Why We Need To Worry About Every Other Country's NSA Too

With the troves of extremely valuable personal information collected by social media giants, it’s likely—if not already occurring—that foreign spies have infiltrated several Silicon Valley companies in the hopes of accessing your/our data, according to leading cyber security strategist Menny Barzilay.

“It’s a mistake to think that the American government is the only one taking things out of Facebook,” Barzilay told me, “Other countries are putting a lot of effort into SIGINT [signals intelligence, similar to what the NSA does], but it would be a lot easier for one of them to pay someone in Facebook to access the data they [foreign intelligence agencies] want.”

Social media’s data has immense value to the intelligence community. “Why else would the NSA go after it?” Barzilay quipped. One of the most concrete examples he cited was mapping social connections, a technique that intelligence experts concluded would have generated significant amounts of actionable intelligence leading up to 9/11. Geolocation tags embedded in images—even if a user doesn’t specifically tag the post with a location—can also be incredibly useful in assisting analysts building a profile of a target. Mapping where a target is, could, hypothetically, help an intelligence team infiltrate their home or office to plant someNSA-style spy gear, or more traditional bugs.

Barzilay is a former information security officer with the Israeli Defense Forces, and now heads the IT department of one the country’s largest banks, and is referring to what’s called human intelligence, or HUMINT—the oft-romanticized James Bond type business of spying in person, or using moles, and informants to collect information. What’s interesting, Barzilay said, is that nowadays we have this “unprecedented” situation where corporations run by civilians have actually rapidly outpaced the military in terms of bleeding edge technology; namely, all of that extremely valuable data the Facebooks of the world collect.

Other security researchers agree with Barzilay’s assessment. “Silicon Valley companies are built around developers and the dev environment with values like trust and transparency,” independent security expert Rodrigo Bijou told me, “As a result, company projects, new deals, and even salaries are open information company-wide, which could make it very easy for an insider to gather valuable intelligence.” He went on to explain that the data isn’t all that well protected because most of the tech giants are set up with a development focus, and because of that controlling access to information that might be useful to “malicious actors” presents numerous challenges.

Barzilay pointed out too that low level employees—who don’t undergo the same level of vetting as a military officer—have access to the same, massive datasets as their superiors, theoretically making it easier to install an agent. “They have unrestricted access to information,” Barzilay said. One of the other key differences is that in the private sector, unlike in the military, there are many more people who hold positions of information-related trust, Barzilay said. Now data scientists, and many others have relatively unrestricted access to petabytes of personal information, unlike in the past.

“These guys [foreign intelligence services] are good at recruiting spies in much more sensitive locations and access to classified information,” Barzilay said, “When thinking about this, we have to understand that private companies are in a weird situation, CIOs are in a weird situation, they have to build controls to deal with states or countries.” Military installations have considerably tighter security than most companies in the US, he said.

Private sector companies aren’t oblivious to the threat—at this years’ RSA security conference, for example, there were a handful of talks on the subject, and how to deal with what the industry calls “insider threats.” There are numerous technical measures and security protocols to be sure, but according to former FBI chief information security officer Patrick Reidy, it may not be possible to detect and prevent every insider threat, even at the FBI. But, it’s definitely possible—through deterrence and detection—to make it a lot more difficult for spies to do their work.

Reidy made clear that insider threats are far more than a just cyber security concern. Often they are regular employees who joined an organization with “no malicious intent.” Insiders are most often people with trusted access to do things that they aren’t supposed to, Reidy said, and only about 1.5 percent of espionage cases involved “admin” privileges. This means most were perpetrated by “normal” employees. And as a result companies wishing to get serious about detection have to couple data/technical driven approaches, with traditional ways of weeding out insider threats.

It’s worth noting that to date there aren’t any examples of spooks successfully infiltrating and stealing data from the social media giants in Silicon Valley, a fact that Barzilay acknowledged. But, he pointed out that the world’s intelligence community would be loath to make public statements boasting about their successes in any area—much less the companies themselves. There are numerous examples of the Chinese government successfully infiltrating companies, and stealing trade secrets. And regardless of the lack of hard evidence, the scenario seems entirely possible, begging the question what would prevent foreign governments from attempting such activities? It’s also yet another opportunity to reconsider the amount of information you, as a social media user, are willing to trust to a private corporation.

TOPICS: Spies, privacy, nsa, power, data

The FBI's Watch Lists Are Plagued by Human Error and Data Overload

If you visit certain websites, or associate yourself with an unsavory group of people, you run the chance of being added to one of the US government's many watch lists. In the interest of national security, they are used to monitor, and if necessary stop, the movements of “known or suspected terrorists.”

But due to amateur errors and the database's sheer size, these lists are allowing dangerous individuals to slip through, and prohibiting innocent people from flying. Two recent cases show just how fallible these lists are: With humans trying to deal with mountains of information, grave mistakes are being made.

First off, these monitoring systems aren't always effective at protecting the US from terrorist threats. Despite repeated warnings from the Russian government about his recent radicalisation, the activities of Tamerlan Tsarnaev, one of the two brothers responsible for the April 2013 Boston Bombing, somehow didn't raise alarm bells when he was traveling between the US and Dagestan for jihadi training. Tsarnaev was included on a watch list, but because his last name had been misspelled in a security database, he reentered the country undetected.

On the other end of the spectrum, other people are prevented from traveling on erroneous grounds. Dr. Rahinah Ibrahim, a Malaysian citizen and Stanford PhD student, was stopped when she tried to return to the US in December 2005. She was handcuffed, detained for two hours, and then questioned. After some confusion, it was revealed she had been put on the secret No Fly List by mistake, and she was then told that she had been removed from it. However, shortly after her visa was revoked and she was denied from reentering the US, making travel to her “second home” impossible.

The agent responsible “erroneously nominated” Ibrahim for the list back in 2004, after he ticked the “wrong boxes”, “filling out the form exactly the opposite way from the instructions on the form,” judge William Alsup wrote.

After a seven-year legal battle, shrouded in secrecy by repeated claims from US officials that the case should be dismissed, Ibrahim was finally removed from the No Fly List. This week, the Department of Justice said it wouldn't appeal the ruling.

But it wasn't easy. Information about the case against Ibrahim remained classified and was kept from her, including whether or not she was on the No Fly List at all. It was a lengthy, laborious exchange between the US government and Ibrahim's lawyers.

The eventual ruling in Ibrahim’s case, however, isn't necessarily a sign of a shifting trend. She is the first person to successfully challenge their placement on a watch list, and with the case being closed to public scrutiny, it is unclear how others may clear their name. Those who might have been placed on one by mistake can only find out by attempting to board a flight and being denied, and as Ibrahim discovered, even then it is likely that any attempt at dialogue with the US government would result in them neither confirming nor denying whether you were placed on a list. It’s a kafkaesque system with no transparent way even to confirm your position, never mind challenge it.

According to the American Civil Liberties Union, this opacity means that “innocent people can languish on the watchlists indefinitely, without real recourse.” 

“The impact on a citizen who cannot use a commercial aircraft is profound,” Judge Trenga said in relation to another case. “Placement on the No Fly List is defining and life restricting across a range of constitutionally protected activities and aspirations. […] A No Fly List designation transforms a person into a second class citizen, or worse.”

Members of civil liberties groups are also worried about the future of these lists. One of them is Ben Wizner, an attorney who is currently working with Edward Snowden:

“We already have watch lists that say that some people can fly and some people can’t, or that they can go in this lane or they can go in that lane,” he told Ars Technica. “But that’s only going to proliferate as there’s more and more data and faster and faster computers and more confidence that they can make these predictions about us.”

In 2012, 875,000 “known or suspected terrorists” were included on US watch lists, and 1,600 additional names were, at the time, nominated to be added every day so the FBI could keep tabs on them.

Despite what some people may say about the US requiring greater surveillance mechanisms to prevent another 9/11—even though such programmes were completely ineffective at thwarting the Boston plot—these two cases show that some serious problems with the watch list system exist, both for stopping terrorists and ensuring that innocent people aren't stopped from living their lives normally.  

@josephfcox

TOPICS: privacy, No Fly List, boston bombing, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, power, FBI, watch lists, surveillance

Copernicus Will Be Europe's All-Seeing Satellite Constellation

The launch of the European Space Agency’s radar satellite Sentinel-1A, and with it the lift-off of its ambitious Copernicus programme, which has one broad mission: observe the Earth. It’s essentially a comprehensive, always-on fitness monitor for the planet.

Sentinel-1A is just the first of Copernicus’ many eyes in the sky, which will work together to feed back huge amounts of data on everything from land movement to ocean patterns, pollution to ice coverage. It’s an ambitious project that will monitor Earth more intently than any other, and aim to give decision-makers across Europe useful information to act on, both at the EU level and on a regional basis. And for any data junkies out there, a new open policy means the data will be easier than ever to get your hands and calculators on.

Ahead of the launch, which will see Sentinel-1A blast off from French Guiana in a Soyuz at around 11pm tomorrow by local time, I spoke to Josef Aschbacher, the head of the ESA’s Earth Observation Programme Planning & Coordination Service.

How the Sentinel-1 satellite should look in orbit. Image: ESA

He explained the scope of the Copernicus project, which will see the launch of six families of satellites, but will also use data from existing satellites and measurements taken from Earth. “It really means to combine satellite observations with measurements on the ground, together with model data or information that comes from model outputs, and create an information service on an operational basis that will be used by decision-makers across Europe,” he summarised. 

According to the ESA, this coordinated data collection will “provide accurate, timely and easily accessible information to improve the management of the environment, understand and mitigate the effects of climate change and ensure civil security.” 

To give just one application, Aschbacher gave the example of oil spills around the European coasts, caused by pollution or traffic. “What we’re doing is using satellites that are observing the area regularly, and once pollution is discovered then the coastguards will be informed,” he said. It’s a way of monitoring the environment to check up on any issues—and also of making sure that European Union directives are followed by individual member states.

He later highlighted another use that illustrates just how omniscient the satellites will be. Using interferometry, an instrument on the satellite 700km above the ground could measure a change in just millimetres on the Earth’s surface. “If, for example, a house will sink in because of some motion in the surroundings by one or two millimetres, this can be detected by satellites from space,” he said. If that sounds like an unlikely scenario, he pointed out that during the recent construction of the Jubilee underground line in London, satellites picked out that houses were sinking in where the ground had been excavated when they’d moved only millimetres. The same technique could also be used for monitoring life-saving measures like dams, and life-threatening activity like landslides.

With a series of satellite launches starting tomorrow and scheduled to continue until at least 2014, Copernicus is a huge operation. I asked Aschbacher if there wasn’t already enough Earth-monitoring satellites—by NASA, for instance—and why Europe needed its own. He responded that, while countries like the US, Japan, and India had bits and pieces similar to some of Copernicus’ components, its overall scope was unmatched. “There’s nothing comparable in terms of complexity, number of satellite missions, and the operational setup we have, so it really is the most ambitious, most comprehensive Earth observation system worldwide,” he said, adding, “It’s not a copy of something American like we sometimes do.”

He compared the Copernicus programme to existing methods in meteorology, where satellite data is combined with measurements like humidity, temperature, air pressure, and so on, to give a full picture of the forecast. Copernicus will take a similar all-encompassing approach “for disaster management, for agricultural monitoring, for oil spill monitoring, for ice monitoring, for Arctic research, for climate research, for land motion measurements, and so on and so forth.”

Sentinel-1A, the satellite that’s launching tomorrow, will be joined by its mission buddy Sentinel-1B in about 18 months, and is responsible for radar. “The radar satellites have the huge advantage of looking through clouds and taking images in day and in night, so it’s really independent of weather and illumination,” said Aschbacher. Sentinels 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6 will eventually make up the full constellation, and all bring different imaging tech to observe the land, oceans, and atmosphere.

That means a huge amount of information, and institutions across different countries will be crunching the data to make useful products. The project’s open data policy means that anyone, from government institutions to private companies, research organisations, and the public, will be able to get a look-in and figure out new ways to use the data. That comes with the caveat that the huge volume of data requires a certain amount of technical capability, but Aschbacher said he considered the policy a “quantum leap forward.”

The Soyuz getting into position for the launch. Image: ESA

Before that can happen, the satellite has to launch, and there’ll no doubt be a few crossed fingers as the Soyuz passes through the most critical moments right after lift-off tomorrow night. The satellite will separate from the launcher after about 30 minutes, and then comes the unfolding of the solar panel and the delicate radar antenna. “It’s a very delicate process because quite a few things could go wrong,” said Aschbacher. When they’re unfolded, the satellite will be about ten metres in length and the instruments will start to switch on.

It’ll then take a few months to calibrate the instruments and run tests to check everything’s working before the data is distributed via the open data policy. In turn, Aschbacher hopes that will lead to even more applications of the programme. “I think this will be a breakthrough in the use of satellite data for everyday life,” he said.

TOPICS: satellites, Copernicus, Sentinel, Sentinel-1A, space, esa, machines

This Anti-Snooping Patent Is the Anti-Google Glass

Image: United States Patent and Trademark Office

Yesterday, wannabe American glassholes with $1500 to spare flocked to buy Google Glass in the still-in-beta device’s one-day public sale. I say “flocked" despite it not being clear exactly who many people had been waiting to get their hands on Glass, though CNN reports that at least one colour, the white “cotton” frame, sold out.

While offering a limited purchase period is a surefire way to raise hype (although I was a little surprised at the lack of buzz yesterday, perhaps because I’m in the UK where it wasn’t available), general reactions to Glass still seemed very divided. Sure,it’s getting cooler, but it’s still raising privacy issues and stirring conflict, with another explorer reportedly attacked for wearing the headset in San Francisco this week.

So while enthusiasts were heading to get their explorer eyes, Geek Wire uncovered a very different (and currently entirely hypothetical) bit of tech—the anti-Glass, if you will. They unearthed a patent filing that details technology to detect and respond to an “intruding camera” that’s trying to sneak a peek at your own devices—and among the inventors listed are a certain Bill Gates and former Microsoft CTO Nathan Myhrvold.

Dated March of this year, the filing describes the invention as follows:

The system includes an electronic media display device having a screen configured to display content, a sensor, and a processing circuit. The processing circuit is configured to obtain information from the sensor, analyze the information to determine a presence of a camera, and edit any displayed content in response to the presence of the camera.

Basically, if you’re watching something on a screen you don’t want others to see, the system would pick up when a camera was trying to edge in for a look and then edit the content, presumably obscuring it from peeping toms. The patent suggests potentially sensitive content could include “private photographs, private videos, financial records, medical records, or any other content that the person may not want other people to view,” which I’ll leave to your imagination.

While the patent doesn't explicitly mention Glass (as is the norm), Figure 8 above is pretty suggestive. The patent also adds that cameras could also be fixed to buildings and vehicles rather than held by a person. Though with around five million CCTV cameras in the UK, I’m thinking it might just be easier not to view dodgy content in public if you’re that bothered.

The filing does suggest, however, that you could instead get an alert when a camera is around, which might be a little more useful—and potentially interesting just as a tracking device to see how watched you are. It also includes a diagram of such a device integrated into an ATM to detect if someone’s trying to film the screen as you use it, which also suggests how it might be appropriated as a security tool.

Of course, this being a patent filing, it’s all just ideas for now, so don’t get your hopes up to have some sort of magic camera detector by the time Glass inevitably hits the mainstream. But like anti-drone burqas and anti-facial recognition make-up, it’s further evidence that as technology evolves, so does anti-technology technology. In the future, as things come full circle, we’ll presumably be seeing cameras with technology that’s anti-camera detecting technology. 

TOPICS: patents, Google Glass, cameras, CCTV, Futures, anti-technology

Information Isn't Free: The High Price Whistleblowers Pay

Just one-third of Americans believe Edward Snowden did the right thing when he revealed the vast domestic surveillance apparatus that the National Security Agency had installed to monitor them. Yet, according to the same YouGov poll, a slim majority believe that "Americans have a right to know about the surveillance programs he revealed." 

That discrepancy helps articulate the plight of the modern whistleblower: We may want to know if illegal activity is transpiring in the convoluted underbelly of our engorged military industrial complex, but we seem to dismiss or even resent the deeds of those who clue us in.

Maybe it stems from a vestigial patriotism that harkens back to an era when the NSA hadn't yet sicced their spies and cryptologists on the entirety of the American public. Maybe it's due to the aggressive political messaging condemning the leaks, or from our basic cognitive intolerance of tattlers. Or maybe we've been convinced by the prevailing techno-optimistic zeitgeist that information simply "wants to be free," as the maxim goes—and we don't fully comprehend the cost it sometimes takes to bring it to light.

Whistleblowers who disclose US state secrets to expose wrongdoing rarely receive the benefit of the doubt, wrong as the doing was. Today, they face not just the prospect of unprecedented, harsh prosecution from the government, but a public reception that ranges from apathy to outright disdain. Silenced, a documentary that premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival this week. The film, which was directed by James Spione and counts Susan Sarandon as an executive producer, seeks to soothe this dissonance: It offers us a window into what it actually takes to blow the whistle—the physical, emotional, and financial toll doing so levies on the truth-teller.

Snowden knew that his leaks would be painted as a betrayal, even condemned as traitorous, so he made sure to relocate to a foreign country before making his revolutionary disclosures. Snowden knew, because long before he made for Asia with a drive full of classified files, PRISM Power Point slides; a veritable almanac of How to Spy on Everything—a slew of other citizen whistleblowers had already been hounded for their leaks. 

By then, it was already clear that the Obama administration was using the Espionage Act—a century-old relic of a law designed to prosecute World War I dissidents and perhaps most famously used to convict Aldrich Ames, the CIA agent who sold US secrets to a KGB assassins during the Cold War—to prosecute those who exposed abuses in the national security sector that cast the government in an unfavorable light. In 2012, the administration had charged six leakers, including Chelsea Manning, with violating the Espionage Act—a charge that labels them enemies of the state—more than all other administrations combined. Snowden made seven. If convicted of his multiple felony charges, he will spend decades, if not the rest of his life, in prison. 

There has been a good deal of public debate over the severity of charges like these. What's less discussed—and less understood—is how totally those charges, and even lesser ones, can unravel a whistleblower's life. How towering the institutional resistance to dissidence is, and how vindictive the individuals and agencies that bring the charges can be to outliers who share secrets. The effect can be chilling, on a personal level, as well as for other potential disclosers of illegality. 

"Part of the purpose of doing what they've been doing for the last several years, is to destroy you," the ex-NSA mathematician and decorated Navy veteran Thomas Drake says in Silenced. 

Without Drake, there would likely be no Snowden revelations. The younger leaker credits Drake as an inspiration, and as a case study of what happens when you offend the security apparatus. After Drake had exhausted official channels with futile complaints about fraud he saw in a massive privately contracted surveillance effort, and of the unnecessarily invasive nature of blanket surveillance the NSA was pursuing in the wake of 9/11, Drake began sharing what he says were unclassified details of the program with members of Congress, and eventually, a Baltimore Sunreporter. 

Even before he was hit with Espionage Act charges that could have sent him to prison for 35 years, he was punted around the agency to lesser posts, placed on administrative leave, and eventually fired.

After the prosecution shuffled the charges around, they amounted to an illegal "retention of classified documents" that the FBI found in his apartment. Drake claims didn't even realize they were classified. But it was still enough to get him labeled as an enemy of the state, blacklisted in the industry, and financially bankrupted by an onslaught of legal fees. 

If you become a whistleblower, "You have to mortgage your house, you have to empty your bank accounts," Drake says. The only work he could find, eventually, was as an Apple store clerk. Though every single one of the major charges were eventually dropped—following a piece on Drake in the New Yorker and a 60 Minutessegment, it should be noted—the toll of his whistleblowing was clear. Drake estimated that the charges had cost him over a million dollars in legal fees and lost work. He was ostracized and condemned by his peers. It was emotionally devastating, too; the charges, Drake implies, led to a painful separation with his wife.

Image: Screenshot/Russia Today

"I never thought of myself a whistleblower," John Kiriakou says in Silenced. "Sometimes I go back and forth in my mind, where I wish I had kept my mouth shut. Other times I wish I had shouted it from the rooftops." 

Kiriakou is the former CIA agent who, after an illustrious, decades-long career in counterterrorism, revealed that water boarding, which he believes was a form of torture, had been institutionalized by the Bush Administration. He did so on national television, and the ensuing uproar and fallout is now well-known. Kiriakou was charged with three counts of violating the Espionage Act, and eventually pled guilty to one. He is now in prison, serving a 30-month sentence. In Silenced, we learn that long before he was officially sentenced, he was fired, rendered unemployable, driven to severe depression, and nearly to bankruptcy, as well. 

If you blow the whistle, "You're not loyal. You're not a good American. You're a terrorist sympathizer," Kiriakou says. His wife, also a government worker, was harassed and pushed out of her job, too. Beginning in 2007, they were audited by the IRS every year. 

"I have to try to protect my children from being exposed to it, I've got the FBI surveilling me for the last seven months," Kirakou says. The stress was certainly exacerbated by the fact that neither he nor his wife could find work for long stretches of time. They turned to government aid and food stamps to feed their five children at one point.

"I've applied for every job I can think of, and I haven't gotten even an email or a call back," he says. Footage shows Kiriakou at one job he did manage to land—a shelf stocker at a retail store. He's also intermittently worked as a counterterrorism consultant for news outlets, and published a book (which he believes furthered the ire fueling the legal retribution), but is still hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt—ironic then, that his critics accuse him of leaking simply for personal profit.

The film also focuses on Jesselyn Radack, once an attorney in the Department of Justice and now perhaps best known as Edward Snowden's lawyer, was forced out of her job after she showed that the military had mishandled the arrest and interrogation of John Walker Lindh, the infamous "American Taliban." Though she was never charged with Espionage Act violations, investigators hounded her at the law firm where she found work, and eventually caused her expulsion. One magazine cover story labeled her "the Woman Who Knew Too Much". She was pregnant at the time, and the ensuing stress, she says, led her to miscarry. 

Radack has since dedicated herself to representing whistleblowers—she provided counsel for both Drake and Kiriakou, and now to Snowden. When I met her at a party following a screening, she was eloquent, impassioned, and indignant at the treatment her clients, and herself, had suffered at the hands of the state. 

"You're not loyal. You're not a good American. You're a terrorist sympathizer."

Unlike Snowden, each of the these whistleblowers did not set out with a clear premeditated plan to expose wrongdoing. Drake repeatedly attempted to appeal to legal channels and to Congress before internal pressures led him to the press. Radack's misfortune was following the law too closely, and threatening to derail a high profile investigation with her knowledge of illegal conduct. And judging the way the event is depicted in the film, Kiriakou never intended to blow the lid off any secret torture program—he simply described what was happening the best he could, because it had become so normalized within the CIA.

Each can be said, in a way, to have stumbled into whistleblowing (with caveats in Drake's case), and that makes the situation all the more harrowing. What begins with honest, even routine complaints of government misconduct, ends up tearing their lives asunder. Kirakou did confirm the identity of a CIA operative to a member of the press, which he regrets doing now, and which is patently illegal. But it again raises the point that the way the government chooses to prosecute leaks is often arbitrary—those who leak classified information that embarrasses the government become targets, while those who utilize secrets to lionize it are patted on the back.

There was plenty of classified information relayed to the makers of Zero Dark Thirty, Radack points out, but no one's in jail. Bob Woodward's books are full of classified sources, and Kiriakou points out that General David Petraeus gave classified information to his civilian mistress—but, seeing as how their leaks are harmonious with the power structure, there's no whisper of espionage there. Meanwhile, those who tell more humiliating truths are often dogged even when the charges are dropped. "I know we're being surveilled, so we use 'drug dealer' tactics," like using burner phones and encryption, Radack said in a Q+A following a screening of Silenced. 

Afterwards, Drake, who was in attendance too, told me that he worries that the rampant prosecution of leakers is a sign that we're regressing away not just from freedom of information, but from democracy altogether. He told me that when he lived in Europe, he'd visit castles built in the Middle Ages, and that he couldn't help be reminded of the direction we're heading: towards concentrated power, inequality, and an intolerance for dissent. 

This conception of how the state is calibrating itself to deal with information breaches, to cloister itself around a growing amount of data, is in stark contrast to another prevailing attitude of our cultural moment: that information wants to be free. 

"By giving people the power to share, we're making the world more transparent,"Mark Zuckerberg has said, in one typical example of the predominant techno-optimistic philosophy in Silicon Valley and beyond. He, and nearly all the influential tech and business leaders who command influence at the moment, embrace the idea that advancing technology, and their products, are giving rise to a world that is inherently home to more information freedom. 

Google's chairman said Snowden's actions were "helpful," but that the company did not endorse the leaking of information. Sergey Brin may want to rub elbows and bask in the halo of Snowden's robotized telepresence—and Snowden may welcome the attention—but the Google execs, or any Silicon Valley companies who have long complied with NSA surveillance directives hardly embody the whistleblower's ideals.

Various parties at Google, Facebook, Yahoo, even Twitter, were aware of mass NSA surveillance, likely long before Snowden was. No one involved in these great information liberation engines made that most crucial knowledge—that the state was conducting mass surveillance on American citizens—free in any way. That took a whistleblower who was willing to relegate himself to a life of exile, to become a target of contempt, scorn, even hatred. 

Information doesn't always "want" to be free, as we can plainly see in the cases of those who have sacrificed their own freedom and well-being to wrench it out of the shadows. The Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, recently made it even harder, by instituting a community-wide gag order that prohibits anyone in the sector from talking to the press without permission. It's as good a reminder as any that information is only as free as our institutions permit it to be, or as willing as those the people toil in those institutions are to risk suffering to share it with the public. 

Plenty of info can't really be considered free in any way; after all, it is imprisoned in secret NSA servers or in dusty file cabinets or phone logs of clandestine conversations. That information—about how much the state knows about our daily lives, and what it does with that information, or about misconduct in the halls of the largest military operation in the world, about how it follows the letter of the law at home and on the battlefield—is the most guarded of all, and often essential to the citizenry. That information, it's clear, can now only be liberated with blood, sweat, and years of suffering.

INSET IMAGE: THOMAS DRAKE, WIKIMEDIA

TOPICS: whistleblowing, silenced, culture, secrets, power