The War on Leakers: National Security and American Democracy, from Eugene V. Debs to Edward Snowden by Lloyd C. Gardner

Author:Lloyd C. Gardner [Gardner, Lloyd C.]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9781620970812
Publisher: The New Press
Published: 2016-02-29T16:00:00+00:00

The Revolt of the Tech Companies

The adulation and awards Snowden received were angst-producing phenomena for the White House, but more serious was the response of tech companies, who had once been big supporters of Barack Obama. Tech companies had pumped $7.8 million into his campaign in 2012. Now they were worried about losing much bigger sums to foreign competitors after the documents revealed that the government had established a secret back door into undisclosed interception points to copy entire data flows from the fiber-optic cables between data processing centers. The trouble had actually started even earlier, when Snowden’s revelations first appeared in The Guardian on June 5, 2013. Among the first revelations were details about PRISM, short for either Planning Tool for Resource Integration, Synchronization, and Management or Personal Record Information System Methodology. The program—a court approved mandate that required Google, Yahoo, and other major Internet companies to allow NSA collection of metadata under provisions of the Patriot Act. The original mandate had excluded mass collection of information of American citizens inside the country without a warrant. But that restriction had little meaning because of American membership in Five Eyes. The distinction between local and foreign had all but disappeared.

The first to complain were the Chinese, with whom American tech companies had a thriving and growing business. Of course, this was not the China of the old weak imperial dynasties, ripe for pillage in the Opium Wars, but a very modern country (at least in some respects) that engaged in industrial spying to gain advantages over American companies. In addition, the Pentagon’s Defense Science Board had evidence that China had secured access to detailed designs of military weapons and aircraft. President Obama and his aides had planned to address this complaint during a summit conference in California with President Xi scheduled to begin two days later, on June 7, 2013. Instead, he found himself on the defensive. The tables had been turned, explained an American China expert, Cheng Li of the Brookings Institution.29 As soon as President Xi returned home, American tech companies in China experienced a loss of consumer confidence. Sales fell off precipitously. IBM’s China revenue declined by 22 percent, causing an overall profit decline for the company of 4 percent. Chinese tech firms moved in to take the business after Snowden’s revelations.

Then came the news that, in addition to PRISM, the NSA had a backdoor program called Muscular, by which it entered into the tech companies internal networks without anyone knowing. In one month, the agency gathered and processed more than 180 million new records. “The Muscular project [operated jointly with NSA’s British counterpart, GCHQ],” wrote the Washington Post reporters who had been the beneficiaries of Snowden’s document release, “appears to be an unusually aggressive use of NSA tradecraft against flagship American companies. The agency is built for high-tech spying, with a wide range of digital tools, but it has not been known to use them routinely against U.S. companies.”30

An NSA slide presentation of the way Muscular works was revealed by Snowden.

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