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SURVEILLANCE STATE CAN BE FUNNY
I
must say that Luke Harding is able to look at this and laugh a bit, although he
also seems to see absurdity as something amusing, not threatening.
Now
imagine your own reaction. You have a
computer, brand new, never been hooked up to the Internet. You are writing a manuscript about the
Snowden papers. You are sitting there,
pausing for a second, and by itself, the cursor starts to backspace, deleting
characters as it goes. You are unable
to even act to stop it before an entire paragraph or two has been deleted. Isn’t that a bit freaky?
I
mean, it’s enough to speed up the auto save function on your word
processor. I’m going to change that
right now and then upload this interview:
MONDAY, FEBRUARY 24, 2014
"The Paragraph Began to Self-Delete": Did NSA Hack Computer of Snowden Biographer & Edit Book Draft?
Is the National Security Agency breaking into
computers and tampering with unpublished manuscripts? Award-winning Guardian
journalist Luke Harding says paragraphs of his writing mysteriously disappeared
when he was working on his latest book, "The Snowden Files: The Inside
Story of the World’s Most Wanted Man." "I wrote that Snowden’s
revelations had damaged U.S. tech companies and their bottom line. Something
odd happened," wrote Harding in The Guardian. "The paragraph I had
just written began to self-delete. The cursor moved rapidly from the left,
gobbling text. I watched my words vanish." Harding joins us to talk about
the computer monitoring and other times he believes he was being tracked.
TRANSCRIPT
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in
its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: We turn now to the latest on the growing surveillance
state.
EDWARD SNOWDEN: [Recently, we learned that our governments], working in concert,
have created a system of worldwide mass surveillance, watching everything we
do. Great Britain’s George Orwell warned us of the danger of this kind of
information. The types of collection in the book—microphones and video cameras,
TVs that watch us—are nothing compared to what we have available today. We have
sensors in our pockets that track us everywhere we go. Think about what this
means for the privacy of the average person. A child born today will grow up
with no conception of privacy at all. They’ll never know what it means to have
a private moment to themselves, an unrecorded, unanalyzed thought. And that’s a
problem, because privacy matters.
AMY GOODMAN: Those are the words of NSA whistleblower
Edward Snowden, speaking in December.
We turn now to the remarkable story of British
journalist Luke Harding, who says he became the target of surveillance himself
while reporting on Edward Snowden. Harding recently published The Snowden Files: The Inside
Story of the World’s Most Wanted Man. On Friday, he revealed that while he
was writing the book on his computer, paragraphs of the book would begin to
self-delete. He repeatedly saw the cursor move rapidly from the left, gobbling
text. And that wasn’t the only time he felt he was being monitored. Luke Harding
joins us now via Democracy
Now! video stream from The Guardian newsroom in London.
Welcome back to Democracy Now!, Luke. Tell us
what happened.
LUKE HARDING: Well, before I do that, I think you have to understand the
context, which is that the first few months of last year after Snowden’s leaks,
both the U.S. and the British governments were scrambling to find out what he’d
taken, how much he’d taken, why he’d taken it, and were really kind of
clueless. And so, I think in that context it’s hardly surprising that the small
number of journalists who were working on this material, including me, would
have been targeted.
What happened was that
I was writing my book. I was about halfway through. I had been to see Glenn
Greenwald in Rio, in Brazil, to interview him, which was a kind of curious
experience because Gleen is clearly very heavily surveilled by, I think, all
sorts of people. Back at my home in the English countryside, I was writing kind
of rather disparagingly, rather critically, about the NSA and its—the damage these revelations
had done to Silicon Valley. And I was sitting back, working offline, I have to
say, and, as you say, the text began rapidly deleting. And I thought, "Oh,
my goodness! What is going on here?" This happened four or five times over
a period of a month, to the point where I was actually, almost kind of
jokingly, leaving little notes every morning to this kind of mysterious reader.
And then, at one point, one of my colleagues mentioned this in a newspaper
interview in Germany, and it suddenly stopped. So, I wrote this piece not
because this was an especially sinister experience, but merely to kind of lay
out the facts in what was another curious episode in an already quite surreal
tale.
AMY GOODMAN: Luke, you describe in your most recent piece about
an American who approached you when you were in Rio de Janeiro, in Brazil.
LUKE HARDING: Well, that’s right. I mean, again, I said this—you know, I
mean, it was quite funny, in a way. Essentially, what happened was that I met
Glenn at a hotel by the seafront, and we had to shift locations several times
because it was clear that there were various people who were trying to
eavesdrop on our conversation, and we ended up in the business suite where we
could actually physically lock the door behind ourselves. Subsequently, at my
hotel, the Marriott, the next day, I was kind of accosted in the lobby by
someone who looked as if they were straight out of CIAcentral
casting, with a kind of military haircut and neatly ironed khaki shorts. And
basically, he wanted to become my friend. He wanted to take me sightseeing. And
it was a curious incident. I mean, you know, I say in my piece that he may have
been a tourist, because of course there’s an innocent explanation for all of
these things. But having talked to Glenn, one of the things he taught me was
that the CIA in Rio especially was very aggressive.
Glenn’s own computer had been stolen from the home where he shared with David
Miranda just a few weeks previously. And it’s clear that there was a lot of
U.S. intelligence activity going on there.
AMY GOODMAN: Remind us, Luke Harding, about the day the GCHQ came to call on The Guardian.
LUKE HARDING: Yeah, it was really, I think, one of the bizarrest
episodes in the history of journalism. Essentially, the British government was
extremely unhappy about our ongoing publication, from June the 5th onwards, of
Snowden’s files, of the prison revelations, of Verizon and so on. And we came
under increasing pressure, private pressure, backdoor pressure, from David
Cameron, the British prime minister, who sent his most senior official, a guy
called Sir Jeremy Heywood, to come and see us and basically say, "We can
do this nicely, or we can go to law." In other words, he wanted this
material back, and if we didn’t give it back, we were going to be injuncted. In
other words, police would seize our computers and kind of shut down our
reporting operation. And we explained that this was pointless, because Glenn
had this stuff in Brazil; Laura Poitras, the filmmaker, had Snowden material in
Berlin; The Washington Post similarly.
But the British
government wasn’t listening, and this culminated in a hot Saturday morning last
summer with three of my colleagues being forced to smash up our computers in
the underground car park, four floors down from where I’m talking to you,
watched by two spies from the British spy agency, GCHQ, who took
photos on their iPhones to record the event, brought along a special machine
called a degausser, which looks like a microwave oven. So we had to post the
pieces of our bashed-up MacBooks into this degausser, which demagnetized them.
And then these spies, who are based in the English countryside in a small
provincial town called Cheltenham, they don’t get to London very often, the big
city, and they left carrying bags of shopping, presents for their families. It
really was a bizarre thing and, I think, for anyone who cares about press
freedom, a pretty chilling thing, too.
AMY GOODMAN: While you were doing the work, while The Guardian was, and Glenn Greenwald was working
for The Guardian,
putting out the original pieces based on what Edward Snowden released from the
National Security Agency, you write about how you were a part of this small
team holed up in a room at The
Guardian. Describe the security you had, and even your computers not being
linked to the Internet.
LUKE HARDING: Yeah, it’s actually one floor up from here, so the
computer smashing happened three floors down. The secret bunker is upstairs.
And we knew that this was a serious—you know, the material that Snowden had
entrusted to us, that this was a very serious undertaking. And we had a clear
mission from him, which was to not publish anything which would damage
legitimate intelligence operations, but to reveal mass surveillance, which we
now all know about. And so, there were seven or eight of us, never any more
than that, working in the room. We had security guards, around the clock, 24
hours, making sure that nobody who shouldn’t have been there was there. We left
all electronics out. And we had four laptops and a PC, which had never been
connected to the Internet, which were brand new, air-gapped at all times. We
papered over the windows so nobody could see in from outside. And we—actually,
to be honest, we were also kind of working against the clock. There was a sense
that we needed to get as many stories out as we could, and in a responsible
way, because we didn’t know when the British government would fall on us. And
one other quite nice detail, cleaners were banned. Nobody was inside that room.
So, very quickly, you know, I write in my book, it sort of resembled a kind of
student dormitory with pizza wrappers, dirty coffee cups. So it was a pretty
insalubrious working environment.
AMY GOODMAN: Has the GCHQ, the Government Communications Headquarters, the
equivalent of the NSA, and the NSA changed
their practices in any way in this eight months since all of this information
has begun to come out?
LUKE HARDING: Well, you would think the answer to that question, Amy,
would be yes, but in reality the answer is no. And I find it very depressing. I
mean, it’s been fascinating. You know, I’ve been to the U.S. several times
researching the book, and there’s clearly a very lively debate, a polarized
debate, going on. But what’s happening politically is very interesting. In
Britain, for certainly the first four or five months, the entire political
establishment was asleep, and it’s only really woken up, I’d say, in the last
few months. And the message from David Cameron, the prime minister, has been,
really, "Move along, nothing to see here." But I think, inevitably,
one of the things you know when you look at these documents is that GCHQ and the NSA work so closely together. This becomes
very clear. They’re practically one entity. So I think the reforms or
"reforms" that Obama announced in January, on January 17th, will
inevitably affect the work of GCHQ, as well.
AMY GOODMAN: And what do you think of President Obama’s so-called
"reforms"?
LUKE HARDING: Well, I mean, I think reform is rather a grand word. It
seems to me they’re more face-saving tweaks, actually. I mean, the big takeaway
is that theNSA will
no longer listen to Angela Merkel’s cellphone or that of other
"friendly" leaders. But I’ve just been in Europe doing various
literary events there, and people are scratching their heads wondering whether
their prime ministers, you know, are sufficiently friendly to—whether that
means they will be bugged or not. They simply don’t know. And on the big thing,
which is of course the collection of American metadata, telephony data, you
know, tell me if I’m wrong, but that’s carrying on. OK, it may be administered
by some new entity, but those programs, which Ed Snowden very bravely exposed,
are still continuing.
AMY GOODMAN: And we just have 30 seconds. Google, Microsoft, have they
changed their ways of operating at all as a result of all that has come out,
and the other big companies?
LUKE HARDING: Well, I mean, I haven’t—I haven’t noticed major changes. I
have noticed absolute panic and a really massive kind of PR campaign to try and
assure everybody, from us—senior Google executives recently visited The Guardian—to the whole
world, that they are not kind of complicit in this spying, and have been
coerced into collaborating. But I still think there are some kind of big
questions about how deep their involvement in all of this is.
AMY GOODMAN: Luke Harding, I want to thank you for being with us, award-winning
foreign correspondent with The
Guardian. His new book, just out, The
Snowden Files: The Inside Story of the World’s Most Wanted Man. He also
recently wrote a piece in The Guardian called "Writing The Snowden
Files: 'The Paragraph Began to Self-Delete.'"
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