has now turned over archives of “thousands” of documents, according to Mr. Greenwald, and “dozens” are newsworthy.

Mr. Snowden’s ability to burrow deep into America’s national security apparatus and emerge clutching some of its most closely guarded secrets is partly a story of the post-Sept. 11 era, when the government’s expanding surveillance Leviathan and complex computer systems have given network specialists with technical skills tremendous power.

While some lawmakers in Washington accuse Mr. Snowden of treason, he casts himself as a truth teller. Like Pfc. Bradley Manning and Daniel Ellsberg, whom he says he admires for disclosing troves of government secrets, Mr. Snowden explained his actions in a Guardian interview by saying the American people have a right to know about government abuses that were kept hidden from them.

He portrayed himself as carefully selecting what to release, seeking to avoid the attacks that accused Private Manning of recklessness. Private Manning, who confessed to leaking hundreds of thousands of classified documents made public by WikiLeaks, faces a possible life sentence in a court-martial.

“He has no regret of any kind, no sense of, ‘Wow, what I have done here? I can’t go back,’ ” Mr. Greenwald said of Mr. Snowden. “He is so convinced that he did the right thing.”

He added: “It’s not like it’s delusional — he’s completely rational. He completely understands that more likely than not, he’s going to end up like Bradley Manning or worse. Yet he has tranquillity.”

It is not clear how Mr. Snowden extracted the secret documents, and the portrait of his transformation from a trusted National Security Agency contractor to a leaker is still impressionistic.

Last year, he donated money to the campaign of Ron Paul, the Republican presidential candidate who was long critical of government’s growing reach. People who knew Mr. Snowden as a teenager said he was enthralled by computers. Joyce Kinsey, who lived across from his apartment in Maryland a decade ago, said she would often see him through the window working at his computer at night.

“He was always on his computer over there — always,” she said. “He was just a quiet kid, really quiet.”

Mr. Snowden, who grew up in North Carolina, did not finish high school and sporadically attended classes at Anne Arundel Community College in Arnold, Md. Military records show he enlisted in the Army Reserve as a Special Forces recruit in May 2004 and was discharged less than four months later, reportedly after breaking his legs in a training accident.

Somewhere along the way, he acquired a top-secret clearance, which, with his computer expertise, was a ticket for admission to the national security establishment. For more than a decade, American intelligence agencies have been desperate for tech-savvy individuals who can run ever more complex computer networks — and who can pass rigorous and intrusive background checks.

Mr. Snowden bounced between jobs both inside the government and as a contractor for the Central Intelligence Agency in Switzerland and for the National Security Agency in Japan, Maryland and Hawaii, according to his account. Eventually working for nearly $200,000 a year in classified facilities as a computer systems administrator, he had access to enormous amounts of secret information.

Christopher Drew and Richard A. Oppel Jr. contributed reporting from New York, and Theo Emery from Ellicott City, Md.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/11/us/how-edward-j-snowden-orchestrated-a-blockbuster-story.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

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Media Decoder: N.S.A. Leaker Is a New Kind for an Internet Age

June 10, 2013 by Leave a Comment

What does a leaker look like? Sometimes, people who reveal secrets remain in the shadows, and the public is left to guess at their motivations, agendas and states of mind.

Edward Snowden, the 29-year-old man behind the recent revelations about the National Security Agency’s pursuit of phone and computer data, upended that history. He is a new kind of leaker of the wired age: an immediately visible one with a voice and the means to go direct with the public. In a era of friction-free Web communication, he disdained the shadows and stepped into view with a lengthy video interview he gave to The Guardian, which broke the story based on information he provided. He stated his motivation plainly, saying, “The public needs to decide whether these programs and policies are right or wrong.”

By identifying himself as the leaker, Mr. Snowden is helping to ensure that the debate occurs in the public common and goes beyond a closely held government investigation followed, perhaps, by prosecution. The video, which can be seen by all, means that he will be judged by all in real time.

The video presents a portrait of a man who was not a marginal loser lashing out as he flailed in his personal life: he gave up a well-paid job and his life in Hawaii with his girlfriend and is now holed up in a hotel in Hong Kong. At first blush he appears reasonable and careful, which will make him a hard target for those who seek to marginalize him or suggest that his concerns are overblown.

Of course, with visibility comes scrutiny. For the time being, the video and his interview with The Guardian are what define Mr. Snowden, but in the coming days, weeks and months, we will learn far more about his personal and professional life, and perhaps a more complicated narrative about his motivations will emerge. For the time being, we only know that he was the source of the leaks and we know his explanation of why he did what he did. Various interested parties will now set about their work, trying to make him out as a hero or a villain as it suits their agendas. And as Mr. Snowden knows better than anyone, any secrets he has will not stay that way for long.

It’s important to note that Mr. Snowden did not just dump a bunch of unredacted documents on the Web and slink back to his job. He apparently thought a great deal about where the information belonged and contacted Barton Gellman, who had a long and respected career in national security reporting at The Washington Post. According to an article by Mr. Gellman in Monday’s Post, Mr. Snowden asked for guarantees about what The Post would print, and when. After The Post said it could not provide any guarantees, according to Mr. Gellman, Mr. Snowden turned to Glenn Greenwald of The Guardian, who has covered national security and secrecy issues in a chronic and ferocious manner. (Mr. Greenwald disputes that timeline, saying he has been in contact with Mr. Snowden since February).

In spite of the uproar around WikLeaks and a new age of electronic drop boxes, there has never been a shortage of whistles; what has been in short supply is people to blow them. In this instance, the Web is not just a repository of leaked material, but a means of changing the dynamics of the debate into a two-way affair in which the public has access to the leaker. The administration, in both its public remarks and its investigations into leaks, has tried to portray those who leak as marginal people with nefarious motivations. By using the Web and speaking on his own behalf, Mr. Snowden is not allowing himself to be defined by the government.

As a whistle-blower who has come to his own defense, Mr. Snowden has engaged the public as a player in the debate. Social media, most notably Twitter, is alive with commentary about who he is and what he did. What is normally a vacuum — in which the government characterizes the leaker and those who enabled him — is now a dialogue. The debate over secrets has gone viral and as a result, is itself much less secret. In the past, few leakers would have been able to broadcast their messages to the world even before the government and the public had time to absorb the implications of what they did.

Mr. Snowden is not the first whistle-blower to draw attention to himself. Daniel Ellsberg, the central figure in the Pentagon Papers affair and one of the historical figures whom Mr. Snowden pointed to as precedents, never hid who he was. Mr. Ellsberg reasoned, correctly as it turned out, that he would be seen as someone who acted in the broader interest of the country even as he divulged its most precious secrets.

But Mr. Snowden’s visibility in an Internet age is more immediate and more ubiquitous. He is now the face of the opposition to state-sponsored information gathering. Even though he is in Hong Kong, he is everywhere.

To those sympathetic to Mr. Snowden’s viewpoint, the information he revealed seems all the more disturbing because he comes off as calm and measured. He is a real person, not a shadow, and his arguments, while very open to debate, are based in careful rhetoric.

Freedom, the right to privacy and open debate are the rare issues that surpass ideology in a very divided nation. After it was disclosed that the National Security Agency was seizing phone records, Josh Earnest, the White House deputy press secretary, said, “The president welcomes a discussion of the trade-offs between security and civil liberties.”

That debate has arrived courtesy of Mr. Snowden and will begin in earnest, perhaps not on the terms or on the schedule that the president had in mind. The age of the leaker as Web-enabled public figure has arrived.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/11/business/media/nsa-leaker-is-a-new-kind-for-an-internet-age.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

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