Sorting through the various narratives is critically important when trying to ascertain the facts in any situation, especially when it comes to the murky world of international relations and espionage. Nothing has stirred up so many narratives and controversies in the latter domain than the massive theft of an estimated 1.7 million documents in 2013 from secure National Security Agency (NSA) computers by former IT worker Edward Snowden that ignited a fierce debate over foreign and domestic government surveillance. Treading through this murky world and how Edward Snowden changed the game for better or worse is investigative journalist Edward Jay Epstein in his 2017 investigative book How America Lost Its Secrets: Edward Snowden, the Man and the Theft.
Epstein's primary assertion in his investigative work is to challenge the casting of Snowden as an unblemished whistle-blower, as an internal NSA investigation found that a majority of the documents concerned not domestic surveillance but methods and sources involved in foreign surveillance. He first examines the trail of Snowden's movements between various government contractors in 2011-2013 before his flight to Hong Kong and eventually Moscow, Russia where he presumably remains. Notwithstanding some very dubious caricatures of Snowden, his allies in the media and hacktivist communities and his girlfriend Lindsay Mills as alternatively nefarious, narcissistic and superficial, Epstein in this first section of his analysis does help highlight the facts and gaps about Snowden's movements before and after his document theft. Some of the more prominent gaps in the story are the interims after he arrived in Hong Kong before he contacted journalists there and the next interval after that until his departure to Russia.
These intervals become the focal points of the remainder of the book, where, necessarily, when concrete facts cannot be found, educated guesses and speculation are made as to the implications of Snowden's disclosure on America's national security and the ongoing debate about government surveillance and contracting in the intelligence business. While not necessarily succeeding in proving without a doubt that Snowden was a knowing Russian spy (an implication of his argument against Snowden's burnished image as a whistle-blower exposing U.S. government overreach), his consultation with fellow journalists and former intelligence workers about the situation and its context does raise a number of concerns surrounding the Snowden case such as the need for increased regulation under the Patriot Act of 2001 on when and how domestic surveillance of national security concerns is conducted and the vulnerabilities in outsourcing espionage functions to private actors.
Because of tightening budgets and caps on the hiring of government employees and the need to keep ahead in an era of cyber-espionage, the United States intelligence apparatus has come to rely on outside contractors like Dell and Booz Allen Hamilton for the vetting and hiring of employees and the maintenance of secure computer networks. However, because outside contractors are driven by the profit motive, the faster they can move on hiring, the more money they earn and increases the potential for more contracts to be fulfilled. Of course, this leads to a decrease in the quality of employee vetting, which means that potential hacktivists with ideological misgivings about the work U.S. intelligence agencies like the NSA conduct could be let in without much thought and provide potentially easy pickings for other intelligence agencies in terms of persuading those employees to leak various quantities of data. Enter Snowden, who was let in by Booz Allen Hamilton to a higher security clearance position despite flags raised by his previous employer, the CIA. It seems to give credence to the concerns by national security professionals of sacrificing computer network security for greater intelligence reach in the cyber-age and the need for a better balance between the two.
Now that a cataclysmic breach once speculated on in the intelligence community for decades became a reality in 2013, what are the other implications aside from the potential need for increased regulation of government contractors? Epstein concludes How America Lost Its Secrets by speculating how the compromising of sources and methods used by the U.S. and its allies impacts the NSA's post 9-11 focus on counter-terrorism efforts. Many of the documents released by Snowden revealed a significant breach of sources in the Middle East, with the potential for darkened channels at the worst to misinformation channels at the best. No matter where one stands on the Snowden issue (such as if he intended serious damage to U.S. intelligence-gathering ability), the reality remains that information is a key currency in this day and age, critical for optimal policy-making and the best use of government and private sector resources.
As noted, it is too early to tell the true impact of the Snowden breach and if Snowden was a willing spy, but one thing that all of us should agree on is finding a way to protect American interests and citizens in a way that doesn't involve dangerous, wanton and unchecked foreign and domestic surveillance characteristic of the authoritarian states we routinely denounce.
Works Cited:
Epstein, Edward Jay. (2017). How America Lost Its Secrets: Edward Snowden, the Man and the Theft. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.
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