The stolen truth

Edward Snowden as a sign of time

On July 1, The New York Times reported that on the eve of Edward Snowden asked for political asylum in Russia. The scandal around Snowden once again shows: the Internet has generated a new type of people for whom transparency and openness are the Absolute. Snowden, like Julian Assange and Bradley Manning, is a native of the virtual world, with his ideas about morality and truth. Obviously, they will have more and more followers. So who are they, heroes of the electronic century or the evil that you need to fight, - versed The New Times

In Sheremetyevo, Edward Snowden appeared in public only on TV

And the former Private US Army Bradley Manning, who transported more than 400 thousand secret documents of the State Department and Pentagon, and the former system administrator of the consulting company Booz Allen Hamilton Edward Snowden, who submitted data on the programs of the National Security Agency (ANB) of the USA. Not timid ten. Such as them, in principle, are not in a novelty for America. Whistleblowers (“those who whistle”) - this is the name in the USA employees of large corporations or government agencies, who, having faced a violation of the law or simply with injustice, cannot, simply do not consider themselves the right to keep this information with them - and disclose it with the help of journalists or the Internet. Initially, the law is on their side. And often only thanks to them, many cases of corruption and abuse become the property of publicity. These people are not only disinterested, but also fully realize the entire degree of risk that they go. It was not without reason that Manning wrote in May 2010, after he sent the secret documents to Assangeus, that he was ready not only by a life sentence, but also for the death penalty: the main thing is to get rid of the cargo of information received. The main problem for the United States is that among the government agencies that give work for the Whistleblowers, the army and special services are the main media carriers. The employer Snowden - Booz ALEN - managed to earn $ 1.3 billion in contracts with the NSA, CIA and FBI.

“We scream personnel from those layers of the population whose concepts about secrecy and transparency are very different from the views of my generation,” said General Michael Hayden, former Director of the CIA (2006–2009), and even earlier - Director of the NSA (1999-2005). - These people do not go to foreign spies, do not ask for money for secrets, but share them for free, because they believe in freedom of information and consider themselves tyrannoers. These are carriers of a hacker attitude, absorbed in chats and online communities such as Reddit or 4Chan. ”

But, being able to navigate in the hidden corners of the virtual world, with the world of real Internet, apparently, they are poorly familiar. Neither China nor Russia stand at the forefront of countries that protect freedom of speech. Nevertheless, Edward Snowden fled from Gonolulu to Hong Kong, and then decided to fly to Ecuador through Moscow (about what role Ecuador plays in scandals around Julian Assange and Edward Snoden - in the material “Offective“ Beast ” ).

Moscow trap

It is not yet clear where Edward Snowden is located and the representative of Wikileaks, Sarah Harrison. Although it was clear that, about to linger in Moscow for less than a day, he was trapped here: the US authorities were canceled by his American passport.

Journalists, meanwhile, to no avail searched for a fugitive in the transit zone of Sheremetyevo Airport, in which he was supposedly from the moment of his arrival from Hong Kong on June 23. Residue General General of the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service Yuri Kobaladze suggested that all this time Snowden had to be interrogated by employees of the Russian special services, especially since he gave the Guardian and The Washington Post information about the secret programs of the NSA-the largest and most closed of American secret services. “Of course, Snowden is of great interest,” said Kobaladze in a conversation with The New Times. “And he knew what he was going to when he decided to fly through Moscow.” According to the former intelligence officer, it was not worth looking for a fugitive in the transit zone: the Russian special services probably found where to arrange him.

In an interview, The New Times was indirectly confirmed by the official representative of WikiLeaks in Iceland, Christinn Khrafnson: “For security reasons, I cannot say where Snowden is located, but I can assure you that he is in a safe place and now solves the issue with further movements.” On July 1, The New York Times reported that on the eve of Edward Snowden asked for political asylum in Russia, but the Federal Migration Service reported that this information was not true. Nevertheless, the duty consul of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Russian Federation at Sheremetyevo Airport confirmed Snowden's petition for political asylum.

Meeting in Hong Kong

30-year-old Snowden began to seek contact with the media back in January 2011. Then he got in touch with the freelancer Laura Poratra, who at that time working at The Washington Post, and in February he wrote a letter to the British newspaper, the British newspaper The Guardian Glen Glenwald, inviting him to make contact through the encrypted Mails. Moreover, he even made a special video for Glen, in which he step by step explained how to create a cipher, but Greenwald did not believe him. Only in March, when Poitra called him and advised him to take the revelations of Snowden more seriously, did he pay attention to him.

On May 20, Snowden, having captured the four full secret information of the laptop, sat on the flight Gonolulu - Hong Kong, and on June 1, Greenwald and Porata arrived at him, which until the last moment did not even imagine what their source looked like. Their meeting resembled a film about James Bond: Greenwald climbed a certain floor at the Mira hotel, where Snowden stopped, and loudly asked how to go to a restaurant. Snowden went out of the corner with a cube of a chubby in his hands. The next five days, journalists worked with documents, and on June 5, the first revelations of the secret decision of the court, which forcing the American telecommunication company Verizon, to provide the government on calls of Americans, appeared on the pages of The Guardian.

Initially, Snowden planned to stay in the shade, but on June 9 he decided to open. “I have no desire to hide, because I know that I did nothing wrong,” he said in a video interview shot in the Hong Kong Hotel Room. Snowden laid the door of the room with pillows from eavesdropping and, sitting down behind the laptop, threw a red cover on himself and on the keyboard so that the spy cameras would not peep on his passwords. On the same day, the interview appeared on The Guardian.

Al-Qaeda to help?

“The public should decide whether these programs are authorized or not,” Snowden said in the same video interview.

By “programs”, he had in mind the general collection of “metadata” about telephone conversations that the NSA has been engaged in the time of Bush Jr., as well as email bargaining, which it has practiced with the permission of the main Internet services like Google, Yahoo or Skype. They cannot resolve, since the ANB each time is armed with the sanction of a special court, which is in charge of the cases related to national security, and sits in Washington in a room without windows.

By the way, “metadata” is not listening to conversations, but information about their date, length and direction, by which a person can also be learned about a person. Regular calls to the drug dealer or to the unlimited tribal areas of Pakistan are usually quite eloquent.

After the storm raised by Snowden erupted, representatives of the American special services said that thanks to the methods opened by the fugitive, they managed to prevent about 50 terrorist attacks around the world, the misfire occurred only in Boston. According to them, having knitted on the whole world, Snowden allowed al-Qaeda and other adversaries to avoid surveillance.

"

"Great. Look at these dead bastards, ”the pilots say behind the scenes, killing eight people

"

Snowden critics also complain that his exposure give a convenient excuse to authoritarian regimes, which will now be able to nod to American surveillance of their own, although it is very different from it in its goals and results. Snowden, for example, told in Hong Kong that America is spying behind China. “But we (the West) have every right to spy on China - this is a communist dictatorship,” said Edward Lucas, editor of the international department of the British magazine Edward Lucas, in a conversation with The New Times.

Another mistake of Snowden, according to Lucas, is that he decided to become the hero of the scandal. “He should have stayed away from the cameras,” says Lucas. “Here Thomas Drake - he probably acted correctly.”*

Hunting in Baghdad

If Snowden is still elusive for the US authorities, then his colleague, the “whistle” of Bradley Manning, is much worse. The trial of it is now taking place at the Maryland Fort Mid Military base,-by the way, the headquarters of the NSA is also located here. The military prosecutor’s office seems to be demanding a life sentence for Mannig.

The motives of Manning were the same: "The information should be free, it belongs to society!" - He wrote to the famous hacker Adriana Lamo in May 2010, sitting at the Army Computer at the Hammer military base near Baghdad. He wrote after he crossed the secret documents to the founder of Wikileaks Julian Assange: the Albino-Australian was a celebrity in hacker circles, for he embodied their ideals-critical thinking, independence from the authorities and freedom. It was thanks to Lamo, apparently, Manning went to Assange. And the same Lamo handed over to manlands to the authorities ...

From the letters of manning it follows that he tried to reach Assange for several months. And when he finally descended to him, he gave him a video, which immediately turned Wikileaks into a significant phenomenon. The video was made by the Apache on the American helicopter, which shot a group of Iraqis in Baghdad in the summer of 2007, taking on grenade launchers of the Reuters agency correspondents.

"Great. Look at these dead bastards, ”the pilots say behind the scenes, killing eight people, including two journalists, and injuring two children traveling to school with their father. “They themselves are to blame that they dragged the children to the war,” the helicopters comment.

Prior to this, Documents about the specialist Guantanamo and Corruption in Kenya and Switzerland, electronic correspondence of the Governor of Alaska (and ex-candidate in the vice presidents of the United States) Sarah Palein and the secret list of members of the neo-Nazi British party appeared on the Assange website. But in the person of Manning, the Australian gained unprecedented access to the bins of America, in which he saw the main source of world injustice.

Without evil intent

Private Bradley Manning complained about loneliness and isolation at the military base in Iraq

In 2010, Assange was ready to put more than 75 thousand on the network of secret combat reports under the name of the Afghan War Diaries. These documents affected the period from January 2004 to December 2009 and displayed combat operations in Afghanistan in detail. The journalist of The Guardian Nick Davis suggested that Assange not just post materials on the Internet, but do this simultaneously with the publication in the world's leading media: in The Guardian itself, the American The New York Times, the German Spiegel and the French Le Monde. Thus, not only the effect of the publication of information increased, but the Assange himself received some journalistic immunity in the eyes of the authorities and the public. Assange agreed, however, when working with documents, journalists had a question: what to do with dozens of names mentioned in the dispatches, among which were Afghans working with coalition forces? And here is the answer of Assange: "If the Afghans collaborated with the Americans, then these are bad Afghans and, therefore, deserve death."

The Australian, however, managed to convince that one should adhere to journalistic ethics and edit materials in order to prevent the death of people. But if it was not difficult for newspaper men to get out of several names, then what was to do with the whole mass of documents? Until the last day, Assange stated at press conferences that WikiLeaks adheres to certain risk minimization procedures. There were no procedures, however, so that Assange even turned to ... Pentagon for help - so that American experts help to edit 15 thousand dispatch containing most of the names. The Pentagon Assangeus refused, and as a result, full versions of documents appeared on the Internet.

“I don’t know if someone was actually killed, but the very fact that potentially dangerous materials were published, serious political damage inflicted (Assanju),” said Nick Davis in a documentary about Juliana Assange We Steal Secrets (“We will steal secrets”). Washington was not slow to take advantage of the hacker’s miscalculation: the world spoke not only about mass victims among the civilian population in Afghanistan, but also that the hands of the founders of WikiLeaks in the blood.

On October 22, 2010, Assange unveiled 391 thousand similar military documents related to war in Iraq.

Finally, on November 28 of the same year, WikiLeaks was revealed by a quarter of a million documents of the State Department. It was the most massive leak of secret documents in American history and the largest since 1971, when The New York Times published the so -called Pentagon papers - the secret history of the US political and military role in Vietnam in 1945-1967, transferred by the press to the press analyst by the Rand Corporation Daniel Ellesberg. “I believed that, being a responsible American citizen, I can no longer participate in the concealment of this information from the American public,” EllSberg explained. (Developing Ellsberg, the authorities broke firewood, and in January 1973 the Los Angeles federal judge eventually simply closed the case.)

Assange tried to fragrance of manning and denied his involvement in the leak. But Manning himself admitted everything, saying during the investigation that he had no malicious intent and, in any case, the reports did not constitute military secrets. “I want people to know the truth,” wrote 22-year-old manning Hacker Lamo, “because, having no information, the public is not able to make decisions based on facts.”

Daniel Ellsberg agrees with this. “With his actions, this guy (manning) had an incredibly positive impact on world events ... And perhaps he prevented new unrighteous wars,” said Vetran analyst in a conversation with a group of journalists in Washington, among whom was one of the authors of this article. Under the current administration, EllSberg believes, the authors of leaks risk much more than before: “At one time I was justified. I have no doubt that under Obama I would receive a life sentence. ”

The right to know

“They themselves are to blame that they dragged the children to the war,” the American helicopters say, having shot a group of Iraqis

According to American experts, attacks on September 11, 2001 played a significant role in the appearance of “whistles”, when different American departments began to share secret information, and there was much more such information. So, if until 2001 about 8 million documents per year were classified in the country, then after this figure increased to 76 million, while 4 million people received access to secret data. Personnel vigilance could not help but, explained to The New Times, the leading expert of the conservative Washington Foundation of the Conservative Foundation, close to the Republicans, Ariel Cohen, who believes that the American special services themselves are to blame for leaks: “How could it be allowed to secretly information such a mentally unconscious person as a mentally unconscious person. Manning? - The expert asks the question, obviously, bearing in mind that Bradley consulted with his psychotherapist regarding the opportunity to do the operation to change the floor and sometimes signed not Bradley, but Breannaya. - And how then could you not extract a lesson and release Snowaden with four laptops full of secret information? ”

However, Manning and Snowden are not at all the first and, obviously, not the latest representatives of the Generation of the Network. Mark Zuckerberg once hacked the databases of Harvard University in order to create Facemash, Facebook. Apple's founder Steve Jobs by a teenager traded devices made by his friend Steve Vozniak to call for free on the intercity. Bill Gates from Microsoft hacked the bills of one of the early computer companies so as not to pay for its services ...

And on May 27, a week after Snowden flew with stolen secrets to Hong Kong, 28-year-old hacker Jeremy Hammond found himself guilty of the embezzlement of mails, data on credit card and documents of the famous company Global Intelligence Service, providing consulting services in the field of security.

Hammond, who did not show much repentance, acted in a group of hackers and activists (abbreviated hackivists), known as Anonymous. «Я делал это, потому что я верю, что у народа есть право знать, чем занимаются правительство и корпорации за закрытыми дверями, — писал он в Сети после признания вины. — Я считал, что поступал по совести».

Судить нельзя наградить

Американское общество разделилось в своем отношении к тем, кто делает государственное тайное явным. Петиция на сайте Белого дома, призывающая простить Сноудена, собрала более 120 тыс. подписей (призыв освободить Брэдли Мэннинга — лишь более 8 тыс.) Как показал опрос еженедельника Time, 53% американцев против 28% считают, что Сноудена следует привлечь к суду. Но в возрастной когорте от 18 до 34 лет, к которой принадлежит он и Мэннинг, уже 43% респондентов думают, что наказывать Сноудена не нужно.

А опрос газеты USA Today и центра PEW показал, что 60% американцев в возрасте 18–29 лет поддерживают утечку информации о тайной деятельности АНБ в прессу, считая, что это послужит общественному благу. Ведь все, что касается армии и спецслужб, касается и налогоплательщика. Впрочем, Ариэль Коэн сомневается в том, что этим опросам можно верить: «В любом социологическом исследовании главное — формулировка. If the question were formulated as follows: “Do you agree that the CIA employees have access to your personal Mail?” “The results would be completely different.”

Джулиан Ассанж, впрочем, в коллизиях вокруг краденых секретов видит пока только плюсы: «Больше всего оптимизма вселяет радикализация молодежи, воспитанной на интернете, людей, впитывающих ценности из интернета, — восторженно заметил он в одном из недавних интервью. — Идет политическое образование аполитичных технарей».

Впрочем, «Уотергейт» или тотальная слежка, вьетнамская война или афганская — в знаменателе всех историй с секретными утечками лежит одна истина: правда спасает жизни. Именно в этом убежден Бил Ковач, знаменитый в прошлом американский журналист, один из тех, кто публиковал в The New York Times те самые «бумаги Пентагона», которыми с ним «поделился» Эллсберг. «В демократиях нельзя ни управлять под покровом тайны, ни вести войны втайне, — заметил Ковач в разговоре с The New Times — Если избиратели и власти не могут принять войну такой, какой она является в реальности, то это значит, что для решения проблем следует выбирать иные способы, нежели война».

Для The New Times специалист в области интернет-безопасности написал о том, как за вами следят и можно ли от этого защититься

фотографии: Reuters, кадр из фильма We steal secrets