The System by James Ball

Author:James Ball
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Part Three

THE MELEE

6

The Cyber Warriors

IT WAS A June night in 2013, and I was one of two people watching a progress bar crawl – painstakingly slowly – towards 100 per cent. We were on the fourth floor of the Guardian’s London offices, two storeys away from the newsroom, in a ‘secret project’ view well out of everyone’s way. The room is usually used for projects senior management want to keep away from reporters – desk moves or possible redesigns. But this time it was something quite different.

Almost everyone else in the building had gone home hours before, leaving, unwittingly, just me and David Leigh – who until just weeks before had been the newspaper’s investigations editor, and who had already been dragged out of retirement – sitting in near silence watching a progress bar advance around 1 per cent every five minutes, missing out on a balmy summer’s evening.

The reason we were sitting there was that we were confident it would be worth the wait, because if everything worked okay – and that felt like a big ‘if’ – we would, just as soon as that progress bar hit 100 per cent, become the first UK reporters to set eyes on thousands of documents revealing the activities of GCHQ, the UK’s signals intelligence agency.

That progress bar was tracking the decryption of tens of thousands of top-secret intelligence documents leaked by the NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden. Not even he had read them all, but from his time working with the USA’s intelligence agency, he’d relayed one tip of what to look for, and this was all that we’d have to go on as a start. We had no details, no explanations, no lengthy guide. We had a note with one word on it: ‘TEMPORA’.

We had no idea what it was, or what it meant, but for investigative journalists, like any other gossip, there is no greater bait than a hint at a mystery, especially one that apparently is on the verge of being solved.

Shortly before midnight, the bar finally hit 100 per cent and we had the ability to search a hugely classified database explaining what the US and UK government surveillance agencies really did. We leaned into the computer and typed in ‘Tempora’. A few dozen documents appeared, mostly complex and technical, documents that would clearly take days or weeks to make sense of.

One of the documents among that batch, though, stood out: a slideshow summarising a visit by General Keith Alexander – then the man who oversaw the National Security Agency – to Menwith Hill, a US intelligence base situated in otherwise sleepy Yorkshire countryside.

‘Why can’t we collect all the signals, all the time?’ it reported the head of the US spy agency saying. ‘Sounds like a good summer project for Menwith!’1

THE DOCUMENTS EDWARD Snowden provided to the Guardian and the Washington Post came to shed unprecedented light on how the USA had come to exploit the internet which it had helped build – not just for intelligence, but for a form of online war too.

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