The original author | Barton Gelman
Excerpts | Xu Yuedong
Recently, the largest oil and gas pipeline in the United States has been hijacked by hackers, claiming to "not give money and not let people go.". This move directly led to the paralysis of the 8800-kilometer gasoline delivery "artery" on the east coast of the United States, and the capital Washington and 17 eastern states all entered a state of emergency. The news attracted attention to cybersecurity.
Barton Gelman, a former investigative journalist for The Washington Post, is very concerned about U.S. cybersecurity and network surveillance. To this end, he spent many years and deeply investigated the ins and outs of the "Prism Gate" incident. In 2013, the "Snowden Incident" was a hit, and he exposed to the world the scandal of the US government collecting user data information from Internet giants, causing an uproar in the international community. For a time, Snowden was also labeled "hero" and "traitor". Many people have not understood why Snowden wants to expose his identity and expose the ethical controversy of the US government in its cybersecurity work. Why was he brave enough to stand up? How did he do it? The following is an excerpt from Barton Gelman's nonfiction documentary work "Black Mirror of America" written by Barton Gelman investigating the "Prism Gate" incident, and he peels away Snowden's inner world layer by layer from the perspective of an interviewer.
Black Mirror of America, by Patton Gelman, translated by Siqi, CITIC Publishing Group, March 2021 edition
Snowden has a personality that strives for excellence
and black and white morality
Closing the windows and turning the radio louder, Edward Snowden drove north on Highway 750 in his brand-new Honda-style car. This is Honolulu, Hawaii, and his destination is an underground fort in Waipahu. The entrance to the fort looks like a mine in a suburban parking lot, which locals used to call a "hole in the ground, and NSA employees used to call it a "tunnel" because they had to go through it to get underground. It was March 2012 when Snowden came to work at the Cunha Regional Security Operations Center, a half-hour drive from a Basrow ice cream shop where former U.S. President Barack Obama worked. Although Snowden contacted the reporter a few months later, he was already at an important turning point in his life.
Snowden locked his cell phone in the car, showed his id documents at the security booth, and walked through a protective door, which had been stuck with a hinge for a long time, and could not be closed even when the end of the world came. The entire building was dilapidated by the age of so long. In the early 1940s, fearing that Pearl Harbor would happen again, military engineers built some huge underground spaces for assembling aircraft. But until the end of the war, production activity here did not take place. As a result, the Cunha base became an unpopular "legacy".
Later, its uses continued to change, and it was used as a naval armory, an air force bunker, an army field station, and a reserve command center for the U.S. Navy's Pacific Fleet. In 1993, the National Security Agency moved here and transformed it into an intelligence center dedicated to eavesdropping and monitoring Asia. It was originally designed as a temporary site, but it wasn't until 2007 that it was rebuilt. When Snowden arrived five years later, according to those who worked here at the same time, it was still in a chaotic situation, and the reconstruction work was not completed.
After descending a slope of about 400 meters, Snowden came to a revolving gate, a two-door interlocking access control system, and when he entered the gate, he could only exit the gate by scanning his green outsourced employee badge and entering the correct personal identification code on the keyboard. The building on the other side of the gate is very large. That morning, Snowden walked through the "tunnel" into a vast area filled with cubicles, network cabinets, offices with combination locks, and long rows of open desks. There are three floors, each the size of a football field, housing thousands of employees with fluorescent tubes overhead that can stretch for miles. "It's like the home of the bad guys in the James Bond movies, except that the lighting conditions are worse," Snowden told me, "and there are a lot more people out there than you think." I remember one fire drill and I was stunned by the number of people there. ”
Discontent is growing. Snowden's rebellion against this strict system of instructions did not begin in Cunha, nor did it end in Cunha. One of his most adventurous operations took place in the second year after that. A new command center named after Joseph J. Roche ford was built 5 miles northeast of Cunha, where Snowden hacked into the NSA's file system. Snowden's shift from loyalty to the U.S. government to loyalty to the American people did not happen overnight, but rather went through years of weighing the pros and cons. By the time he left the CIA, the idea of revolt was gradually translated into concrete plans.
Back many years ago, from his teenage years to his early 20s, Snowden's skills, values and strong sense of self laid the foundation for his future as a global public figure. After dropping out of high school, he developed a study plan for himself, mainly studying computer networking, graphic design, Chinese kung fu, but also involved in the imaginative world of animation, role playing, and video games.
All this has led to his pursuit of excellence and a black-and-white morality, with a particular emphasis on personal virtue and extraordinary skill. Later, he discovered a shortcut into the U.S. Army's special forces. So he put down the gamepad in his hand, changed into a military uniform, and took up his weapon. He worked very hard in the army until he was later injured during a training exercise. He qualified as an engineer by taking a series of certificates, although he never listened to those courses in its entirety. Later, he came to Cunha. It was here that Snowden began using the Verax identity (in addition to which he had many identities), and it was here that he began to infiltrate the NSA's defenses.
"I started to do something gradually." It was a hot summer night, and we had a nine-hour interview in Moscow, and as the interview drew to a close, he briefly let down his guard and recalled to me the scene.
"What you say seems to have two meanings," I said cautiously, considering that he had refused to talk about the subject many times before, "one meaning is that you start collecting information from there, extracting it from the system, and going on the road of no return; the other meaning is that you start contacting reporters from there." ”
"In fact, it's just a small point in the process," Mr. Snowden replies, "and it's a shift in perception from 'something needs to be done' to 'I'm going to start doing something.'" I tried to press down, but Snowden avoided talking.
Snowden
Later, he wrote in an email: "You are asking me to make it clear whether I have committed the crimes that the government says have been committed." "Another time, I wondered how he had taken so many documents, so I asked some questions, and he accused me of not being the mainstream media's concern, but rather the popular tabloids." Obviously, you're asking this question out of personal interest, out of curiosity, but you have to learn to restrain yourself. When you only have to weigh the pros and cons, what's the use of knowing these details? ”
Still, he couldn't help but reveal a hint of pride. "I don't know if anyone will care how I do it all in the future," he says, "all I can say is that the process is extremely complex, that everything is done in a very restrictive environment, that it requires a lot of care, and that there is no room for error." ”
The Hawaiian experience is Snowden
The passage to "Top Secret Information" is opened
Snowden was transferred to Hawaii out of concern for his physical health, which gave him the opportunity to put an end to his intelligence career. Previously, he worked for the Dell Advanced Solutions Group, a contractor for U.S. intelligence agencies, and was assigned to the CIA as a technical consultant. During his time at work, he had several episodes of dizziness over the course of several months, but none of them were severe, until he had a sudden seizure on the phone with his boss, which was very serious. According to the latest diagnosis, Snowden can no longer drive from Maryland to Langley, Virginia, or it would be considered illegal.
So Dale moved him to Hawaii Island, on the other side of the world, where he could theoretically ride his bike to work. Snowden rented a bungalow in Waipahu and had planned to ride his bike to work, but locals reminded him that there were some poorly seen bends on the north side of Grand Manor Road, and traffic accidents were frequent. He went to investigate the commute route and thought it was safer to drive to and from work, even though Hawaii state law prohibits people with a history of epilepsy for 6 months. As usual, he made contingency plans and put his judgment above the rules. If he feels like he's going to get sick, he goes into a ditch on the east side of the road so that it doesn't endanger the lives of others. Mr. Snowden was already familiar with that rushing feeling, having previously worked at Langley as a CIA technical officer in Switzerland and later to Japan as a Dell employee to work for the NSA. Cunha's job, for him, is partly about relaxing.
By the spring of the following year, Snowden was already very bored and felt that everything was meaningless. Previously, he contracted Dell as an analyst at the NSA's National Threat Operations Center (NTOC), where he worked with the agency's military and civilian staff to predict, scout, and thwart attacks by foreign hackers on U.S. government cyber systems. On his way to the inauguration, Snowden was relieved of his duties because of political struggles within the company. The general contractor for the role, the California Center for Analysis (CACI), kicked out subcontractor Dell's employees and replaced them with its own. By the time Snowden learned of the change, he had packed his bags and checked in the ship. As compensation, Dell's Hawaii Technical Group in the Information Sharing Office (codenamed HT322) placed him in a relatively idle temporary position. His job is to configure and maintain confidential web servers and to enforce access restrictions on each account.
This compensatory position pays more than the one he was originally going to work for, but the work content is extremely boring. Within a few weeks, he was able to automate most of his work from the computer, such as writing operational scripts and other day-to-day tasks. Previously, his predecessors had to do these tasks manually. Snowden told me that most of the time, he only needs up to half an hour a day to keep Microsoft's SharePoint servers running stably. Occasionally, he'll be called in for some very basic technical support work. Not everyone in the NSA is a computer expert, and many people are still far behind.
In August 2012, a colleague at her headquarters in Meadeborg encountered a difficult problem: for some reason, she could not open documents sent from Hawaii. So she sent an urgent request to the system's help desk. On Aug. 24, a more senior employee complained that the request had been "lying there for more than a week, and no one had handled it," and that it was sent to Snowden. Snowden sent a solution to the colleague that same day, and the email chain has not been received since then. It wasn't until August 30 that he wrote his last words: "Select the 'Word Pad' program from the list of programs, select the 'Always use the selected program to open this file' checkbox at the bottom left, and then click 'ok'." It took Snowden 6 days and thousands of words to completely solve the colleague's doubts.
In his free time, Snowden began browsing the directory of files under his management. This is not something he needs to do in his daily work, but it is by no means prohibited. For any file on a SharePoint server, Snowden has effective permissions to perform read, write, copy, or delete operations. His manager at the NSA, a career clerical, soon expanded Snowden's access. The manager found that the current job was completely overkill for Snowden, so he arranged for him to work as a helper in the more busy Windows network department.
Strictly speaking, Snowden's new job responsibilities go beyond the scope of federal contracting regulations. Dell may not be aware of this, but for Snowden's work beyond the contract, Dell billed the NSA based on the length of the work. Within the NSA, this kind of private work arrangement is a common thing, and it is generally necessary to transfer employees wherever they are needed, and it is indeed unrealistic if every additional job content of employees is reflected in the contract. Snowden was already a Microsoft-certified systems engineer as early as the age of 19 and had practical network management experience. His superiors certainly didn't want to waste his skills.
By April, Snowden was on the list of "super users" in Cunha's Windows Server Engineering division, and only a handful of people were able to make that list. He went beyond the limitations of ordinary user accounts and was able to penetrate the network and change the basic way it operated. Later, the NSA's chief technology officer, Lonnie Anderson, said the agency's "system administrators are divided into three levels, one, two, and three." Snowden has become the highest-ranking administrator with "privileged access" (PRIVAC). In this "tunnel", he can freely access any Windows machine with an IP address.
He told me, "I'm also supporting the Linux systems team." Here he is talking about Linux as an operating system as opposed to Windows, which is widely used in computer networks. "So you know, I have Linux system tools, relevant qualifications, virtual servers, and everything. So, basically, I can access everything, I can access all the data shares, I can access all the servers, I'm familiar with all the infrastructure. ”
Then he came across a project called Heartbeat. Over the next few months, he used the project to open up access to "top-secret/sensitive quarantine information" (TS/SCI) networks that extend far beyond Cunha, across the Pacific Ocean, beyond the NSA's own digital boundaries. At this time, Snowden had not yet reached the age of establishment.
Why did Snowden part ways with the CIA?
CIA public affairs staff were silent about Mr. Snowden's job duties or performance at the time, leaving former employees to comment. Michael Morell, who was deputy director and acting director of the CIA until August 2013, sat with me in an outdoor café overlooking Pigeon Hill in Arizona in early 2014.
Michael Morrell
Three months before Morrell retired when Snowden publicly disclosed classified documents, he had inquired about Snowden. Morrell said it was ridiculous that some people portrayed Snowden as a man of great achievement or high power at a young age. Snowden's rank is the lowest among the grassroots staff, and he is even barely up to the task. According to Morrell, the CIA hired Snowden only because there was a shortage of talent for telecommunications officer positions as the agency's pace of operations around the world accelerated.
He said that the reason why Snowden was able to pass the test and enter the organization was only because the position was short of people at the time and the recruitment standard was temporarily lowered. Some of Morrell's remarks are clearly false. A review of past notes on the CIA's job site reveals that there has been no significant change in job requirements. Compared with previous years, the eligibility conditions of Snowden's employees are unlikely to be difficult to access as national security secrets. As for other issues, Snowden's performance appraisal results can visually explain everything. Morrell's formulation is clearly deliberately pejorative, and it is difficult to explain why Snowden's position has risen steadily.
Snowden attended the next six-month training course, titled "Basic Telecommunications Training Course," in a more secretive CIA office building in Warrenton, northern Virginia. The new operations officers, the agency's espionage agents, were trained at a more well-known location, often referred to as the "farm." The location where Snowden and other tech officials were trained is often referred to as the "hill."
This is reminiscent of Dr. Q, the master in the James Bond movie scene, explaining in a doactic gesture how to launch missiles from a remotely remote-controlled luxury sports car. In the training course outline of "The Hill", more than aston Martin sports cars appear, but worn-out radios. "You basically have to learn how to handle any piece of infrastructure that might be present in an embassy," Snowden said. He practiced splitting and reassembling routers, phones, firewalls, and ventilation units. He studied the fundamentals, current state and history of cryptography.
In addition to being up-to-date with the latest systems, he must be well-versed in outdated equipment that old-school ambassadors and intelligence station chiefs might be accustomed to using. Firefly keys, boxy KG-84 encryption devices with knobs and dials are old enough to be placed in museum collections, but Snowden must be proficient in them. He said a lot of time was spent learning how not to be seen by others. Along with other cadets, Snowden learned the basic espionage intelligence techniques that CIA officials need to master because they could be monitored abroad. They also need to spend a lot of time getting used to their disguised identities at the embassy. In this way, even their future colleagues at the embassy will not know the real employer behind them. "There's a special course to practice how to masquerade as an employee of the U.S. State Department to understand how this institution works. At the very least, you have to be able to impersonate people from the State Department who have their own internal language, who have their own habits of abbreviated expressions... You have to be able to fit in. ”
Snowden learned how to identify if he was being followed, how to check whether a vehicle had been passive, how to make his lies more convincing, what not to tell his partner (many of which could not be), and what not to tell his children (all of which could not be). Another course was taught how to write telegrams while on field work, with special guidance on how to write emergency reports. The urgent report here refers to the fact that when the content of the intelligence is very important, the process from learning about the content of the intelligence to forming a written report to sending it to the president takes 10 minutes to complete. Emergency reporting can only be used in specific situations, and according to a confidential briefing, emergency reporting can only be made for those things that "can cause urgent and serious harm to key political, economic, intelligence, and military interests of the United States." One of the trainers, as a warning, told them a story: one of the former trainees was unlucky enough to actually send out an emergency report for practice. Whether this story really happened or was fabricated, we have no way of knowing.
In addition, the trainers admonished the new telecommunications officers in bold letters on a slide: "Be sure to eliminate any uncertainty!" The example given is that at 2:31 a.m. on August 2, 1990, the CIA intelligence post in Baghdad issued a briefing: "Iraqi troops appeared in Kuwait, within a thousand yards of the United States Embassy, where an exchange of light weapons took place. ”
Before the course was over, Snowden also taught the CIA a little bit. When it comes to matters of principle, Snowden is not at all afraid to go out of the way. Trainees who trained with him complained that they lived in a dilapidated, crumbling inn and that the CIA refused to pay them overtime. Snowden argued that the CIA's actions violated labor laws, occupational safety and health regulations. So he launched a formal complaint, and after the head of the training school dismissed his complaint, he went directly to the head of the CIA field service team, and then went to the leader's boss. The end result was that Snowden was able to change accommodations and was reprimanded for disobeying orders, but he didn't mind it at all. Snowden recalls that, unlike others around him, he was willing to bear the "price of the rise."
On the final day of the training, Snowden and other trainees listed their preferred locations to be sent. Snowden's first choice is a war zone — Iraq or Afghanistan — and geneva. He had heard that the work was technically challenging in Geneva, where intelligence posts had complex cyber infrastructure and where the ratio of spies to the total number of inhabitants exceeded that of most other cities in the world. In March 2007, the CIA actually sent him to Geneva. Snowden's photograph, printed on a bright red diplomatic badge, shows him with a baby's face, blue uniform, maroon shirt and striped tie. In the eyes of the outside world, Snowden is the U.S. foreign affairs commissioner sent to the United Nations Office at Geneva, and is an employee of the U.S. State Department, number 64554. Snowden's office is located in the Information Technology Center on the top floor of the embassy's office building.
The office environment of the CIA's Telecommunications Officer is an enclosed space with security doors. Next to it are the U.S. State Department's communications group and employees of the NSA's Special Intelligence Collection Division, which is primarily responsible for eavesdropping on some of the local targets. When communicating in writing here, Snowden uses the name "Dave M. Churchyard." This is a precautionary measure that has been widely used since the occupation of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran in 1979. In this way, even if someone hacks into confidential record documents, it is difficult to discover his identity as an intelligence officer.
The CIA offered enough salary and allowance for Snowden to rent a four-bedroom apartment overlooking Lake Geneva. He had a luxurious life in Switzerland, bought a BMW car, and started trading stocks. But he complains about life there, as he once said in a chat with people on the Ars Technica website: "Prices are ridiculously expensive, class discrimination is frighteningly serious", but overall it is "quite good". His job in Geneva is not much different from his network management work at Langley as a contractor employee. Not content with this, he volunteered to take on temporary assignments — the Geneva intelligence service often seconded staff.
In the spring of 2008, Snowden was seconded to the U.S. Embassy in Bucharest, Romania. President W. Bush is going to be there for the NATO summit. At the time, Mr. Snowden was part of a high-level program team whose mission was to send the results of the CIA's threat assessments to the Secret Service. "The threat reports were ridiculous," he recalled, "and some keyboard men on forums claimed to be driving over Bush's body." He thinks these clues are extremely unreliable, and does not understand how they are collected, why someone will take them seriously. But he only laughed it off, believing that the government was just wasting time and resources.
After returning to Geneva, Snowden saw something that bothered him. In one case, two intelligence agency officials first encouraged a Saudi Arabian money manager to drive home drunk and then used it as a blackmail to get the money manager to run the affairs for them. "We're dealing with really bad guys who are really, really hard to deal with, but useful," a later colleague of Mr. Snowden said, "and sometimes we use very vile means, and I'm ashamed to be personally involved in this kind of thing." ”
Another thing that disillusioned Mr. Snowden was that American espionage had infiltrated diplomats at the United Nations. Snowden later told me that when he worked with three CIA intelligence officers, they privately consulted him on how to hack into a diplomat's computer system. "Their questions are often similar: We want to insert a USB stick, how should we operate?" What's the trick? What do we need to worry about? Be careful not to screw up anything? How could it possibly be discovered? How to explain it after being discovered? Make up some more reasonable excuses. Mr. Snowden said he understands that monitoring the actions of his allies puts him in an advantageous position, but he doesn't approve of it. At the time, he held a libertarian political view of opposing the U.S. war in Iraq, the secret extradition of so-called terrorists, and President George W. Bush's handling of the 2008 stock market crash. He doesn't understand why the United States always tries to act as the world's policeman, trying to provide security for businesses?
Mavanie Anderson, who worked as a legal intern in the Geneva delegation and worked with Snowden from 2007 to 2009, was under the impression that Snowden was an introverted computer genius who was accustomed to contemplation. At the time, she said, Snowden faced a test of conscience. Mr. Snowden said the first time he had the idea of exposing it was in Geneva, but he held back for fear of putting intelligence officials and agents at risk. He had pinned his hopes on the new president, Barack Obama, who would change the policies that bothered him.
In early 2009, he spoke on Ars Technica in a tone that didn't look like a person who would divulge secrets. Anonymous officials who leak classified information, he wrote, should be "shot to death, and some information is kept secret for a reason."
It was around that time that disagreements began between the 25-year-old Snowden and his employer, the CIA. There are three theories about why Snowden left the CIA, each with its own. One claim comes from information provided by "two senior U.S. officials" reported by The New York Times, but did not quote their original words. According to them, Snowden's supervisor in Geneva suspected that he had tried to open unauthorized documents. The supervisor made a bad note in Snowden's personnel file. Surprisingly, the day after the report was issued, the CIA's Office of Public Affairs issued a statement denying the veracity of the report.
There are some bad records in Snowden's archives, but the reasons are far less serious. According to Snowden's own later interpretation, the second theory, the official version, is more reliable. Snowden said he identified a security vulnerability when filling out his annual performance appraisal, where any employee could enter malicious code into an organization's human resources online application. Snowden proposed manipulating the system without causing any damage to confirm the existence of the vulnerability. This is a common method in system security studies. Snowden's idea was to cause the manipulative system to suddenly pop up a terrorist message, but his boss advised him not to be so high-profile. So, after filling out the performance appraisal, in order to prove that he could "control" the web version of the app, Snowden changed all the colors on the page.
According to Mr. Snowden himself, the act angered his boss's superior, a veteran technologist in charge of the entire European region, because he felt humiliated. It was this technologist who recorded a bad stroke in Snowden's file, essentially blocking Snowden's path to promotion. A retired CIA official told Vanity Fair magazine that Snowden was "too smart to stay comfortable with that job." In the official's view, the root of the contradiction is that "I think he may prefer to be a player."
As to why Snowden left the CIA, the third theory comes from two acquaintances who were close to Snowden's family, and does not completely contradict the first two claims. According to them, in December 2008, Snowden flew home to attend his father's retirement ceremony in the Coast Guard. Snowden's parents noticed that their son always seemed to be coughing. The CIA's telecommunications officers are sometimes sent to destroy classified data by crushing some electronic components into particles. Lonnie Snowden Jr. believes it was the CIA's negligence to put his son in a dangerous environment with a high concentration of silicon dust. He insisted that his son see a doctor. Snowden went to Washington, D.C., to consult with some respiratory experts. Since then, Snowden has not returned to his original post. The Geneva intelligence station sent someone to his apartment to pack his luggage and send him home.
Editor| Zhang Ting
Introduction Proofreading | Li Xiangling
Source: Beijing News