the same time, all the talk of using technology to protect civil liberties may have worked to obscure some equally valuable truths. Chief among them: encryption is an important tool, but it’s not everything. All meaningful communication and collaboration rely on a bedrock of trust: people of good faith working together. The most advanced algorithms can’t outpace that basic principle.
During a debate over secure messaging, Jon Evans, a TechCrunch columnist and software engineer, explained as much. “You always have to trust somebody. It’s inevitable,” he wrote. “Real security design is about navigating the compromises between usability and security, determining the sophistication and threat model of your users, deciding who you have to trust and who you can’t afford to.”
In essence, when it comes to trust, there is always a practical tradeoff to be made — unless you live on a desert island and you’re a do-it-yourselfer who relies exclusively on homebrewed code, building proprietary smartphones out of coconuts and corresponding only with yourself. Faith in no one, after all, is a recipe for isolation.
Unfortunately, as Evans pointed out, we can’t afford to trust others indiscriminately. Sometimes the figures who are most beholden to the public prove least worthy of its confidence.
That was true of James Clapper, who probably never imagined his tenure as US director of national intelligence would collide with one of the most significant leaks in national history. Three months before the first secrets spilled out of Snowden’s box, Clapper was questioned by Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) at an open congressional hearing.
Wyden’s job, of course, meant he had a national security clearance. So it seems likely the senator already knew the answer when he asked Clapper if the NSA collected “any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans.”
“No, sir,” Clapper replied. He added: “Not wittingly.”
That was a lie.
When his bad-faith testimony was exposed by Snowden’s leaks, Clapper’s first move was to deflect attention away from the lie. He assured Americans: a hunt was on for the dastardly individual who had stolen the government’s secrets. “This is someone who for whatever reason, has chosen to violate a sacred trust for this country,” he thundered.
That remark revealed either extreme hypocrisy or — even worse — the kind of cynicism that makes hypocrisy irrelevant. But the absurdity of making such a charge against the leaker, even with his own credibility in tatters, seemed lost on Clapper.
The intelligence chief would finally apologize for giving “clearly erroneous” information to Congress and the American people. Months later he would resign — his long career as a public servant derailed by deceit. But in the days following the first NSA leaks, contrition was not part of the script. Clapper focused on a single talking point: a traitor had betrayed America. In doing so, he underscored — over and over, as if immune to irony — the importance of upholding public trust.
During one especially revealing interview, NBC anchor Andrea Mitchell asked him how hard it was for intelligence officials to safeguard classified information. Clapper rattled off a litany of tools and protocols. He mentioned security clearances for federal workers and contractors, along with the spy-proof rooms known as SCIFs, or sensitive compartmented information facilities.
But even with the most sophisticated strategies the government could develop, keeping secrets was a “tough problem,” Clapper admitted. After all, systems are only as reliable as the people who operate them.
“When it all boils down to it,” he concluded, “it is all about personal trust.”
Clapper may not have been trustworthy himself — but he was right to argue that everything comes down to trust.
That’s why we’re writing this book. The two of us are journalists, but, even more important, we’re best friends. We believe in each other. And in an age of eroding trust, that was enough to make us part of the impromptu network that helped Snowden, a man neither of us has ever met — or even talked to — move his archive of state secrets.
More than six years have passed since those tense days. We’re describing them now because we want to preserve these small moments for the sake of posterity. Above all, we hope that this story will help empower others — anyone who cares about an open society — to speak and act during a precarious moment in American history.
Meanwhile, the presidency of Donald Trump has brought new threats to democracy and transparency in government. Chelsea Manning, whose role in leaking US diplomatic cables made her an inspirational figure to Snowden, has been thrown back in jail, despite having received a pardon by President Barack Obama. WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has been charged under the Espionage Act and now faces up to 175 years in jail. Meanwhile, Trump is pushing to restore the NSA’s access to Americans’ phone and text records, a practice that was exposed — and then derailed — by the Snowden revelations.
As we write this, a new whistleblower has emerged from the intelligence community to reveal a startling abuse of presidential power: Trump pressuring Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky to investigate the son of Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden. The whistleblower alerted Congress of these actions through legally approved channels, an anonymous process that offers the full protection of federal law. Immediately Trump demanded to know the source’s identity, deriding this person as something ‘‘close to a spy,’’ and thundering about retribution.
In these times, it’s easy to feel the creeping chill of suppression. So why would we want to tell the story of Snowden’s box now? A book like this could make us vulnerable in the ongoing crackdown. Given how the Trump administration treats journalism as a conspiracy against the government, it could be used as road map to our indictment.
Privacy attorneys have made the argument that, by describing such sensitive moments in detail, writers risk “doing the government’s work for them.” But we feel differently. We believe that once people censor themselves and stop telling stories, the work of the government has already been done.
It’s easy to believe that small things — individual actions and human relationships — don’t make much of a difference in the face of an authoritarian regime. We disagree. We want this book to serve as a quiet testament to the power of trust, and why it’s worth fighting for a culture where it can thrive.
Trust is the glue of the world, the difference between civilization and chaos. It’s what lets people come together in any kind of cooperative action, from social movements to marriages and markets. When shared between members of a civic-minded community, trust is the one thing that can keep state power in check — unless, of course, we allow ourselves to be manipulated by fear and, in the silence that follows, grow apart from one another.
— Jessica Bruder and Dale Maharidge
Dale Maharidge
It was a frigid winter, and the Manhattan loft was cold — very cold. Something was wrong with the gas line, and there was no heat. In a corner, surrounding the bed, sheets had been hung from cords to form a de facto tent with a small electric heater running inside. But the oddities didn’t end there: when I talked to the woman who lived in the loft about her work, she made me take the battery out of my cellphone and stash the device in her refrigerator. People who have dated in
