Should we be afraid of mass surveillance ?

Snowden the movie: Ewen MacAskill watches the NSA super-leak come back to life

Oliver Stone looks overwhelmed. It is May 2015, and we are in Munich on the penultimate day of shooting his drama about Edward Snowden. At lunch, the director seems anxious and weary, eyes heavy, shoulders stooped, energy sapped. When the idea of Snowden was proposed, he explains, he had strongly resisted. Then, slowly and reluctantly, he was drawn in. Today, he sounds as if he might regret that decision. There have been problems with finance, with finding distributors, in portraying something as dull as the cyberworld that Snowden inhabits.

“A director has to say everything is great, things are wonderful,” he says, exasperated. “Every day on a set is a potential disaster. Every day on a film set is the hope that it is turning out well, but the truth is it is just a slog all the way through. It’s the bulldozer going through a treeline. It is not easy. It has never been easy.”

This film, in particular, was not easy. “Every movie I have made is a challenge. But from day one, every day seems to have its obstacles, whether it is computers or the technology being arcane, difficult to understand, or the character of Snowden, who has a strong, robot, nerd quality. It is a drawback. He is not the active type.” As Stone headed back to the set, his final comment expressed his limited ambition for the movie at that time: “I don’t want to do anything that will hurt Edward Snowden.”

Almost a year later, I meet Stone again, in London. The tiredness is gone. This is a man full of enthusiasm for life and his movie. The editing has gone well, he feels; the previous week a positive reaction had met an early preview in Idaho – despite his sense of dread.

“As a director, I think the film has a power beyond its details,” he says, beaming. “Maybe no one will come. But those people that come will see something they have not seen before. There are no chases. There are no murders. I love tension but there is a different kind of tension … What Snowden did in history, I believe, will make a difference. I don’t think it is going to go away.”

It was a few months after the story first broke in summer 2013 that Stone was approached by Anatoly Kucherena, Snowden’s lawyer in Russia, about making a movie about his client. It caught him, he says, at a low point. A project about Martin Luther King had failed to come to fruition. He didn’t fancy embarking on another complicated proposition unlikely to make it to the multiplex. Nonetheless, he went to Moscow, met the man himself, and was sufficiently intrigued to do further research and buy up film rights to Kurcherena’s fictional account of an American whistleblower, Time of the Octopus, as well as Guardian correspondent Luke Harding’s The Snowden Files.

I first met Stone six or so months later, when he visited the Guardian. I was called into the office of the then-editor, Alan Rusbridger, and was pleased at the prospect, never having met a Hollywood director before. This was also one whose films I had enjoyed. There were a handful of us in the room and we chatted for about hour. The reason I was there was that, along with fellow journalists Laura Poitras and Glenn Greenwald, I had met Snowden in Hong Kong, where he handed over tens of thousands of top-secret US and British documents to us – one of the biggest leaks in intelligence history – before going into hiding. Stone wanted to hear the account firsthand. At that point, I wasn’t sure what to make of the director, but I was impressed by the detail he had already accumulated about Snowden.

I met him next in December 2014, alone over lunch in London. I was half-an-hour late but he did not make a fuss: there was nothing of primadonna to him. Instead, he cracked on with his questions. There were a lot of them. They were followed up with emails and phone calls. I liked this obsessiveness, more journalist than film director; a stubborn pursuit of the unanswered in an effort to complete a picture. In the end, Stone and his co-writer Kieran Fitzgerald interviewed almost everyone involved. He spoke to lawyers, journalists and former members of the NSA. He went to the Ecuadorean embassy in London to talk to WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. And he met Snowden’s partner, Lindsay Mills. He went to Moscow at least eight times to meet Snowden.

Too much research, Stone says. About 80% had to be ditched. Not time wasted though, he says – it gave him the clarity he hankered after. We are now back in Munich, two days after the UK general election: a time of great industry and excitement in a newspaper. Filming, by contrast, is boring. I had never been on a movie set before and I am glad I had the chance to see behind the scenes. But I had somehow imagined it might be a bit like a stage performance. It was not. The experience is dull and repetitive. That morning was dominated by Stone shooting Joseph Gordon-Levitt, who plays Snowden, looking out of a hotel window. This was meant to be in Hong Kong; Snowden’s bedroom at the Mira hotel having been recreated in Germany. Gordon-Levitt was filmed looking left to right and then down to the street. Over and over again. Different lighting. Different angles. Different shots. The scene makes it into the movie but only lasts a few seconds. It took four hours.

When not looking out of glass, Gordon-Levitt was happy to chat. By then, he had already met Edward and was accurately reproducing his slow, precise speech. The son of west coast liberals, he had fostered an intense interest in Snowden and the arguments around surveillance. Unafraid of public declarations of political intent, Gordon-Levitt was preparing to be an advocate for privacy issues in the press commitments ahead. He has already donated his earnings from the movie to the American Civil Liberties Union, one of whose lawyers is Snowden’s chief representative.

Watching the shooting in the mocked-up Hong Kong hotel, I spotted on Snowden’s cluttered table an empty can of Tsingtao beer. But there were never any empties in that room. None of us was drinking at the time; Snowden is teetotal. But I didn’t have the heart to mention it because it was already so far into the shooting and the idea of subjecting them to more hours reshooting felt unimaginable. In the end, though, I can’t remember seeing the stubbie in the final cut.

There are other, bigger quibbles. Parts of the film are pure Hollywood. Stone devotes much of the movie to the romance between Snowden and Mills. The way Snowden smuggles data out of the NSA headquarters in Hawaii in a Rubik’s Cube is almost certainly the stuff of thriller fantasy. It is also a straightforward biopic, following Snowden from a failed attempt to join US special forces to a successful career as an NSA computer specialist, through disillusionment and then to being a whistleblower.

Yet the broad direction of Snowden is more faithful to the truth than might be expected from Hollywood. Stone is quick to insist he is not a political director or an activist, but a dramatist. A surprise to me, maybe to others also familiar with his work. Yet perhaps what he meant was that he does not want to make anything that would be dull. The film isn’t. But I’m an interested party: I’m depicted in it, and so I hope it does well.

I’m most interested in the film’s capacity to shift public opinion about the man whose story it portrays. Attitudes in the US tend to be polarised between those who view him as a traitor and those who see him as a hero. Stone’s film can reach people with little prior knowledge. It humanises its subject, makes complex arguments about the balance between privacy and surveillance immediately understandable. Even those who argue that they are not bothered about potential intrusion into the private lives will likely squirm at a scene in which the central couple are having sex – but then Snowden hesitates, spotting an open laptop, wondering if anyone might be watching through the webcam. (The incident is based on an interview with the Guardian in which Snowden said surveillance agencies do engage in such voyeurism.)

Will Snowden shift opinion? “I hope so,” Stone says, a touch uncertain. “It is tricky,” he qualifies. In fact, his film may give some of the more zealous anti-surveillance campaigners pause for thought. One of the more unexpected subtleties in the film comes with its portrayal of the NSA, where differing views about the balance between privacy and security are permitted – embraced, even.

“Ed never revealed real people to us,” said Stone. “But he gave us ideas about real people and events from which we could draw and make – with dramatic licence – conclusions that would not be too far-fetched. We tried over many drafts to make it as realistic as possible.

“The NSA have human souls,” he added. “They are not all James Bond villains.” He was not smiling; he meant it.

Yet his own allegiances lie with the whistleblower; his undoubted aim is to caution the unaware about what he calls “the surveillance state”. “I think we are all facing problems of an Orwellian super–organisation that is running the world,” he says. “But that is politics!” He is disappointed that the issue has surfaced so little in the US election campaign so far – its sole appearance at that point was in a Democratic candidates’ debate. Stone backed Bernie Sanders (and is also a fan of Jeremy Corbyn). “Hillary Clinton has no mercy in her soul for Snowden,” he says, also murmuring uneasily about her “hardcore warmongering tactics”.

Snowden will be released in the US two months before a new president is elected, and a day after Stone’s 70th birthday. Its fate will be decided then. But what of the most important opinion, that of Snowden himself? His instinct when he worked at the NSA was to keep a low profile – presumably he would have been mortified at the prospect of a movie about him. And he remains an essentially private person, happy to talk about technology and surveillance, but guarding details about his own life. The world of the celebrity is not one he would be comfortable with.

Stone hints that Snowden liked the movie – and his cooperatation suggests he is onside. His real pleasure in it, though, may be like mine. In April, the trailer was released. Snowden tweeted: “For two minutes and 39 seconds, everybody at NSA just stopped working.”

After seeing the Oscar-winning movie Citizenfour, a Guardian colleague offered up his verdict: “The guy playing you is rubbish.” It was a joke, I hope; the guy playing me is me, as Citizenfour is a documentary.

Released in 2014, Citizenfour recorded a meeting between NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden with three journalists, Laura Poitras, Glenn Greenwald and myself, in Hong Kong in 2013. Oliver Stone’s Snowden is different. Actors take most of the roles, including Tom Wilkinson as me.

Throughout my career, I have been comfortable with a low profile, hiding behind print. That has not survived the Snowden story, which has so far spawned three plays, several documentaries and now a Hollywood movie.

My part in all of them is relatively small. Even so, the first time I went to see myself played by an actor – Jonathan Coy, in James Graham’s Privacy at the Donmar Warehouse in 2014 – I felt a mixture of both embarrassment and dread, not least because I had to write about it. But Coy did a good job and I began to relax after he delivered the first of his lines. I had met the actor before on what I thought was a social occasion – in fact, he was scoping me, picking up mannerisms.

Fear, then relief, at my portrayal in new play Privacy
Ewen MacAskill
Ewen MacAskill Read more
It gave me a strange taste for this strangest experience. When I flew to Munich to visit the set of Snowden, two things were uppermost in my mind. The first: would my small role survive the final cut? The second: would I keep my Scottish accent? Stone might have opted for American, or even English.

In a break on set during a thunderstorm, I met the man playing me: Tom Wilkinson. He confirmed he stuck with Scottish. “It is always an accent I have never had any problems with,” he said. “I am good with accents in a way and Scottish is apparently one of them.” And his accent is good, if a little more Edinburgh than my Glasgow glottal stop. Plus, he refers to Snowden in the movie as “laddie”. Not a term I would ever employ.

One of the biggest differences between being portrayed on stage and on film is that the language in the play was mine, recorded verbatim, while that in Snowden is invented.

At one point in the real meeting in the Mira hotel, Snowden covered himself and his laptop with a red hood. He wanted to hide his password from any hidden cameras, he explained later. Even at the time it seemed odd behaviour and myself and Glenn are caught in Citizenfour exchanging puzzled, uneasy glances.

In the movie, I offer up a quip as Snowden pulls the hood over his head, something like, “Do we all get under that?”, which I did not say. Stone repeatedly stressed to me he was making a movie and had to make it interesting. Me just taking notes in a chair, he said kindly, just wasn’t particularly exciting. He needed action.

There’s another striking line in which I call the Guardian to tell them that “The Guinness is good” – a pre-arranged signal that the whistleblower was genuine, not a crank. In fact, I did say that in real life. And, oddly, it was scripted, the brainchild of then-Guardian US editor Janine Gibson, who is played here by Joely Richardson.

The film shows me nodding off. This is accurate, too – but it happened later than the scenes shown. Neither Glenn, Laura or myself got much sleep for a week. It was only when Snowden went into hiding that I began to relax and started falling asleep all over the place.

As for Wilkinson, he was less exercised by the themes behind the film than his director or co-star, but he recalled with excitement the coverage in the Guardian when the story broke, and is sympathetic towards the man. “I don’t think he is a traitor,” he says, quiet and considered. “You need someone like that. I think all people who put themselves out on a limb to the extent to which he has have a simplicity of outlook that eludes the rest of us.”

Earlier in the summer, I saw a preview of the film with my colleague Luke Harding, on whose book much of the movie is based. Afterwards, I asked him how accurate he felt the Wilkinson portrayal was. A fearless foreign correspondent confronting the powerful forces of the US and British intelligence services – right? Luke’s verdict: “You looked a bit dopey.”

Ewen MacAskill - The Guardian - 18 August 2016

Privacy experts fear Donald Trump running global surveillance network

Privacy activists, human rights campaigners and former US security officials have expressed fears over the prospect of Donald Trump controlling the vast global US and UK surveillance network.

They criticised Barack Obama’s administration for being too complacent after the 2013 revelations by the NSA whistleblower, Edward Snowden, and making only modest concessions to privacy concerns rather than carrying out major legislative changes.

The concern comes after Snowden dismissed fears for his safety if Trump, who called him “a spy who has caused great damage in the US”, was to strike a deal with Vladimir Putin to have him extradited.

Snowden, in a video link-up from Moscow with a Netherlands-based tech company on Thursday, said it would be “crazy to dismiss” the prospect of Trump doing a deal but if personal safety was a major concern for him, he would not have leaked the top-secret documents in the first place.

Snowden, wanted by the US on charges under the Espionage Act, found asylum in Russia in 2013 but his visa is due to expire in July.

Privacy and human rights campaigners in the US and UK say a Trump presidency will tip the balance between surveillance and privacy decisively towards the former. The UK surveillance agency GCHQ is so tied up with America’s NSA, often doing work on its behalf, it could find itself facing a series of ethical dilemmas.

On the campaign trail, Trump made an ambiguous remark about wishing he had access to surveillance powers.

“I wish I had that power,” he said while talking about the hack of Democratic National Committee emails. “Man, that would be power.”

Although Obama’s administration introduced a few modest concessions to the privacy lobby following Snowden’s revelations, he left the rest of the surveillance apparatus untouched. His approach has been to offer a modicum of transparency, much of it forced on him by the courts, in place of reform.

The White House, which would not comment for this story, has no evident regrets about that approach. The administration believes it has set an appropriate balance between intelligence authorities and civil liberties, and expressed confidence in intelligence professionals who will continue to serve in the NSA and FBI under Trump to act responsibly.

But others are less convinced. “There have been some people who were complacent about things like drone killing of US civilians and mass surveillance under Obama, because they trusted him. That wilful neglect on their part is about to come back and possibly bite all of us in the ass,” said Nick Merrill, the executive director of the Calyx Institute, a technology focused research group that promotes encryption tools.

Ben Wizner, Snowden’s lawyer who works for the American Civil Liberties Union, said: “The danger of the aggregation of executive power we have seen over the last decade is that we might have an executive who is not worthy of that trust. This has been a trend in the US but there has been a weakening of constitutional oversight during the growth of the national security state.

“I think many Americans are waking up to the fact we have created a presidency that is too powerful.”

John Napier Tye, a former state department official who became a reluctant whistleblower in 2014, warning of NSA dragnets, said: “Obama and Bush could have set the best possible privacy protections in place, but the trouble is, it’s all set by executive order, not statute.

“So Trump could revise the executive order as he pleases. And since it’s all done in secret, unless you have someone willing to break the law to tell you that it happened, it’s not clear the public will ever learn it did. Consider that even now, the American people still do not know how much data on US persons the NSA actually collects.”

Thomas Drake, an NSA whistleblower who predated Snowden, offered an equally bleak assessment. He said: “The electronic infrastructure is fully in place – and ex post facto legalised by Congress and executive orders – and ripe for further abuse under an autocratic, power-obsessed president. History is just not kind here. Trump leans quite autocratic. The temptations to use secret NSA surveillance powers, some still not fully revealed, will present themselves to him as sirens.”

One specific surveillance measure Trump proposed on the campaign trail was surveilling mosques and keeping a database of Muslims. “A grave concern we have is that his rhetoric is going to be perceived in some corners as a green light for unfettered surveillance activities. Our concern is not just about the NSA but also the FBI. The FBI doesn’t exactly have a great record over the last 15 years,” said Farhana Khera, the president and executive director of the US-based civil rights group Muslim Advocates.

The next flashpoint over the NSA’s powers will come late in 2017, when a major surveillance law permitting collection of Americans’ international communications is set for expiration, the legal basis for the NSA’s Prism programme which siphons information from the technology giants.

The UK government has made even fewer concessions to privacy campaigners than the US. The UK parliament has passed the investigatory powers bill, due to receive royal assent shortly, that basically legalises the illegal activities exposed by Snowden.

Even in Germany, where public support for Snowden is at its highest, parliament last month approved legislation that ostensibly increases oversight of intelligence agencies but which privacy campaigners claim expands their powers.

Jim Killock, executive director of the UK-based Open Rights Group, said the NSA and GCHQ worked closely together. “Given that the agencies’ operations are nearly indistinguishable, it makes it incredibly hard for the UK to resist using our resources for risky endeavours or even human rights abuses … Trump’s election ought to remove the complacency MPs have been suffering from.”

Carly Nyst, a UK-based human rights lawyer, said: “The British people should be especially worried: the NSA and GCHQ act so closely, and intelligence is shared so fulsomely, that any increase in surveillance under Trump will undeniably touch upon the privacy of Britons’ communications.”

According to documents released by Snowden, now years out of date as technological advancements have developed, the NSA vacuums 5bn daily records just of cellphone locations. In April 2011, it was collecting an average of 194m text messages every day.

Through its partnership with Britain’s GCHQ, it has access to, among other things, webcam imagery, including pornographic material. GCHQ collected such imagery from 1.8 million Yahoo users in a six-month period in 2008.

Ewen MacAskill - The Guardian - 11 November 2016

This week we are going to talk about a rather disturbing subject. Indeed on the occasion of the cinema release of the film tracing the life of E.Snowden and the recent election of Donald Trump we can ask how will evolve the mass surveillance put in place by the powerful countries. The USA with the NSA for example.

The film Snowden, traces the course of Edward Snowen. An honest and brilliant American patriot who worked for the CIA and the NSA and who contributed to the development of surveillance software. We can see the evolution within these monitoring organizations. We can also see its grasp of this globalized and intrusive surveillance. That prompted Snowden to reveal this to the world. This was a scandal that the US ended up confrminating as true. Nevertheless Snowden is considered a traitor and has found refuge in Russia. Nevertheless he remains one of those rare men to show what our system is made of and how violent it can be. At any time you can be watched and listened to by a government. Your government or another.

The election of Donald Trump leads us to wonder about the future US surveillance policies. Indeed we know that the US has access to all information, private or public. They have access to FaceBook or Google servers. They can see from the WebCam of your computer without problems. They can see everything everywhere and when they want to. Other major powers must also have such means.
Major private groups are worried about how global surveillance could evolve following the election of Donald Trump. Indeed, its protectionist policy could well benefit from all this information.

To conclude, all this is shocking. Our privacy can be used without our knowledge. The development of new connected technologies is a bargain for the state. Information is now easy to access.It sends shiversdown your spine! 

Have a good day !