No Safe Place - NSA Cracks All Codes
Glenn Greenwald on Secret NSA Program to Crack Online Encryption
(Image: via Shutterstock).A
new exposé based on the leaks of Edward Snowden has revealed the
National Security Agency has developed methods to crack online
encryption used to protect emails, banking and medical records.
"Encryption is really the system that lets the Internet function as an
important commercial instrument all around the world," says Glenn
Greenwald of The Guardian, which collaborated with The New York Times
and ProPublica on the reporting. "It’s what lets you enter your credit
card number, check your banking records, buy and sell things online, get
your medical tests online, engage in private communications. It’s what
protects the sanctity of the Internet." Documents leaked by Snowden
reveal the NSA spends $250 million a year on a program which, among
other goals, works with technology companies to "covertly influence"
their product designs. "The entire system is now being compromised by
the NSA and their British counterpart, the GCHQ," Greenwald says.
"Systematic efforts to ensure that there is no form of human commerce,
human electronic communication, that is ever invulnerable to their
prying eyes."
TRANSCRIPT:
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
Juan González: The Guardian, The New York
Times and ProPublica have jointly revealed the National Security Agency
is successfully waging a long-running secret war on encryption,
jeopardizing hundreds of millions of people’s ability to protect their
privacyThe New York Times writes, quote, "The NSAhas circumvented or
cracked much of the encryption, or digital scrambling, that guards
global commerce and banking systems, protects sensitive data like trade
secrets and medical records, and automatically secures the e-mails, Web
searches, Internet chats and phone calls of Americans and others around
the world." Security experts say the NSA program "undermine[s] the
fabric of the internet." The revelations are based on documents from
the NSA and its British counterpart, GCHQ, leaked by
former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.
Amy Goodman: The documents also showNSA spends $250
million a year on a program which, among other goals, works with
technology companies to covertly influence their product designs.
The NSA has also been deliberately weakening the international
encryption standards adopted by developers. And according to the
documents, a GCHQ team has reportedly been working to develop ways into
encrypted traffic on the "big four" service providers, named as Hotmail,
Google, Yahoo and Facebook. The spy agencies insist that the ability to
defeat encryption is vital to their core missions of counterterrorism
and foreign intelligence gathering.
Well, for more, we’re joined by Democracy Now! video stream by Glenn Greenwald of The Guardian, co-author of the new
article,
"US and UK Spy Agencies Defeat Privacy and Security on the Internet."
Glenn Greenwald first published Edward Snowden’s revelations about
the NSAsurveillance programs and continues to write extensively on the
topic.
Glenn, welcome back to Democracy Now! We haven’t spoken to you since
your partner, David Miranda, was held at Heathrow for nine hours, the
airport in Britain, and we want to get to that. But first, talk about
the significance of this latest exposé that both The Guardian, The New
York Timesand ProPublica have published today.
Glenn Greenwald: First of all, I think there’s
significance just in the partnership itself. It’s very unusual for three
media organizations to work so closely on a story of this magnitude.
And that happened because the U.K. government tried forcibly toThe
Guardian from reporting on these documents by pressuring The
Guardian editor-in-chief in London, Alan Rusbridger, to destroy the hard
drives of The Guardian which contained these materials, which is why
they ended up making their way to The New York Times and ProPublica. So I
think it clearly backfired, now that there are other media
organizations, including probably the most influential in the world, The
New York Times, now vested in reporting on the story.
The significance of the story itself, I think, is easy to see. When
people hear encryption, they often think about what certain people who
are very interested in maintaining the confidentiality of their
communications use, whether it be lawyers talking to their clients,
human rights activists dealing with sensitive matters, people working
against oppressive governments. And those people do use encryption, and
it’s extremely important that it be safeguarded. And the fact that
the NSA is trying to not only break it for themselves, but to make it
weaker and put backdoors into all these programs makes all of those very
sensitive communications vulnerable to all sorts of people around the
world, not just the NSA, endangering human rights activists and
democracy activists and lawyers and their clients and a whole variety of
other people engaged in sensitive work.
But encryption is much more than that. Encryption is really the
system that lets the Internet function as an important commercial
instrument all around the world. It’s what lets you enter your credit
card number, check your banking records, buy and sell things online, get
your medical tests online, engage in private communications. It’s what
protects the sanctity of the Internet. And what these documents show is
not just that the NSA is trying to break the codes of encryption to let
them get access to everything, but they’re forcing the companies that
provide the encryption services to put backdoors into their programs,
which means, again, that not only the NSA, but all sorts of hackers and
other governments and all kinds of ill-motivated people, can have a
weakness to exploit, a vulnerability to exploit, in these systems, which
makes the entire Internet insecure for everybody. And the fact that
it’s all being done as usual with no transparency or accountability
makes this very newsworthy.
Juan González: But, Glenn, going back to the
mid-1990s in the Clinton administration, when the government tried to
establish these backdoors into communications on the Internet, there was
a public debate and a rejection of this. What has happened since then
now in terms of howNSAoperates?
Glenn Greenwald: Right, it’s interesting. If you go
back to the mid-'90s, that debate was really spawned by the attack on
Oklahoma City, which the Clinton administration—on the Oklahoma City
courthouse by Timothy McVeigh, which the Clinton administration
immediately exploited to try and demand that every single form of
computer security or human communication on the Internet be vulnerable
to government intrusion, that it all—that there be no encryption to
which the governments didn't have the key. And as you said, a
combination of public backlash and industry pressure led to a rejection
of that proposal, and the industries were particularly incensed by it,
because they said if you put backdoors into this technology, it will
make it completely vulnerable. If anyone gets that key, if anybody
figures out how to crack it, it will mean that there’s no security
anymore on the Internet.
And so, since the NSA and the U.S. government couldn’t get its way
that way, what they’ve done instead is they resorted to covert means to
infiltrate these companies, to pressure and coerce them, to provide the
very backdoors that they failed to compel through legislation and
through public debate and accountability. And that is what this story
essentially reveals, is that the entire system is now being compromised
by the NSA and their British counterpart, the GCHQ, systematic efforts
to ensure that there is no form of human commerce, human electronic
communication, that is ever invulnerable to their prying eyes. And
again, the danger is not just that they get into all of our transactions
and human communications, but that they are making it much easier for
all kinds of other entities to do the same thing.
Amy Goodman: Glenn Greenwald,The Guardian piece, you
write, "The NSA spends $250m a year on a program which, among other
goals, works with technology companies to 'covertly influence' their
product designs." How does the NSA do this?
Glenn Greenwald: So, one of the things that happens
here is that a lot of these large technology companies sell products,
expensive products, to their users based on the claim that these
products will safeguard the privacy of people’s activities online or
online communication through encryption. At the same time, these
companies are working directly with the U.S. government andNSA, either
cooperatively or because they’re getting benefits from it or through
coercion, to make these products vulnerable and insecure, exactly
undermining the commitments that they’re making to their users that they
will enable and safeguard the privacy of their communications. So it’s
really a form of fraud that the—that the technology industry is
perpetrating on its users, pretending that they’re offering security
while at the same time working with the U.S. government to make sure
that these products are being designed in a way that makes them actually
vulnerable to invasion. And again, sometimes it’s the fault of the
technology companies. They do it because they want good relationships
with the U.S. government. They’re profit-motivated. They get benefits
from it. But a lot of times there’s just pressure and coercion on the
part of a very powerful, sprawling U.S. government that induces these
companies to do it against their wishes.
Juan González: And these revelations have some
specifics in terms of those who are cooperating. Could you talk about
Microsoft and its Outlook email?
Glenn Greenwald: Sure. We actually reported about a
month ago an article that focused almost exclusively on Microsoft and
the extraordinary collaboration that company engages in withNSA to
provide backdoor access to its very programs that they tout to the world
as offering safe encryption. If you look at what—if you just go look at
Outlook.com, what Microsoft says about its Outlook email server, which
is now basically the program where, if you use Hotmail or any other
Microsoft service, your email is routed through, they tout Outlook as
this really great service that protects people’s communications through
this strong encryption. And at the very same time, Microsoft is working
in private with the NSA to ensure access by the NSA across all of their
platforms, not just Outlook email, but Skype and a whole variety of
other services that Microsoft offers to their users to basically ensure
that it’s all completely vulnerable to NSA snooping. And again, one of
the big problems with it is that when you allow—when you make these
programs vulnerable to the NSA, you’re also making them vulnerable to
other intelligence agencies around the world or to hackers or to
corporate spies or to people who just wish you ill will for any number
of reasons. It’s making the entire Internet insecure.
Amy Goodman: After—The Guardian revealed last month
that it smashed several computers in its London office after the British
government threatened legal action, editor Alan Rusbridger said he
agreed to their demand in order to avoid the newspaper’s potential
closure. This is what he said.
Alan Rusbridger: We were faced, effectively, with an
ultimatum from the British government that if we didn’t hand back the
material or destroy it, they would move to law. That would mean prior
restraint, a concept that is anathema in America and other parts of the
world, in which the state can effectively prevent a news publisher from
publishing, and I didn’t want to get into that position. And I also
explained to the U.K. officials we were dealing with that there were
other copies already in America and Brazil, so they wouldn’t be
achieving anything. But once it was obvious that they would be going to
law, I would rather destroy the copy than hand it back to them or allow
the courts to freeze our reporting.
Amy Goodman: Last month at a White House news
briefing, the deputy spokesperson, Josh Earnest, was asked if the U.S.
government would ever take similar actions against a media outlet. He
said, quote, "It’s very difficult to imagine a scenario in which that
would be appropriate." Glenn Greenwald, can you talk about what happened
at your paper?
Glenn Greenwald: It should be a major scandal. I
mean, the United States and the U.K. run around the world constantly
denouncing other countries that aren’t friendly with it for abusing
press freedoms or failing to protect them, and yet at the same time both
of these countries are engaged in a major assault on journalism when it
comes to those who are trying to report on what it is they’re doing.
The idea that the U.K. government, at the behest of the highest levels
of that government, the prime minister and their top—it’s his top
security officials—wentThe Guardian and threatenedThe Guardian's top
editor repeatedly and ultimately forced him to destroy hard drives that
contained the byproduct of our journalism is the stuff that, you know,
the U.K. and the U.S. governments would like you to think happen only in
Russia or China or other governments that they love to depict as
tyrannical, and yet it's happening in the closest ally of the United
States.
And, of course, in the United States itself, there is a major war on
the news-gathering process with the prosecution of whistleblowers, the
people who serve as sources for journalists, the theories they flirted
with to criminalize the process of journalism, with the criminal and
grand jury investigation of WikiLeaks or the filing of an affidavit
accusing a Fox News journalist of being a co-conspirator in felonies
because he worked with his source.
You really see these two governments working hand in hand to create
this climate of fear in which even the largest media organizations,
like The New York Times, whose celebrated reporter Jim Risen is being
threatened with jail, or The Guardian, a 220-year-old newspaper, one of
the most influential in the world, being threatened in the most thuggish
and abusive ways to stop their reporting. And The Guardian had to take
very extreme measures to evade those threats, including providing
substantial numbers of documents to The New York Times and ProPublica to
make sure that if they were ordered to destroy all of their sets, that
there would be copies existing elsewhere in the world so that this
material could continue to be reported.
Juan González: Glenn, what do you think needs to
happen, given these continuing revelations aboutNSA especially, but our
government in general, being virtually out of control in terms of its
surveillance of communications of—not only of Americans, but around the
world? Do you think that the impact of all of these revelations is going
to move, hopefully, Congress to act in a stronger way to control these
activities?
Glenn Greenwald: I do. I think the impact of all of
this reporting is often underappreciated, in part because the changes in
public opinion are often imperceptible. They happen somewhat
incrementally, and we don’t immediately notice the shifts. But certain
polls that have been released since we began our reporting show some
very radical changes in how Americans think about threats to their
privacy. They now fear government assault on their civil liberties more
than they fear the threat of terrorism, something that has never
happened, at least since the 9/11 attacks.
But I also think it’s important to appreciate just how global this
story has resonated. There are countless countries around the world in
which there are very intense debates taking place over the nature of
U.S. surveillance, the value of Internet freedom and privacy. There are
all kinds of pressure movements to demand that those people’s
governments take serious action against the United States to protect the
Internet from these kind of intrusions. You see an incredibly
unprecedented, really, coalition of people across the spectrum in
Congress banding together against NSA spying, insisting that they will
continue to engage in reform movements, something that transcends
partisan divisions or ideological divisions. It’s causing serious
diplomatic tensions between the United States and allies in Germany,
here in Brazil and other countries around the world, that will continue,
as more reporting happens, on a country-by-country basis, as we partner
with more and more media organizations around the world. So I think
absolutely this has had a huge impact not just on the way that people
think about surveillance and the NSA surveillance program, but, as
importantly, the way they think about President Obama, the credibility
of the United States government in terms of the claims it makes, one
after the next of which have proven to be false, and, more generally,
the role of the United States and its closest allies, including the
U.K., in the world, and how much defiance and challenge they actually
need.
Amy Goodman: You know, you could, in an odd way,
talk about how Syria is linked to these revelations. President Obama is
pursuing a pro-strike strategy with Syria right now in Russia, as
opposed to talking about, you know, using this moment at the G-20 summit
to push for diplomacy. He was already isolated from Putin, angry at
Putin because Putin gave temporary asylum to Ed Snowden, so he cancels
his bilateral meeting with Putin, which could have been used to make a
deal around Syria, since he’s the major sponsor of Syria. You also have,
with the G-20, President Obama trying to get these countries to support
a strike, but he’s up against—you could say, against a wall BRICS,
meaning BRICS, you know, the BRICS nations—Brazil, Russia, India, China
and South Africa—who, it’s been revealed, that the NSA has been spying
on, so there’s not a lot of friendliness there. Can you talk about your
more recent—the piece you did before this one, around Brazil, which has
caused a furor in your country, the country where you live right now,
where we’re speaking to you?
Glenn Greenwald: Sure. We’ve been doing a lot of
reporting in Brazil, in the same way that Laura Poitras, who lives in
Germany because she’s afraid to edit her own film on U.S. soil because
she thinks it will be seized, the footage will be, because it’s
aboutNSA, the way that she’s been teaming with Der Spiegel to report on
U.S. spying on Germans. I’ve been teaming with British media
outlets—Brazilian media outlets to report on what’s being done in Brazil
and, more generally, to Latin America.
And the stories that we started off with were about indiscriminate
mass collection of the communications, data and voice and Internet
emails, of literally tens of millions of Brazilians, literally stealing
from the Brazilian telecommunications system all of this data on the
part of the NSA, on behalf of a government over which Brazilians
exercise no accountability, for which they don’t vote, to which they—and
which owes them no obligation. That already created a huge scandal in
Brazil. And the reporting talked about how that’s being done more
broadly in Latin America, which made that scandal spread.
And then, with the report that we did last week that Dilma herself,
the president of Brazil, Dilma Rousseff, had been a very personal,
specific target, along with the Mexican president, where her personal
communications had been analyzed and intercepted and listened to,
created an enormous furor here. It caused the Brazilian government to
threaten to cancel a state dinner, which is a huge matter between the
U.S. and Brazil, the only state dinner that I believe the White House is
having this year, to threaten to cancel large contracts. And now, this
Sunday, on the same program, which is the largest, most-watched program
in Brazil, we’re going to have another report that I think is even
bigger, about what the NSA is doing in terms of spying on Brazilian
citizens.
And so, you know, I think that one of the things that’s happening
here is that, at the very least, if theNSA wants to construct a massive
spying system that literally has as its goal the complete elimination of
privacy around the world, that people around the world ought to at
least be aware that that’s taking place, so that they can have
democratic and informed debates about what they want to do about it,
about how they want to safeguard their privacy, just like Americans are
entitled to know that the U.S. government is collecting all of their
personal communications data, as well.
Juan González: And, Glenn, I want to ask you about
something closer to home, ask you about what happened to your partner,
David Miranda, when he was detained last month by the British government
at London’s Heathrow Airport for nine hours under a British
anti-terrorism law. He faced repeated interrogation and had his
belongings seized, including thumb drives carrying information you used
in your reporting NSA surveillance. Speaking on his return to Brazil,
Miranda said he was subjected to psychological violence.
David Miranda: [translated] A Brazilian that travels
to a country like this and is detained for nine hours in this way, it, I
think, breaks a person, you understand? You break down completely and
get very scared. They didn’t use any physical violence against me, but
you can see that it was a fantastic use of psychological violence.
Juan González: Glenn, could you talk about—about this incident?
Glenn Greenwald: Sure. I mean, first of all, what
David was talking about there was the fact that they didn’t just detain
him the way you sometimes get regularly detained at an airport when you
visit another country for a few minutes or for even an hour to get
secondarily screened. He was told right from the beginning that he was
being detained under the Terrorism Act of 2000, which means that he was
being detained under a law the purpose of which is to investigate people
for ties to terrorism. And although it might be a little bit difficult
for American citizens or for British citizens to understand, for people
around the world who have seen what the U.S. and the U.K. governments do
in the name of terrorism—they disappear people, they kidnap them, they
torture them, they put them into cages for years at a time without so
much as charges or even a lawyer—it’s an—not to mention the bombs they
drop and the children they kill with drones—it’s an incredibly
intimidating thing to be told that you’re being detained by a government
with the behavioral record of the U.K. under a terrorism law.
The fact that hour after hour after hour went by, when they refused
to allow him to speak to me or anybody in the outside world other than a
list that they gave him of what they said were their approved lawyers,
who they said that he was free to talk to on the phone, and when he told
them that he didn’t trust their lawyers, their list or their phones,
that he wanted to speak in person with a lawyer sent by me or by The
Guardian, and was told that he had no right to a lawyer, no right to
outside contact, that’s what he meant by the psychological violence,
that he was kept in this small room, repeatedly interrogated hour after
hour under a terrorism law, denied the right to his independent lawyers,
ones that he trusted, not ones provided by them, and had no idea what
was going to be done to him.
The entire day, I was being told by Guardian lawyers in Britain that
it was likely that after the nine hours he would be arrested. That’s
typically what they do. They barely ever hold anybody for more than an
hour, and almost always when they do, it ends with an arrest. Sometimes
they arrest them on terrorism charges, sometimes because there’s an
obligation under this law to be fully cooperative, meaning answering all
their questions fully, not refusing to answer anything, giving them
passwords that they ask. If you even remotely refuse any of that, if
they perceive that you’re not being cooperative, they will then charge
you separately for a violation of that law, then will arrest you and put
them in—put the person into the criminal justice system.
All of this, combined with the fact that high-level Brazilian
diplomats were unable to find out any information about where he was or
what was being done to him, was absolutely designed to send a message—as
Reuters reported, by quoting a U.S. official, a message of intimidation
to those of us who have been reporting on the GCHQ and the NSA, that if
we continue to do so, this is the sort of thing that we can expect. The
idea that all they wanted to do was to take his USB drives is
ludicrous, for a lot of reasons, including the fact that all kinds
of Guardian reporters have flown in and out of Heathrow. Laura Poitras
herself flew to London and back out again without incident. They had no
idea what he would be carrying. How would they possibly know? But more
to the point, if all they wanted to do was take his things, that would
have taken nine minutes, not nine hours. They purposely kept him for
nine hours, the full amount allowed under that law, because they wanted
to be as thuggish and intimidating as possible.
And the fact that he was helping Laura for a week in Berlin with our
journalism, that he was carrying material back to me that Laura and I
were working on journalistically, doesn’t make what they did better, it
makes it worse. It shows how what the U.K. government is doing is
specifically targeting the journalism process and trying to be
intimidating and to force it to stop. And it’s clear it had no effect.
If anything, it backfired, as I said from the beginning that it would.
But I think their intent is completely clear to the world.
Amy Goodman: Are you suing? And did David get his equipment back?
Glenn Greenwald: David is absolutely suing. He is
pursuing a judgment in the British courts that, as even the author of
that law in the U.K. said, it was a completely illegal detention because
it was obvious they had no interest in investigating him about
terrorism. They never asked him a single question about terrorism. There
was obviously no—nobody thought he was connected to a terrorist
organization. He was repeatedly questioned about everything but
terrorism, including, primarily, our journalism.
He hasn’t gotten any of his belongings back. And one of the things
that happened is that the U.K. government just outright lied about what
took place that day. They claimed he was carrying a password that
allowed them access to 58,000 classified documents. He was not carrying
any password that allowed them access to any documents. They actually
filed an affidavit the same day they made that claim, saying—asking the
court to let them continue to keep his belongings on the ground that all
of the material he was carrying was heavily encrypted, that they
couldn’t break the encryption, and they only got access to 75 of the
documents that he was carrying, most of which are probably ones related
to his school work and personal use. But, of course, media outlet has
just uncritically repeated what the U.K. government had said, as though
it were true. It wasn’t true; it was a pack of lies. But even if it were
true, the idea that you’re going to detain somebody under a terrorism
law who you think is working with journalists is incredibly menacing, as
menacing as anything the U.K. government denounces when other countries
do it.
Amy Goodman: Glenn, we want to thank you for being
with us. We know you have to leave. Glenn Greenwald is a columnist on
civil liberties and U.S. national security issues The Guardian. He’s also
a former constitutional lawyer, first published Edward Snowden’s
revelations about the NSA surveillance program and continues to write
extensively on the topic. His most recent
piece,
co-authored in The Guardian, "US and UK Spy Agencies Defeat Privacy and
Security on the Internet." We will link to that at Democracy Now.org.
Don’t go away. After break, Bruce Schneier, one of the leading
experts on security on the Internet, is coming up, and then we’ll speak
with Adam Entous of The Wall Street Journal about the Saudi-Syrian rebel
connection and what the U.S. has to do with it. Stay with us.
