Government needs reminding that they work for us, says Pulitzer-winning reporter Barton Gellman, who describes Edward Snowden as ending an era of indifference to surveillance

Encryptions tools must be simplified and made accessible for the mainstream, Pulitzer-winning journalist Barton Gellman said on Monday, calling on the tech industry to have the courage and ingenuity to help address the disparity of power between the people and their government.

Addressing the SXSW festival shortly before Edward Snowden’s live speech by video, Gellman said we are a long way off simple, transparent encryption tools. He cited Pew research which found that 88% of Americans say they have taken steps to protect their privacy in some form.

“With all the user interface brains out there we could get easier tools,” he said. “But it’s not just the ability to encrypt, it’s a frame of mind, a workflow and a discipline that is alien to most people, and that is the opposite to the open nature of the consumer internet. You could use Tor to access a site a hundred times, but the 101st time you forget, you may as well not have used Tor.”

“There are people at this conference who have taken very considerable risk to protect the privacy of their customers and have put themselves at the edge of the door to jail and it will take courage as well as ingenuity to change the way things work.”

Metadata is more powerful than phone tapping

Gellman, who interviewed Snowden in Russia in 2013, said Snowden has highlighted the peak indifference to security. Metadata is incredibly potent as a method of surveillance, yet most internet users fail to understand how powerful it can be in aggregate.

“One of the great gifts of Snowden is that he has shown what surveillance can do,” he said. Gellman told of a colleague who said he wasn’t concerned about metadata and his privacy, a colleague who used Twitter heavily and with location stamps.

So Gellman downloaded three months worth of Twitter location stamps and plotted them on a Google map, plotting the times, frequency and significance of each location. His horrified colleague consequently changed much of his behaviour online.

“I would rather someone listened in to all my phone calls than accessed my metadata - you can learn much more about me from that metadata.”

Whistleblowers - traitors or lantern bearers?

Gellman doesn’t like the word ‘whistleblower’. On one side are many in government who say he signed an agreement not to disclose information, and that disclosing specific unlawful behaviour, or waste, should be dealt with by internal channels. Snowden himself did speak to around ten supervisors and to colleagues informally with some questions about their work, and at one point asked if what they were doing would pass ‘the front page test’.

“That’s a pretty bold thing to do when you’re gathering documents and speaking to three reporters,” he said. “But the illegality test is too narrow.

“If the idea is genuine that the government works for us, and information is power, we are living inside a one-way mirror because they know more and more about us and we know less and less about them. There’s a huge disparity of power.”

“Do we think it’s a good idea to listen to every call, to bust encryption standards… if it’s a big policy question, and stuff is being done behind our backs that might shock us if we knew about it, there’s pretty good reason to put it out there. Forget whistleblower - it should be lantern holder.”

How has the NSA surveillance story stayed live?

“Snowden paid very careful attention to what had happened to other whistleblowers that hadn’t had a long-term impact, and was careful to produce the documents… If Snowden had asked me 6-8 months later [if this story and still been live] but he has got to have exceed every plausible estimation about impact. It’s because he didn’t realise the documents all at once.”

That pace was less about Snowden releasing the documents slowly but about the work journalists need to do to verify and interrogate before they publish.

Doctorow said he was most concerned by the programmes known as Bullrun in the US and Edgehill in the UK, which saw the NSA spend $250,000 a year spend trying to sabotage security standards and have backdoors built into security products.

“In the second world war, countries had their own encryption tools but now we share networks and tools, and if you can undermine the random number generator - if you can make it less random - and that’s what the NSA was doing by trying to trick, buy or persuade companies to make their encryption more breakable,” said Gellman. “They would create an encryption standard that only they would break - that would let them be both information assurance and signal intelligence.”

Was Prism effectively a front for the more substantial fibre optic and undersea cable tapping? Interviewing Gellman, Cory Doctorow said: “The reason for Prism was to give them a plausible reason to know about the things they knew from the fibre taps and not alerting the companies.” When Prism started Twitter barely existed, Facebook was limited to college campuses and Google was tiny.

How did Snowden get the documents out?

Asked whether he has been harassed when writing about Snowden, Gellman said no.

“I have not been harassed. I’ve had some interesting exchanges with government reps of various temperatures. But I speak to them before every story. If they want to demonstrate falsity I want to hear it, and if they want to tell me about specific damage I would be doing then it want to hear that too. I get warnings about the espionage act and I assume that I’m more interesting than I used to be. And Google has warned me that they believe a state-sponsored hacker is attempting to compromise my computer… I assume that is more likely to be a foreign agency.”

“Do I worry about doing harm and putting lives at risk? Of course I do. There are things in the documents I don’t think should be published and there are things Snowden doesn’t think should be published…

“He’s a very smart guy on a lot of levels, and a very nimble mind. There lots of boundaries he draws with me, and as a reporter I look for side-channel attacks… Genghis Khan didn’t try to known down the Great Wall of China - he bribed the guards and put up ladders. But he Snowden won’t tell me how he got the documents out, for example.”

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