Luke Harding talking:
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.
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 CIA central 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.
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.
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.
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.
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 the NSA 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.
I haven’t noticed major changes in Google, Microsoft and other big companies. 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.
http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/feb/20/edward-snowden-files-nsa-gchq-luke-harding