The Spying Game: Diplomacy after Snowden "No matter where you are, we are a target these days," said R. James Woolsey Jr., director of central intelligence during the Clinton administration. "No matter where we go, countries like China, Russia and much of the Arab world have assets and are trying to spy on us so you have to think about that and take as many precautions as possible." On a trip to Latin America in 2011, for example, a White House photo showed Obama talking from a security tent in a Rio de Janeiro hotel suite with Hillary Rodham Clinton, then the secretary of state, and Robert M. Gates, defence secretary at the time, about the air war against Libya that had been launched the previous day. Another photo, taken three days later in San Salvador, showed him conferring from the tent with advisers about the attack. Spokesmen for the State Department, the CIA and the National Security Council declined to provide details on the measures the government takes to protect officials overseas. But more than a dozen current and former government officials, most of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity, described in interviews some of those measures. They range from instructing officials travelling overseas to assume every utterance and move is under surveillance and requiring them to scrub their cellphones for listening devices after they have visited government offices, to equipping the president's limousine, which always travels with him, to keep private conversations private. Obama carries a specially encrypted BlackBerry; one member of his Cabinet was told he could not bring his iPad on an overseas trip because it was not considered a secure device.

Countermeasures are taken on US soil as well. When Cabinet secretaries and top national security officials take up their new jobs, the government retrofits their homes with special secure rooms for top-secret conversations and computer use. Following a several-hundred-page classified manual, the rooms are lined with foil and soundproofed. An interior location, preferably with no windows, is recommended. One of the most recent recipients: James B. Comey, the new director of the FBI, whose homes in the Washington area and New England were recently retrofitted. During the Cold War, a former senior official said, listening devices were found embedded in the walls and light fixtures of the hotels where US diplomats stayed. These days, the official said, US analysts worry more about eavesdropping radio signals beamed toward hotel rooms in the hopes of picking up officials' conversations. "We took it for granted that in some of these hotels, no matter the state, that devices were built in there," the official said. It is not exactly clear when US officials began using the tents while travelling. According to several former senior law enforcement and intelligence officials, George J. Tenet, the director of the CIA from 1997 to 2004, was one of the first officials to use one regularly. I felt like I was in the middle of the big woods, but I was in the middle of a hotel room.

"Clinton and the White House were using him as an emissary in the Middle East with Arafat and he was always over there and in Israel and needed to have something secure to read and talk," said a former senior intelligence official who worked directly with Tenet. "He started using it and just continued through the rest of his tenure." The official said the CIA was particularly insistent that Tenet use the tent in Israel because it has some of the most sophisticated spying software. "We would get especially concerned when our Israeli hosts wanted to reserve the hotel rooms for us at the King David," the official said, referring to one of the best-known hotels in Jerusalem. Woolsey said that when he travelled abroad as the nation's top intelligence official from 1993 to 1995, he had only encrypted phones. "We were so far ahead of the rest of the world at that point technologically," Woolsey said. "But by the time Tenet came along in the late '90s, they started to get worried about China and things were changing." Before the security tents are set up, hotel rooms are checked for bugs and radio waves. A former senior government official who read classified documents in the small tents said they were far less attractive than the sleek ones that sleep six and are sold at camping stores like American retailer REI. "I felt like I was in the middle of the big woods, but I was in the middle of a hotel room," said the former official.

Many of the measures taken for overseas travel are only for the most senior officials because they are costly and cumbersome. Instead of the tent, less senior officials can end up using smaller structures that look like telephone booths. But all officials travelling in this age of high surveillance are given one basic marching order: use common sense. "You follow procedures about what to do and what not to do," said William J. Lynn III, a former deputy defense secretary under Obama. "It wasn't like I had to make calls in the shower." Official US visitors to Russia and China are warned that they should never access or discuss sensitive or classified information outside the embassy. In recent years, many private companies have gone further, instituting policies that forbid employees to bring their cellphones to Russia and China. But even outside countries with longstanding histories of spying on Americans, diplomats say, they are resigned to the fact that no electronic message sent or received is ever really private anymore. "We do operate with the awareness that anything we do on a cellphone or BlackBerry is probably being read by someone somewhere, or lots of someones," said a senior US diplomat.

Even with rigorous security protocols drilled into their heads by their superiors - like rules barring some White House and National Security Council staff members from accessing social media on their computers and phones out of fear of downloading malware - officials say it is hard to police every utterance on a mobile device. "Given the press of events and the ubiquity of cellphones," said one former US diplomat with experience in the Middle East, "it is in practice very difficult to constantly self-edit conversations to ensure that you don't stray into classified information." New York Times