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 high-stakes endeavor that relied, more than anything, on bonds of trust.
That’s no small thing. We live in an era of suspicion, marked by an eroding faith in government, the media, and even each other. Social scientists have studied the decline of public confidence, quizzing Americans on the same set of topics over and over for nearly half a century as part of a long-term project called the General Social Survey. It includes this question:
Generally speaking, would you say that most people can be trusted or that you can’t be too careful in dealing with people?
Researchers ran the first round of the survey in 1972. At the time, nearly half of the people who responded said they trusted others. By the latest round in 2018 — two years after Donald Trump was elected president — the figure had dropped to less than a third.
That’s scary news. Trust is the basis of all cooperative action in a free society. It’s the feeling of fellowship that allows people to take risks and grow. It’s also the underpinning of democracy. And it’s fragile, easy to undermine. Massive domestic spying systems — like the one Snowden revealed — are corrosive to the kind of deep human connections that nourish trust and collaboration.
Consider East Germany, the most notorious surveillance state in modern history. Its secret police force — the Ministerium für Staatssicherheit, better known as the Stasi — was created in 1950. By the time it disbanded four decades later, the Stasi had grown to include some 86,000 full-time employees. If you add part-time and unofficial agents, the total number of people spying for the secret police had risen to more than half a million.
The population was saturated with snoops. Some estimates set the ratio at one informer to every six and a half citizens. Most major institutions — from universities to churches and political parties — were infiltrated. Neighbors snitched on neighbors, and mistrust was rampant. Even a member of the nation’s Olympic bobsledding team, Harald Czudaj, confessed to spying on his fellow athletes. Years later, he recounted through tears that police had caught him driving drunk and blackmailed him into becoming an informer.
East Germany was an extreme case, but even in systems with fewer informants state surveillance frays the relationships between citizens. People grow wary, exhausted from the constant pressure. Eventually, they turn against each other.
“If we are gathering data on people all the time on the basis that they may do something wrong, this is promoting a view that, as citizens, we cannot be trusted,” explained University of Sheffield sociology professor Clive Norris, testifying more than a decade ago before members of British Parliament. Today, the United Kingdom maintains one of the most extensive surveillance systems in the world.
The constant monitoring of a population, Norris and other scholars note, “fosters suspicion,” undermines “cohesion and solidarity,” and amounts to “a slow social suicide.” In other words: paranoia will destroy you.
The Snowden affair created a groundswell of concern about how ordinary people are monitored by powerful entities, from governments to tech firms and other corporate interests. It sparked a public conversation on privacy, security, and freedom in the digital age, pushing our culture — at least for a moment — past the point of what the writer Cory Doctorow calls “peak indifference.”
Before Snowden came on the scene, state-run surveillance rarely made it into mainstream American discourse. One of the rare exceptions came in 1993, when officials under the Clinton administration unveiled a device called the Clipper chip and proposed installing it in telephones nationwide. This cutting-edge microchip would encrypt users’ communications, but it would also provide direct access for eavesdropping by intelligence and law enforcement agencies.
Privacy advocates, politicians, technologists, and civil libertarians were alarmed by the Orwellian plan. Together, they formed a motley opposition with members ranging from the ACLU to Rush Limbaugh.
“The precise object of their rage is the Clipper chip, officially known as the MYK-78 and not much bigger than a tooth,” wrote journalist Steven Levy. “Just another tiny square of plastic covering a silicon thicket. A computer chip, from the outside indistinguishable from thousands of others. It seems improbable that this black Chiclet is the focal point of a battle that may determine the degree to which our civil liberties survive in the next century. But that is the shared belief … The Clipper chip has prompted what might be considered the first holy war of the information highway.”
Polling showed that 80 percent of Americans didn’t want their phones to be Clipper-chipped. So the White House mounted a bizarre public relations offensive, including a WIRED article by NSA chief counsel Stewart A. Baker titled “Don’t Worry Be Happy: Why Clipper Is Good for You.”
But that breezy, Bobby McFerrin–flavored headline wasn’t enough to save the government’s plan. Around the same time Baker’s article came out, an AT&T Bell Laboratories researcher named Matthew Blaze announced a security flaw in the Clipper chip: hackers could use it to encrypt communications the government wouldn’t be able to crack. The technology was sunk for good.
After that brief flare in public consciousness, dialogue about surveillance in America largely returned to the underground: a lively counterculture of cypherpunks, hackers, and digitally literate civil libertarians. It was far enough outside the mainstream that even Greenwald, who’d written for Salon and the Guardian about abuses of surveillance and went on to play a pivotal role in the NSA leaks, had given little thought to securing his own private communications.
When a mysterious person — using the handle “Cincinnatus” — pleaded with him to set up encrypted email, Greenwald blew off the request. “Despite my intentions, I never created the time to work on encryption,” he later wrote. “It was simply that on my always too-long list of things to take care of, installing encryption technology at the behest of this unknown person never became pressing enough for me to stop other things and focus on it.”
Cincinnatus was, of course, Snowden.
In early 2013, most journalists were like Greenwald. Protecting their email from prying eyes wasn’t a priority. The general public was even less interested in such matters. In the immediate aftermath of the Snowden leaks, that changed. For many, privacy went from a curious abstraction to an immediate, tangible concern. Encryption got hip. At packed CryptoParties, grassroots privacy activists around the globe taught layfolk how to safeguard their online communications. By the time the television series Mr. Robot aired in 2015, the public was primed to immerse itself in a drama about a hacktivist collective. The show’s first season averaged 1.39 million viewers an episode. Meanwhile, a handful of heavy-hitting tech giants followed consumers’ interests — or
