About that spy thing

It is not clear whether Russia and China stole Snowden’s data, or whether he voluntarily handed over his secret documents in order to remain at liberty in Hong Kong and Moscow.

David Miranda, the boyfriend of the Guardian journalist Glenn Greenwald, was seized at Heathrow in 2013 in possession of 58,000 “highly classified” intelligence documents after visiting Snowden in Moscow.

What’s the problem with that Sunday Times passage? It’s an utter lie. David did not visit Snowden in Moscow before being detained. As of the time he was detained in Heathrow, David had never been to Moscow and had never met Snowden. The only city David visited on that trip before being detained was Berlin, where he stayed in the apartment of Laura Poitras.

The Sunday Times “journalists” printed an outright fabrication in order to support their key point: that Snowden had files with him in Moscow. This is the only “fact” included in their story that suggests Snowden had files with him when he left Hong Kong, and it’s completely, demonstrably false (and just by the way: it’s 2015, not 1971, so referring to gay men in a 10-year spousal relationship with the belittling term “boyfriends” is just gross).

Then there’s the Sunday Times claim that “Snowden, a former contractor at the CIA and National Security Agency (NSA), downloaded 1.7m secret documents from western intelligence agencies in 2013.” Even the NSA admits this claim is a lie. The NSA has repeatedly said that it has no idea how many documents Snowden downloaded and has no way to find out. As the NSA itself admits, the 1.7 million number is not the number the NSA claims Snowden downloaded – they admit they don’t and can’t know that number – but merely the amount of documents he interacted with in his years of working at NSA. Here’s then-NSA chief Keith Alexander explaining exactly that in a 2014 interview with the Australian Financial Review:

AFR: Can you now quantify the number of documents [Snowden] stole?

Gen. Alexander: Well, I don’t think anybody really knows what he actually took with him, because the way he did it, we don’t have an accurate way of counting. What we do have an accurate way of counting is what he touched, what he may have downloaded, and that was more than a million documents.

Let’s repeat that: “I don’t think anybody really knows what he actually took with him, because the way he did it, we don’t have an accurate way of counting.” Yet someone whispered to the Sunday Times reporters that Snowden downloaded 1.7 million documents, so like the liars and propagandists that they are, they mindlessly printed it as fact. That’s what this whole article is.

Then there’s the claim that the Russian and Chinese governments learned the names of covert agents by cracking the Snowden file, “forcing MI6 to pull agents out of live operations in hostile countries.” This appears quite clearly to be a fabrication by the Sunday Times for purposes of sensationalism, because if you read the actual anonymous quotes they include, not even the anonymous officials claim that Russia and China hacked the entire archive, instead offering only vague assertions that Russian and China “have information.”

Beyond that, how could these hidden British officials possibly know that China and Russia learned things from the Snowden files as opposed to all the other hacking and spying those countries do? Moreover, as pointed out last night by my colleague Ryan Gallagher – who has worked for well over a year with the full Snowden archive – “I’ve reviewed the Snowden documents and I’ve never seen anything in there naming active MI6 agents.” He also said: “I’ve seen nothing in the region of 1m documents in the Snowden archive, so I don’t know where that number has come from.”

Finally, none of what’s in the Sunday Times is remotely new. US and UK government officials and their favorite journalists have tried for two years to smear Snowden with these same claims. In June, 2013, the New York Times gave anonymity to “two Western intelligence experts, who worked for major government spy agencies” who “said they believed that the Chinese government had managed to drain the contents of the four laptops that Mr. Snowden said he brought to Hong Kong.” The NYT‘s Public Editor chided the paper for printing that garbage, and as I reported in my book, then-editor-in-chief Jill Abramson told the Guardian‘s Janine Gibson that they should not have printed that, calling it “irresponsible.” (And that’s to say nothing of the woefully ignorant notion that Snowden – or anyone else these days – stores massive amounts of data on “four laptops” as opposed to tiny thumb drives).

The GOP’s right-wing extremist Congressman Mike Rogers constantly did the same thing. He once announced with no evidence that “Snowden is working with Russia” – a claim even former CIA Deputy Director Michael Morell denies – and also argued that Snowden should “be charged with murder” for causing unknown deaths. My personal favorite example of this genre of reckless, desperate smears is the Op-Ed which the Wall Street Journal published in May, 2014, by neocon Edward Jay Epstein, which had this still-hilarious paragraph:

A former member of President Obama’s cabinet went even further, suggesting to me off the record in March this year that there are only three possible explanations for the Snowden heist: 1) It was a Russian espionage operation; 2) It was a Chinese espionage operation, or 3) It was a joint Sino-Russian operation.

It must be one of those, an anonymous official told me! It must be! Either Russia did it. Or China did it. Or they did it together! That is American journalism.