SNOWDEN’S BOX
SNOWDEN’S BOX
Trust in the Age of Surveillance
By Jessica Bruder and Dale Maharidge
First published by Verso 2020
© Jessica Bruder, Dale Maharidge 2020
Parts of this book appeared originally under the same title in Harper’s Magazine, May 2017
All rights reserved
The moral rights of the authors have been asserted
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Verso
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Verso is the imprint of New Left Books
ISBN-13: 978-1-78873-343-4
ISBN-13: 978-1-78873-346-5 (US EBK)
ISBN-13: 978-1-78873-345-8 (UK EBK)
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Bruder, Jessica, author. | Maharidge, Dale, author.
Title: Snowden’s box : trust in the age of surveillance / By Jessica Bruder and Dale Maharidge.
Description: First edition hardback. | London ; New York : Verso, 2020. | “Parts of this book appeared originally under the same title in Harper’s Magazine, May 17, 2017”—T.p verso. | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2019038432 | ISBN 9781788733434 (hardback) | ISBN 9781788733465 (ebk) | ISBN 9781788733458 (ebk)
Subjects: LCSH: Snowden, Edward J., 1983– | Electronic surveillance—United States. | Confidential communications—United States. | Journalism—Political aspects—United States—History—21st century.
Classification: LCC JF1525.W45 B78 2020 | DDC 327.12730092 [B]—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019038432
Typeset in Adobe Garamond by Hewer Text UK Ltd, Edinburgh
Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY
For Max
Once you have the data local to you, copy it to more media in off-site locations so it is unlikely to be confiscated. Literally bury a backup copy in the woods, that sort of thing.
— Edward L. Snowden, in an encrypted
email to Laura Poitras, February 4, 2013
I’ve seen the nations rise and fall.
I’ve heard their stories, heard them all.
But love’s the only engine of survival.
— Leonard Cohen, “The Future”
Contents
Foreword: An Underground Railroad for Secrets
3. The Players
4. American Amnesia
5. The Panopticon in the Parlor
6. The Tree
Appendix: Sanity in the Age of Surveillance
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index
An Underground Railroad for Secrets
In the spring of 2013, an unauthorized trove of NSA files traveled nearly 5,000 miles in the care of the US Postal Service.
Postmarked May 10 at a former pineapple plantation village on the island of Oahu, the box of secrets soared east over the Pacific Ocean in a small flat-rate box, bearing a stamp for $5.80. It traversed the breadth of America before landing, unceremoniously, on the fourth floor of a nondescript walk-up apartment building in Brooklyn.
The sender had shipped the box via Priority Mail. He’d addressed it to a person he’d never met at a home he’d never seen. The recipient, in turn, knew nothing about him or the contents of the box. Her job was simple: carry it to a third person, who would ferry the package to its final destination.
At the time, to the best of the sender’s knowledge, no one was paying attention.
By the first week of June, the whole world was watching. Secrets began streaming out of the box, onto the front pages of newspapers. They included evidence that the US government had created a massive surveillance apparatus and used it to spy on its own people. Intelligence officials blasted the unidentified source of the leaks and, warning of dire consequences, prepared to launch a criminal probe.
But before anyone could unmask him, the leaker revealed himself. The cover of the Guardian bore a giant yellow headline: “The Whistleblower.” Below it appeared a photo of Edward Joseph Snowden. The twenty-nine-year-old had a patchy goatee and an earnest expression. He wore rectangular, semi-rimless Burberry eyeglasses — these would soon become iconic — with the left nose pad inexplicably missing. He identified himself as an NSA infrastructure analyst working for the defense contractor Booz Allen Hamilton.
The materials he’d taken, Snowden told reporters, revealed “an existential threat to democracy.”
“I don’t want to live in a world where there’s no privacy and therefore no room for intellectual exploration and creativity,” he added.
In the years that followed, Snowden’s story would be told and retold, a ballad for our times. The saga unfolded in films, including Laura Poitras’s Oscar-winning documentary Citizenfour and Oliver Stone’s biopic Snowden, and in such books as No Place to Hide by Glenn Greenwald, Luke Harding’s The Snowden Files, and, most recently, Snowden’s own memoir, Permanent Record.
Missing from those chronicles so far has been a small but crucial episode — the journey of a plain cardboard box that passed through strangers’ hands, setting the rest of the story in motion. In its absence grew a question: if the American government’s surveillance was so mighty, so all-seeing, how did a motherlode of classified information get spirited away by mail, right under the watchers’ noses?
The answer may be simpler than you think.
The story of Snowden’s box is deeply human, somewhat messy, and more than a little weird. It’s about a brief moment when strangers worked together to build an underground railroad for secrets — a