by Dish Staff
James Bamford’s lengthy new profile of Edward Snowden, based on a series of in-person interviews in Moscow, purports to be a look at the leaker’s motivations but will more likely be remembered for its two new revelations about the NSA’s cyber-espionage activities. The first is that a cock-up at the NSA was responsible for the nationwide Internet outage Syria experienced in late 2012, not the Syrian government as everyone thought at the time:
One day an intelligence officer told him that TAO—a division of NSA hackers—had attempted in 2012 to remotely install an exploit in one of the core routers at a major Internet service provider in Syria, which was in the midst of a prolonged civil war. This would have given the NSA access to email and other Internet traffic from much of the country. But something went wrong, and the router was bricked instead—rendered totally inoperable. The failure of this router caused Syria to suddenly lose all connection to the Internet—although the public didn’t know that the US government was responsible.
The bigger scoop, however, is about a program codenamed MonsterMind, with which the NSA is trying to automate the process of detecting, defeating, and striking back against cyberattacks:
The program, disclosed here for the first time, would automate the process of hunting for the beginnings of a foreign cyberattack. Software would constantly be on the lookout for traffic patterns indicating known or suspected attacks. When it detected an attack, MonsterMind would automatically block it from entering the country—a “kill” in cyber terminology. Programs like this had existed for decades, but MonsterMind software would add a unique new capability:
Instead of simply detecting and killing the malware at the point of entry, MonsterMind would automatically fire back, with no human involvement. That’s a problem, Snowden says, because the initial attacks are often routed through computers in innocent third countries. “These attacks can be spoofed,” he says. “You could have someone sitting in China, for example, making it appear that one of these attacks is originating in Russia. And then we end up shooting back at a Russian hospital. What happens next?”
Yishai Schwartz pans the profile, which he says “reads like a release from a Snowden PR press office”, and Bamford’s “bewildering reluctance to ask any challenging questions at all”:
Bamford never asks why Snowden accepted—and even pursued—a series of high-level jobs in signals intelligence despite his misgivings. Bamford never pushes Snowden to face the moral complexity of his choices. And he never asks Snowden to explain whether it was responsible of him to release troves of information that not even he himself had seen. Most remarkably, Bamford seems unwilling to push Snowden on even his most outlandish claims, like Snowden’s insistence that he tried “to leave a trail of digital bread crumbs” so that his colleagues could determine what he had taken, prepare for future leaks, and mitigate damage. Alas, Snowden explains to a sympathetic Bamford, the NSA was simply too incompetent to decipher his clues. …
Now, national security isn’t quite Grimm’s Fairy Tales, nor is it a Dan Brown novel, so perhaps it might have made sense for Bamford to ask why Snowden chose this particular method for helping out his old colleagues at the NSA. And although Bamford is clearly enamored with Snowden’s brilliance (virtually the only family quotation about Snowden that Bamford thought worthy of inclusion was Snowden’s father’s proud mention of his son’s high IQ scores), it’s doubtful that Snowden’s attempts at helping were simply too clever for the combined powers of the American intelligence agencies. But again, Bamford doesn’t see fit to ask.
The piece reinforced Dreher’s sympathy for Snowden, though he acknowledges the moral dilemmas that Bamford largely elides:
If I had been in Snowden’s shoes, I might have done the same thing, out of fidelity to the moral law. As Augustine said, an immoral law is no law at all. At the same time, it is perfectly clear that a government riddled with even a thousand Snowdens, who believe they have the right to determine which of the government’s secrets to make public, could not function. Snowden may have had a clear moral mandate to become a whistleblower, but what about someone whose motives weren’t as pure as Snowden’s seem to have been? Where do you draw the line? In the case of the church, or Wall Street, I would cheer for any whistleblower who broke his (assumed) pledge of loyalty to expose grave injustice or serious wrongdoing. But national security is a more serious matter, and not one to be taken lightly. This is what troubles me about the Snowden case, even though my sympathies definitely lie with him.
The Dish 