After weeks of broadcasting his intention to “name names” and publish the identities of specific Americans targeted by the NSA and FBI for surveillance, journalist Glenn Greenwald finally made good on his promise.
Greenwald spoke with WIRED prior to publication of his story late Tuesday night. In the story, Greenwald and colleague Murtaza Hussein identified five Muslim-Americans whose email addresses appeared on a lengthy surveillance target list. NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden provided the list to Greenwald last year, which included more than 7,000 email addresses, at least 200 of which were tagged by the government as being “U.S. persons.” In naming five of those in the Greenwald story, it’s the first time that American targets of the government’s surveillance, who were never arrested or accused of terrorist activity, have been identified.
In this frank interview with Greenwald, he explains the significance of the revelations. He also divulges why he delayed the story last week instead of publishing as planned, and discusses the possible existence of a mysterious “second leaker,” and why it has taken a decade to finally get confirmation of surveillance activities that were first reported in 2005 and 2006 by the New York Times and USA Today.
WIRED: You’ve written that it’s unclear if the government obtained warrants to conduct surveillance of the five Muslim-Americans identified in your story, but it appears that, at least in the case of Nihad Awad, executive director of the Council on Muslim-American Relations, a government official has said no warrant was obtained to surveil him. Also, the surveillance was all conducted in 2008 or earlier, when a warrant wasn’t needed under certain programs. So do you think the government had warrants or not?
GLENN GREENWALD: Even prior to the 2008 FISA Amendments Act, if they were targeting Americans on U.S. soil they would have had to have gone to the FISA Court and gotten a warrant unless they were conducting it under the Terrorist Surveillance Program, which I don’t think is likely… I think it’s very likely that most of them were surveilled subject to a FISA warrant. I think it’s possible that…the reason [Awad] wasn’t was because he spent so much time on foreign soil that they were able under the Protect America Act and other authorities to target him without a FISA Court warrant… . He probably [spent] 50 percent of the time [overseas].
WIRED: You write that another media outlet was told by the government that no warrant was used with Awad and you suggested this was the reason the story was delayed last week. What media outlet are you talking about?
GG: We were partnering with a media outlet that was going to do TV and promote our story. They then started to try and do some of their own reporting on the story so that when they went on TV they would have something to add. So they called a couple of their sources and a couple of their sources said, “We never got a FISA warrant against Awad and to the extent that [Greenwald is] reporting that the NSA did, [he's] wrong.” We actually weren’t even reporting that they got a FISA warrant against Awad, but we did write our story on the premise that they had FISA warrants against all of them, because that was what the NSA kept telling us: “oh you shouldn’t report this because this was all done with FISA Court approval.” So given that we had the NSA saying in general “we got FISA approval” and then these anonymous sources who this media outlet vouched for as being pretty senior and knowledgeable saying “no, they never did [get one for Awad],” we just felt like we had to resolve that or do the best we can or write into the story that we didn’t know. That was the only reason we held the story at the last minute: was just to investigate that one narrow claim.
WIRED: Is it possible the media outlet misunderstood their sources?
GG: It’s a very big respectable media outlet. They didn’t tell us who their sources were, of course, because they were anonymous. But they went back [to the sources] and we then went to the NSA and we said, “What’s going on? You’ve been telling us for months that all of this was done with the approval of the FISA Court. Now you have people in DoJ and FBI saying…Awad and maybe one other one didn’t have a FISA warrant.” They said, “we can’t control what they say.” Then they started saying. “there are theories we could have used where we could have surveilled some of these people without FISA warrants.” They would never explicitly confirm or deny that any of these people were FISA targets. It was all off-the-record hypotheticals: “If we were to surveil people, it would all be done with FISA warrants, which is why you shouldn’t reveal your targets.”
“This is the first time that there’s a human face on who the targets are of [the U.S. government's] most intrusive type of surveillance.”
WIRED: Were you able to identify any of the other Americans on the list? You write that at least 200 were flagged on the spreadsheet as being U.S. persons.
GG: In virtually none of the cases is there an actual name next to the email address. So sometimes you can identify the name from the email address if you look at the organization to which they belong and do some digging. But in the vast majority of cases, it’s impossible to find the identity of the person whose email address is being targeted.
WIRED: You point out that one of the most important aspects, aside from the fact that you’ve got attorneys being targeted for surveillance, is that this gives the people who were targeted standing to sue in a way that hasn’t existed in the past.
GG: I think there’s several really significant aspects. For one, this is the first time that there’s a human face on who the targets are of [the U.S. government's] most intrusive type of surveillance. It’s all been this sort of abstract…oh the NSA is acquiring these capabilities and is engaged in mass surveillance and indiscriminate vacuuming. But here you really get to see who these people are who are the people worthy of their most invasive scrutiny. I think it’s important for people to judge—are these really terrorists or are these people who seem to be targeted for their political dissidence and their political activism?
Secondly, I think there’s a huge discrepancy between how American Muslims are treated and how non-Muslims are treated. Because there are so many similarly situated non-Muslims who have done as much, if not more, to end up on the list [but] who aren’t on the list. But people who are Muslim end up on the list…. And the question becomes, if you’re engaging in political dissidence that some people consider threatening, should you really be targeted?
“There’s a huge discrepancy between how American Muslims are treated and how non-Muslims are treated. Because there are so many similarly situated non-Muslims who have done as much, if not more, to end up on the list [but] who aren’t on the list.”
The big significance as well is it’s impossible now to throw these people out of court on standing grounds. I think you’re probably going to see some of them, if not all of them, challenge the constitutionality of the statutory framework, as well as the specific spying that they were subjected to.
WIRED: The government made a number of objections to you publishing the story. What were they?
GG: They were simply saying: if you reveal our targets you could blow our ongoing surveillance operations or reveal our sources and methods. Their second argument was: you’re crossing a line here because this isn’t a case where we’re asking you to take our word for it that this was proper; we actually have a FISA Court judge…who said that this was proper. So for you to then go and disclose it is completely inappropriate, given that it’s not just us saying this is legitimate but an independent judge saying that.
WIRED: Let’s talk about Richard Clarke [who served on a recent oversight panel that examined the surveillance programs and largely found the programs to be acceptable except for a few recommendations for changes]. If only he had known about this list, he tells you, he would have asked tougher questions of the government and asked to see individual FISA warrants to review them. What do you make of this reaction that suddenly this concerns him now more than it did before?
GG: He is kind of this consummate national security state insider who generally lends himself to endorsing whatever those agencies do, but at the same time likes to maintain this public facade that he’s the reasonable, questioning insider who will object when things go too far… . He endorsed huge amounts of all of these activities while sitting on that panel, and then I think was confronted with some evidence that suggested that some of his endorsements might have been baseless. And now he’s trying to back pedal and say, “oh if only I had known.” …I know that these advisory panels don’t get the lists of the people that they’re targeting and they don’t scrutinize any of this information either. So for them to just offer these general endorsements that there is no abuse and that there’s no evidence of wrongdoing without seeing this information, I think, shows just what a farce those oversight panels are. What’s more significant than him saying had he known he would have looked more into it, is the fact that he never—and therefore his fellow panel members never—bothered to ask for and certainly never got… the list of American whom they were actually spying on. How can you conduct an investigation without that?
WIRED: Well, you don’t even need the list of names. All you have to know is how many Americans are on the list and why they’re on it—those are obvious questions and they didn’t even go that far to ask them.
GG: I would argue you do need the names. But you’re absolutely right that…there’s this kind of intermediary bit of information that they seem not to have shown any interest in, either, which is remarkable given what a clean bill of health they gave the NSA on these issues.
WIRED: There was also his other statement about not asking to see any of the court orders. The reason he gave was that they were just five guys working part time and didn’t have the resources to do that.
GG: Maybe that’s why you don’t sign this huge report clearing the NSA of all wrongdoing. You either say we need more resources, or you say in the report that you didn’t get the things you needed and therefore can’t come to any conclusions.
WIRED: In 2006 USA Today broke the story about the phone records bulk-collection program, but at the time the government and telecoms denied it. It took seven years to get confirmation of this program with the Snowden documents. Do you have an idea why we had these great revelations in 2005 from the New York Times about the warrantless wiretapping program and then in 2006 from USA Today about the phone records collection and then nothing for so long?
GG: What was amazing was that even the New York Times revelation—they won the Pulitzer and it was like a scandal for a little while—but the outcome of that was that Congress got together in 2008 on a bipartisan basis and voted to make that program legal.
“You can actually see for yourself what they’re doing in a way that you were never supposed to.”
I do think there was an assumption that when the country voted against Bush and his party, and in favor of this other party that was vowing to uproot these polices, that it was sort of like, well, whatever problems we had they were sort of over [now]. I think part of the reason why people reacted so strongly to our story was because it was the first time that we saw that Obama was doing it [too], that it had basically continued and even expanded… . I think there’s a huge difference between reporting something because sources told you and saying to people, “look at these documents that you were never supposed to see. You don’t have to rely on my word or anybody else’s word. You can actually see for yourself what they’re doing in a way that you were never supposed to.” I think that’s a big part of why it has resonated [now]; it’s that these documents make it indisputably clear exactly what they’re doing in the way that a New York Times or USA Today story based on anonymous sources just doesn’t do.
WIRED: After the first Snowden revelations were published last year, Senator Ron Wyden (D–Oregon), who is on the intelligence committee, warned that we were just seeing the tip of the iceberg and there was so much more about the surveillance that hadn’t come out yet. You have characterized this story as the finale in your coverage, the pinnacle of your reporting on this topic. Does this and the other stories now constitute the whole iceberg? (With the understanding that of course you don’t possess everything about the government’s surveillance in your cache of documents.) But is this the peak now?
GG: When I talked about my finale I just sort of meant…basically I’ve been doing this for a year now so it’s just kind of time for me to do other things. I’m sure there are stories in there that I passed by because I didn’t recognize the significance of it and neither did the other journalists working on it that people who have a different set of understandings about things would. I already have a few stories written that are going to come after this one, so this isn’t my last one. But I do think there are some really big stories left to tell that would probably be very related to what Ron Wyden was saying… . But we have a snippet of what the NSA did. We don’t have anything close to everything that the NSA did. And it’s possible—in fact I think it’s highly probable—that there are things Ron Wyden knows about and was referring to that, for whatever reason, just aren’t in the documents that we have, or we haven’t found them.
WIRED: One revelation in your book that didn’t get much play was the issue of U.S. telecoms partnering with foreign telecoms to upgrade their networks and in the process help the NSA subvert those networks by redirecting the target country’s communications to NSA repositories. That to me was one of the more shocking allegations because you weren’t just talking about phone companies providing access to their own networks and their own customers but serving as pseudo-contractors and agents of the NSA to help them spy on foreign infrastructure. Why didn’t that get more attention?
GG: You know, it’s funny because it was a huge issue here in Brazil, before I wrote the book, because the first story we did in Brazil was about the collection of 2 million metadata and so the question was how was the NSA getting that? The Senate was interested in that…The reason it never took off is because the one thing the NSA holds really close is the identity of their partners. I have a very good idea of who these companies are based on circumstantial evidence, but no one would ever let me say it. But without that, how do you make it stick? The Brazilian government was desperate to know, because they wanted to kick that company out.
WIRED: There has been a lot of speculation about the possible existence of a second leaker, ever since Jake Appelbaum, a developer for The Tor Project, and Der Spiegel published the so-called ANT catalogue of NSA surveillance tools and didn’t attribute the document to Snowden. Then last week Jake published a second story in Germany about surveillance of people who use privacy tools, based on what appears to be leaked source code from an NSA datamining tool. That story also wasn’t sourced to Snowden. You’ve said you think there’s a second leaker.
GG: It’s hard for me because I actually know what’s in the archive and I don’t want to just come out and say: this is in the archive, this isn’t in the archive. But the thing I thought was most notable about that Der Spiegel article Jake did is that they don’t say a single thing about what the source was for those documents, and every single other time Der Spiegel has reported on Snowden documents they say specifically: this came from NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden. And they were just completely coy and silent on the sourcing for those catalogues. I think that should have been a red flag for a lot of people, in addition to the fact that it wasn’t any of the normal journalists who did that reporting. Everyone knows who got the documents, like me and Laura [Poitras] and Bart [Gellman at the Washington Post].
There are big legal issues surrounding these documents from the start and one of the things we’ve always been told by lawyers is you can report journalistically on the documents but you can’t just hand them out to other people because the minute you start handing them out to other people, you become the source. So given Jake’s obvious proximity to WikiLeaks, the idea that I or Laura or anyone else would just be handing documents of all people to Jake Appelbaum, which means that they could have easily ended up in the hands of WikiLeaks, seems very remote. That’s not what happened.
WIRED: So you still hold strong to this idea that there probably is a second source.
GG: It’s hard for me because I know for certain but I don’t want to be coy and be like well there may be and there may not be but I can’t say for certain because I don’t want to talk about what’s in the archive or not in the archive for the rest of my life… . It’s hard to me to say for certain because there are so many documents.
WIRED: But you did tweet that it seems clear there is a second source.
GG: Exactly, and I stand by that. I mean the reason I said it seems clear—even that’s like a little amorphous—is because of the way both the Der Spiegel article and this latest article said nothing about the sourcing.
Screengrab: WIRED
