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[Photo: National Security Agency, Ft. Meade, MD via Wikimedia]

18 USC 793e in the Time of Shadow Brokers and Donald Trump

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Late last year, a Foreign Affairs article by former Principal Deputy Director of National Intelligence Sue Gordon and former DOD Chief of Staff Eric Rosenbach asserted that the files leaked in 2016 and 2017 by Shadow Brokers came from two NSA officers who brought the files home from work.

In two separate incidents, employees of an NSA unit that was then known as the Office of Tailored Access Operations—an outfit that conducts the agency’s most sensitive cybersurveillance operations—removed extremely powerful tools from top-secret NSA networks and, incredibly, took them home. Eventually, the Shadow Brokers—a mysterious hacking group with ties to Russian intelligence services—got their hands on some of the NSA tools and released them on the Internet. As one former TAO employee told The Washington Post, these were “the keys to the kingdom”—digital tools that would “undermine the security of a lot of major government and corporate networks both here and abroad.”

One such tool, known as “EternalBlue,” got into the wrong hands and has been used to unleash a scourge of ransomware attacks—in which hackers paralyze computer systems until their demands are met—that will plague the world for years to come. Two of the most destructive cyberattacks in history made use of tools that were based on EternalBlue: the so-called WannaCry attack, launched by North Korea in 2017, which caused major disruptions at the British National Health Service for at least a week, and the NotPetya attack, carried out that same year by Russian-backed operatives, which resulted in more than $10 billion in damage to the global economy and caused weeks of delays at the world’s largest shipping company, Maersk. [my emphasis]

That statement certainly doesn’t amount to official confirmation that that’s where the files came from (and I’ve been told that the scope of the files released by Shadow Brokers would have required at least one more source). But the piece is as close as anyone with direct knowledge of the matter — as Gordon would have had from the aftermath — has come to confirming on the record what several strands of reporting had laid out in 2016 and 2017: that the NSA files that were leaked and then redeployed in two devastating global cyberattacks came from two guys who brought highly classified files home from the NSA.

The two men in question, Nghia Pho and Hal Martin, were prosecuted under 18 USC 793e, likely the same part of the Espionage Act under which the former President is being investigated. Pho (who was prosecuted by Thomas Windom, one of the prosecutors currently leading the fake elector investigation) pled guilty in 2017 and was sentenced to 66 months in prison; he is processing through re-entry for release next month. Martin pled guilty in 2019 and was sentenced to 108 months in prison.

The government never formally claimed that either man caused hostile powers to obtain these files, much less voluntarily gave them to foreign actors. Yet it used 793e to hold them accountable for the damage their negligence caused.

There has never been any explanation of how the files from Martin would have gotten to the still unidentified entity that released them.

But there is part of an explanation how files from Pho got stolen. WSJ reported in 2017 that the Kaspersky Anti-Virus software Pho was running on his home computer led the Russian security firm to discover that Pho had the NSA’s hacking tools on the machine. Somehow (the implication is that Kaspersky alerted the Russian government) that discovery led Russian hackers to subsequently target Pho’s computer and steal the files. In response to the WSJ report, Kaspersky issued their own report (here’s a summary from Kim Zetter). It acknowledged that Kaspersky AV had pulled in NSA tools after triggering on a known indicator of NSA compromise (the report claimed, and you can choose to believe that or not, that Kaspersky had deleted the most interesting parts of the files obtained). But it also revealed that in that same period, Pho had briefly disabled his Kaspersky AV and downloaded a pirated copy of Microsoft Office, which led to at least one backdoor being loaded onto his computer via which hostile actors would have been able to steal the NSA’s crown jewels.

Whichever version of the story you believe, both confirm that Kaspersky AV provided a way to identify a computer storing known NSA hacking tools, which then led Pho — someone of sufficient seniority to be profiled by foreign intelligence services — to be targeted for compromise. Pho didn’t have to give the files he brought home from work to Russia and other malicious foreign entities. Merely by loading them onto his inadequately protected computer and doing a couple of other irresponsible things, he made the files available to be stolen and then used in one of the most devastating information operations in history. Pho’s own inconsistent motives didn’t matter; what mattered was that actions he took made it easy for malicious actors to pull off the kind of spying coup that normally takes recruiting a high-placed spy like Robert Hanssen or Aldrich Ames.

In the aftermath of the Shadow Brokers investigation, the government’s counterintelligence investigators may have begun to place more weight on the gravity of merely bringing home sensitive files, independent of any decision to share them with journalists or spies.

Consider the case of Terry Albury, the FBI Agent who shared a number of files on the FBI’s targeting of Muslims with The Intercept. As part of a plea agreement, the government charged Albury with two counts of 793e, one for a document about FBI informants that was ultimately published by The Intercept, and another (about an online terrorist recruiting platform) that Albury merely brought home. The government’s sentencing memo described the import of files he brought home but did not share with The Intercept this way:

The charged retention document relates to the online recruitment efforts of a terrorist organization. The defense asserts that Albury photographed materials “to the extent they impacted domestic counter-terrorism policy.” (Defense Pos. at 37). This, however, ignores the fact that he also took documents relating to global counterintelligence threats and force protection, as well as many documents that implicated particularly sensitive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act collection. The retention of these materials is particularly egregious because Albury’s pattern of behavior indicates that had the FBI not disrupted Albury and the threat he posed to our country’s safety and national security, his actions would have placed those materials in the public domain for consumption by anyone, foreign or domestic.

And in a declaration accompanying Albury’s sentencing, Bill Priestap raised the concern that by loading some of the files onto an Internet-accessible computer, Albury could have made them available to entities he had no intention of sharing them with.

The defendant had placed certain of these materials on a personal computing device that connects to the Internet, which creates additional concerns that the information has been or will be transmitted or acquired by individuals or groups not entitled to receive it.

This is the scenario that, one year earlier, was publicly offered as an explanation for the theft of the files behind The Shadow Brokers; someone brought sensitive files home and, without intending to, made them potentially available to foreign hackers or spies.

Albury was sentenced to four years in prison for bringing home 58 documents, of which 35 were classified Secret, and sending 25 documents, of which 16 were classified Secret, to the Intercept.

Then there’s the case of Daniel Hale, another Intercept source. Two years after the Shadow Brokers leaks (and five years after his leaks), he was charged with five counts of taking and sharing classified documents, including two counts of 793e tied to 11 documents he took and shared with the Intercept. Three of the documents published by The Intercept were classified Top Secret.

Hale pled guilty last year, just short of trial. As part of his sentencing process, the government argued that the baseline for his punishment should start from the punishments meted to those convicted solely of retaining National Defense Information. It tied Hale’s case to those of Martin and Pho explicitly.

Missing from Hale’s analysis are § 793 cases in which defendants received a Guidelines sentence for merely retaining national defense information. See, e.g., United States v. Ford, 288 F. App’x 54, 61 (4th Cir. 2008) (affirming 72-month sentence for retention of materials classified as Top Secret); United States v. Martin, 1:17-cr-69-RDB) (D. Md. 2019) (nine-year sentence for unlawful retention of Top Secret information); United States v. Pho, 1:17-cr-00631 (D. Md. 2018) (66-month sentence for unlawful retention of materials classified as Top Secret). See also United States v. Marshall, 3:17-cr-1 (S.D. TX 2018) (41-month sentence for unlawful retention of materials classified at the Secret level); United States v. Mehalba, 03-cr-10343-DPW (D. Ma. 2005) (20-month sentence in connection with plea for unlawful retention – not transmission – in violation of 793(e) and two counts of violating 18 U.S.C. 1001; court departed downward due to mental health of defendant).

Hale is more culpable than these defendants because he did not simply retain the classified documents, but he provided them to the Reporter knowing and intending that the documents would be published and made available to the world. The potential harm associated with Hale’s conduct is far more serious than mere retention, and therefore calls for a more significant sentence. [my emphasis]

Even in spite of a moving explanation for his actions, Hale was sentenced to 44 months in prison. Hale still has almost two years left on his sentence in Marion prison.

That focus on other retention cases from the Hale filing was among the most prominent national references to yet another case of someone prosecuted during the Trump Administration for taking classified files home from work, that of Weldon Marshall. Over the course of years of service in the Navy and then as a contractor in Afghanistan, Marshall shipped hard drives of classified materials home.

From the early 2000s, Marshall unlawfully retained classified items he obtained while serving in the U.S. Navy and while working for a military contractor. Marshall served in the U.S. Navy from approximately January 1999 to January 2004, during which time he had access to highly sensitive classified material, including documents describing U.S. nuclear command, control and communications. Those classified documents, including other highly sensitive documents classified at the Secret level, were downloaded onto a compact disc labeled “My Secret TACAMO Stuff.” He later unlawfully stored the compact disc in a house he owned in Liverpool, Texas. After he left the Navy, until his arrest in January 2017, Marshall worked for various companies that had contracts with the U.S. Department of Defense. While employed with these companies, Marshall provided information technology services on military bases in Afghanistan where he also had access to classified material. During his employment overseas, and particularly while he was located in Afghanistan, Marshall shipped hard drives to his Liverpool home. The hard drives contained documents and writings classified at the Secret level about flight and ground operations in Afghanistan. Marshall has held a Top Secret security clearance since approximately 2003 and a Secret security clearance since approximately 2002.

He appears to have been discovered when he took five Cisco switches home. After entering into a cooperation agreement and pleading guilty to one count of 793e, Marshall was (as noted above) sentenced to 41 months in prison. Marshall was released last year.

Outside DOJ, pundits have suggested that Trump’s actions are comparable to those of Sandy Berger, who like Trump stole files that belong to the National Archives and after some years pled guilty to a crime that Trump since made into a felony, or David Petraeus, who like Trump took home and stored highly classified materials in unsecured locations in his home. Such comparisons reflect the kind of elitist bias that fosters a system in which high profile people believe they are above the laws that get enforced for less powerful people.

But the cases I’ve laid out above — particularly the lesson Pho and Martin offer about how catastrophic it can be when someone brings classified files home and stores them insecurely, no matter their motives — are the background against which career espionage prosecutors at DOJ will be looking at Trump’s actions.

And while Trump allegedly brought home paper documents, rather than the digital files that Russian hackers could steal while sitting in Moscow, that doesn’t make his actions any less negligent. Since he was elected President, Mar-a-Lago became a ripe spying target, resulting in at least one prosecution. And two of the people he is most likely to have granted access to those files, John Solomon and Kash Patel, each pose known security concerns. Trump has done the analog equivalent of what Pho did: bring the crown jewels to a location already targeted by foreign intelligence services and store them in a way that can be easily back-doored. Like Pho, it doesn’t matter what Trump’s motivation for doing so was. Having done it, he made it ridiculously easy for malicious actors to simply come and take the files.

Under Attorneys General Jeff Sessions and Bill Barr, DOJ put renewed focus on prosecuting people who simply bring home large caches of sensitive documents. They did so in the wake of a costly lesson showing that the compromise of insecurely stored files can do as much damage as a high level recruited spy.

It’s a matter of equal justice that Trump be treated with the same gravity with which Martin and Pho and Albury and Hale and Marshall were treated under the Trump Administration, for doing precisely what Donald Trump is alleged to have done (albeit with far fewer and far less sensitive documents). But as the example of Shadow Brokers offers, it’s also a matter of urgent national security.

The Intercept’s Silence about Edward Snowden’s Inclusion in Julian Assange’s Charges

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Back in October, I beat up The Intercept’s Micah Lee for writing a post that purported to cover the “crumbling” hacking case against Julian Assange by working from an outdated indictment rather than the superseding one that added 50-some paragraphs to the overt acts alleged in the single count for conspiracy to hack. Micah made a half-assed and still factually inaccurate “correction” (without crediting me for pointing out the embarrassing error) that utterly misunderstands US conspiracy law, and claimed events since 2011 had tolled whereas the original password hacking attempt had not.

In the 2020 indictment, attempting to portray Assange as a hacker rather than a journalist, the government listed other instances of Assange allegedly directing hacking activity by people other than Manning — but did not add to the charges against him, prompting a discussion of whether the statute of limitations on the alleged new crimes had expired. Assange’s lawyers called the newest evidence “‘make weight’ allegations designed to bring all of this back within the limitation period.” It remains to be seen if the U.S. government will pursue this reaching strategy. At the moment it seems that these supplemental allegations are peripheral to the first, and only clearly chargeable, instance described by the government that could be conceived as a conspiracy to commit a computer crime — providing marginal support for a case which is, at its core, already weak.

In short, having been alerted to the superseding indictment, The Intercept’s resident expert on hacking utterly dodged the allegations made in that expanded charge, not so much as mentioning what they were.

At the time, I promised to return to Micah’s embarrassing piece after I finished some more pressing issues.

It turns out, the problem at The Intercept is broader than just Micah’s piece.

A recent post from Charles Glass suggests that if President Biden were to “remove the Espionage Act charges against Assange,” it would amount to the withdrawal of his extradition application entirely.

WHEN JOE BIDEN becomes president of the United States on January 20, a historic opportunity awaits him to demonstrate America’s commitment to the First Amendment. He can, in a stroke, reverse four years of White House persecution of journalism by withdrawing the application to extradite Julian Assange from Britain to the U.S.

[snip]

By removing the 1917 Espionage Act charges against Assange, Biden would be adhering to the precedent established by the administration in which he served for eight years as vice president. President Barack Obama’s Department of Justice investigated Assange and WikiLeaks for three years until 2013 before deciding, in the words of University of Maryland journalism professor Mark Feldstein, “to follow established precedent and not bring charges against Assange or any of the newspapers that published the documents.” Equal application of the law would have required the DOJ to prosecute media outlets, including the New York Times, that had as large a hand in publicizing war crimes as did Assange himself. If prosecutors put all the editors, publishers, and scholars who disseminated WikiLeaks materials in the dock, there would not be a courtroom anywhere in America big enough to hold the trial. Obama decided against it, knowing it would represent an unprecedented assault on freedoms Americans hold dear.

Glass went on to repeat the grossly erroneous claims about the history of Assange’s prosecution made at the extradition hearing by journalism history professor Mark Feldstein, who literally submitted a filing to the hearing admitting he wasn’t familiar with what the public record actually says about it.

That Glass ignored the hacking charge against Assange is remarkable given that, along with the erroneous piece from Micah, an earlier post from him is one of the few that addressed the (now superseded) CFAA count.

In addition, The Intercept did a Deconstructed show on the hearing in October. It, too, adopted the erroneous fairy tale about why the Trump Administration charged Assange when the Obama Administration did not. And while it introduced the allegation that Assange is a hacker, it then reverted to the so-called New York Times test, suggesting that if the publishing activities of Assange cannot be distinguished from the NYT’s, then it means Assange cannot and should not be prosecuted.

RG: Supporters of the prosecution of Assange make a number of arguments: That Assange is not a “real” journalist. He’s a hacker. He’s a traitor. He recklessly endangered lives and so he deserves no protection as a journalist. All of this is wrong.

The First Amendment isn’t worth the parchment it’s written on if it’s not respected, and defended, in the broader culture of the United States. People have to support it. Once that support erodes, it tends not to come back. That’s why authoritarians, when they want to curtail a particular freedom, usually find the most unsympathetic target they can, hoping nobody will come to his defense. Then once a new precedent is established, all bets are off. With Assange, Trump and Barr think they’ve found just such a man. It’s up to us not to take the bait.

[snip]

Kevin Gosztola: I think the key thing about Trevor Tim[m]’s testimony is destigmatizing the work of WikiLeaks, or even demystifying it. Because what you have through the U.S. government’s targeting of Wikileaks over the past decade is a concerted effort to make it seem like what WikiLeaks does is not journalism. And so the counter to that through the defense’s case is to make it abundantly clear that this is not reasonable; that in fact, everything that WikiLeaks does, from when it accepts the documents, when it tries to authenticate them, to when it makes media partnerships, to also make sure that names are redacted, to make sure that sensitive details are understood fully before the documents are published. And I think you see that this is the way to keep investigative journalism robust in the 21st century.

RG: I thought Trevor’s point was interesting that The New York Times does not get a press badge from the U.S. government. You know, it isn’t, and it shouldn’t be, up to the U.S. government to decide who is and who is not a journalist.

And the idea of who is or is not a responsible journalist is different from what is illegal or legal conduct, which I also thought was important because the prosecution wants to say: Well, he’s an irresponsible person, so therefore, he doesn’t have these protections. And the counter is no, it’s not up to the government to say what’s responsible or irresponsible journalism. You know, the government creates laws, and if the laws are violated, then you can start your prosecution. But if not, you can’t. And it’s never been against the law to publish classified information. It’s against the law to leak it, if you have access to it. But it’s not against the law to publish it.

As I have said over and over, I agree that the Espionage Act charges against Assange, as charged, pose a real threat to journalism (though so do the Trump DOJ’s other prosecutions of Espionage as a conspiracy, including the Henry Kyle Frese case where DOJ used a Title III wiretap to obtain evidence, and the Natalie Sours Edwards case where the Treasury Department attempted to achieve prior restraint on Jason Leopold, prosecutions that have gotten far less attention).

But I also think the sheer amount of shitty propaganda and outright lies people are telling in service of Julian Assange do their own damage to journalism. It is possible to discuss the risk that Assange’s prosecution on the Espionage charges poses without ignoring large swaths of the public record or even, as The Intercept has done in these three pieces and much of their earlier coverage, the actual charges.

The Intercept’s silence on the superseding indictment is all the more notable because of the way its founding act plays a part.

As I laid out here and here, the superseding charge incorporates a number of other overt acts in the CFAA conspiracy, going through 2015 (and seemingly setting up another superseding indictment that covers publications from 2015 through 2017). The new overt acts include a number of things that absolutely distinguish Assange and WikiLeaks from journalists and publishers. Of particular note, they allege that Julian Assange:

  • Entered into an agreement with individuals involved in Gnosis and Lulzsec before those individuals carried out the hack of Stratfor and remained in the agreement during and after the hack. This is a case where five of the people Assange allegedly entered into a conspiracy with have already pled guilty, in both the UK and US (as well as Ireland), making the primary proof required at trial that Assange did enter into agreement with the other co-conspirators, not that the hack occurred.
  • Directed Siggi to hack a WikiLeaks dissident to destroy incriminating evidence implicating Assange. While I’m less certain whether Siggi took steps to advance this conspiracy (and Siggi has credibility problems as a witness), I know of multiple different allegations that dissidents, sources, and competing outlets were similarly targeted for surveillance, with one WikiLeaks dissident claiming to have been hacked and threatened after a political split with the group.
  • Helped Edward Snowden flee, both by sending Sarah Harrison to facilitate his flight and creating distractions, and then using WikiLeaks’ assistance as a means to recruit further hackers and leakers.

The last one seems particularly irresponsible for The Intercept to suppress as they have, particularly given four other details:

  • Snowden’s description of setting up Tor bridges for Iranians with other Tor volunteers in the extended Arab Spring, making it highly likely he had a relationship with Jake Appelbaum before he took his NSA job in Hawaii.
  • Bart Gellman’s description of how Snowden worked to “optimize” his own outcome to encourage others to leak, mirroring Harrison’s stated motive for helping him flee.
  • The government’s suggestion that Daniel Everette Hale — Jeremy Scahill’s alleged source for his drone reporting — was inspired to leak by Snowden.
  • Snowden’s own (recent) treatment of three Intercept sources — along with Hale, Reality Winner and Terry Albury — as a group meriting a Trump pardon, something that will likely make Hale’s defense at trial next year more difficult.

The government’s theory about Snowden as a recruitment tool is really problematic (though I suspect the government plans to make it a lot more specific after inauguration, even before Hale’s trial next year). But it is also the case that publishers don’t usually help their sources flee as a way to ensure they’ll recruit future leakers and hackers (indeed, in his book, Gellman talked at length about how careful he was to avoid crossing that line when Snowden tried to trick him into it).

One can argue that WikiLeaks was heroic for doing so. One can argue that the US empire has what’s coming to it and so WikiLeaks was right to help Snowden flee. But one can’t argue that the overt acts alleged in the CFAA count of the superseding indictment are things that journalists routinely do. And, if proven, that gets the government well beyond the New York Times test.

Importantly, if you’re engaging in a debate about Assange’s fate but ignoring credible allegations that Assange did a bunch of things that journalists do not do, you should not, at the same time, claim you’re serving journalism. You’re serving propaganda (particularly if you’re also telling a fairy tale about what changed in 2016 and 2017).

All the more so if you’re The Intercept. The government has alleged that one thing that distinguishes Julian Assange from journalists — and they’re right — is that he sent someone halfway around the world to save the guy who created the opportunity to create The Intercept in the first place. Unless Assange is pardoned before Trump leaves (and maybe even then, since many of the acts Assange is charged with are more obviously illegal in the UK), this allegation is going to remain out there.

The founding possibility for The Intercept has now been included as an overt act in a hacking indictment. One way or another, it seems The Intercept needs to address that.

Snowden

Snowden Lies about Outreach about a Pardon and Puts a Target on Daniel Everette Hale’s Back

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I’m going to make three observations about this Edward Snowden interview, to mark it.

The interview was filmed live, Friday night US time, September 11, as the other clip indicates.

In it, Snowden repeatedly and categorically denied any outreach to the US government for a pardon.

Williams: Have you had any contact with the Administration. Did you initiate any? Have they initiated any? Have you sought a pardon from the United States?

Snowden: I have not. And this is something people have actually forgotten. There was a pardon campaign back during the Obama Administration. But I at no point actually asked for pardon myself. It was tremendously gratifying to have this level of support. But as I said, my condition for return is simply a fair trial. Now we didn’t see the Obama Administration talking about a pardon in this way and I think Trump has commented again since then that he thought treatment was very unfair, or could be. And there’s been a lot of speculation that’s come from this. But there’s been no contact. I was as surprised as anyone else to see this. But it’s very interesting to see this President thinking pardoning what a lot of people would consider [laughs] one of the big names in this new war on whistleblowers. And that’s something that we should all support seeing come to an end.

Williams: So no representative for you has done any outreach. No representative for you or you yourself has heard anything from the White House, the Administration, any government types?

Snowden: No. By hook or by crook, there’s been nothing. No contact, anything like that. I think [laughs] if that were happening, it would be certainly news that we would hear through other channels.

Williams: Let’s use plain English. The price for pardons appears to be lavish praise for this President after the fact. Is that something you’re willing to do?

Snowden: Certainly not. I don’t think a pardon is — or should be — conditioned on anything. When you look at the pardon power, it’s constitutionally derived. It’s Article II Section 2. A pardon is not a contract. A pardon is not something that you accept or reject. And it certainly shouldn’t be used as a political tool. And this is why, while I haven’t asked for pardon from the President, I will ask for A Pardon for others. When I mentioned the war on whistleblowers, this is an ongoing and continuing thing. The reason pardon is even being considered, even being debated, the fact that comments from the Attorney General are even hitting the news are because everyone who has followed these cases know, being charged under the Espionage Act as a whistleblower means no fair trial is permitted. And there are people in the United States today, serving time in prison for doing the right thing. And this is why we should see Donald Trump — or any President — end the war on whistleblowers. He should pardon Reality Winner for trying to expose election interference. He should pardon Daniel Hale for revealing abuses in the drone program. Or Terry Albury for trying to expose systemic racism within the FBI. And these are all people who are deserving of pardon. But this, when we look at pardon, pardon is intended to ameliorate unfairness, to fix fundamental flaws in our system of laws or the way they’re being applied. And there’s nowhere this is more clear right now than in the prosecution of whistleblowers under the Espionage Act.

It is, of course, a blatant lie that there has been no outreach.

Just hours earlier (I think about three?), Glenn Greenwald went onto Tucker Carlson’s show — a show that has repeatedly served as a platform for people to pitch pardons — and argued that Trump should pardon Snowden and Julian Assange. Though Glenn had promised he would be talking about journalism, he instead pitched the pardon as a good way for Trump to stick it to the Deep State. Glenn’s pitch was not only premeditated (it had been rescheduled days earlier), but it was delivered to fit Tucker’s 3 minute time slot.

So Glenn lied about defending journalism (rather than just damaging the Deep State), and Snowden lied about there being no outreach. Snowden also, in the other clip, lied about Putin taking no interest in him.

There was one truth told. When Snowden said, “if that [outreach about a pardon] were happening, it would be certainly news that we would hear through other channels,” he was effectively telling the truth. This was news on another channel: Glenn Greenwald, appearing on Fox News, just hours earlier, pitched Trump on a pardon.

Snowden, in turn, suggested that Trump was thinking of ending the “war on whistleblowers” and — at a time when Trump is ending the careers of people who make legal whistleblowing claims upholding democracy, with glee — claimed that there is no place where unfairness is more clear than the prosecution of whistleblowers under the Espionage Act.

I’ll spot Snowden that one for his own self-interest.

Then Snowden calls for a pardon for three others he suggests are serving time in prison. Reality Winner and Terry Albury are serving time. But Daniel Hale is not. He’s out on bail awaiting trial. In other words, Snowden is actually just calling to pardon everyone who leaked to The Intercept.

In fact, unless Trump decides to pardon Hale, who doesn’t have anyone lobbying him on Tucker Carlson’s show, Snowden just made Hale’s life worse.

That’s because the government believes that Hale was “inspired” by Snowden.

Moreover, as argued in more detail in Defendant’s Reply in support of his Motion to Dismiss for Selective or Vindictive Prosecution (filed provisionally as classified), it appears that arbitrary enforcement – one of the risks of a vague criminal prohibition – is exactly what occurred here. Specifically, the FBI repeatedly characterized its investigation in this case as an attempt to identify leakers who had been “inspired” by a specific individual – one whose activity was designed to criticize the government by shedding light on perceived illegalities on the part of the Intelligence Community. In approximately the same timeframe, other leakers reportedly divulged classified information to make the government look good – by, for example, unlawfully divulging classified information about the search for Osama Bin Laden to the makers of the film Zero Dark Thirty, resulting in two separate Inspector General investigations.3 Yet the investigation in this case was not described as a search for leakers generally, or as a search for leakers who tried to glorify the work of the Intelligence Community. Rather, it was described as a search for those who disclosed classified information because they had been “inspired” to divulge improprieties in the intelligence community.

That is, Snowden — who with WikiLeaks’ Sarah Harrison made sure to avoid capture so he could be an inspiration to others to follow — effectively just confirmed what the government has only alleged, and in secret, that there is a tie between him and Hale. In so doing, he has also confirmed an allegation in the superseding Assange indictment.

Between them, Snowden and Glenn are feigning that Trump would pardon anyone out of any concern for journalism or whistleblowing. Both claims are utterly absurd.

And in so doing, they’re going to make sure that any pardon Snowden gets is not because Trump cares about journalism or even wants to rein in spying (he has done the opposite, on both counts), but is done exclusively in the name of damaging the Deep State.

The Government Argues that Edward Snowden Is a Recruiting Tool

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As I noted in my post on the superseding indictment against Julian Assange, the government stretched the timeline of the Conspiracy to Hack count to 2015 by describing how WikiLeaks helped Edward Snowden flee to Russia. DOJ seems to be conceiving of WikiLeaks’ role in helping Snowden as part of a continuing conspiracy designed to recruit more leakers.

Let me make clear from the onset: I am not endorsing this view, I am observing where I believe DOJ not only intends to head with this, but has already headed with it.

Using Snowden as a recruitment tool

After laying out how Chelsea Manning obtained and leaked files that were listed in the WikiLeaks Most Wanted list (the Iraq Rules of Engagement and Gitmo files, explicitly, and large databases more generally; here’s one version of the list as entered into evidence at Manning’s trial), then describing Assange’s links to LulzSec, the superseding Assange indictment lays out WikiLeaks’ overt post-leak ties and claimed ties to Edward Snowden.

83. In June 2013, media outlets reported that Edward J. Snowden had leaked numerous documents taken from the NSA and was located in Hong Kong. Later that month, an arrest warrant was issued in the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia, for the arrest of Snowden, on charges involving the theft of information from the United States government.

84. To encourage leakers and hackers to provide stolen materials to WikiLeaks in the future, ASSANGE and others at WikiLeaks openly displayed their attempts to assist Snowden in evading arrest.

85. In June 2013, a WikiLeaks association [Sarah Harrison, described as WLA-4 in the indictment] traveled with Snowden from Hong Kong to Moscow.

86. On December 31, 2013, at the annual conference of the Chaos Computer Club (“CCC”) in Germany, ASSANGE, [Jacob Appelbaum] and [Harrison] gave a presentation titled “Sysadmins of the World, Unite! A Call to Resistance.” On its website, the CCC promoted the presentation by writing, “[t]here has never been a higher demand for a politically-engaged hackerdom” and that ASSANGE and [Appelbaum] would “discuss what needs to be done if we re going to win.” ASSANGE told the audience that “the famous leaks that WikiLeaks has done or the recent Edward Snowden revelations” showed that “it was possible now for even a single system administrator to … not merely wreck[] or disabl[e] [organizations] … but rather shift[] information from an information apartheid system … into the knowledge commons.” ASSANGE exhorted the audience to join the CIA in order to steal and provide information to WikiLeaks, stating, “I’m not saying doing join the CIA; no, go and join the CIA. Go in there, go into the ballpark and get the ball and bring it out.”

87. At the same presentation, in responding to the audience’s question as to what they could do, [Appelbaum] said “Edward Snowden did not save himself. … Specifically for source protection [Harrison] took actions to protect [Snowden] … [i]f we can succeed in saving Edward Snowden’s life and to keep him free, then the next Edward Snowden will have that to look forward to. And if look also to what has happened to Chelsea Manning, we see additionally that Snowden has clearly learned….”

The following section describes how, “ASSANGE and WikiLeaks Continue to Recruit,” including two more paragraphs about the Most Wanted Leaks:

89. On May 15, 2015, WikiLeaks tweeted a request for nominations for the 2015 “Most Wanted Leaks” list, and as an example, linked to one of the posts of a “Most Wanted Leaks” list from 2009 that remained on WikiLeaks’s website.

[snip]

92. In June 2015, to continue to encourage individuals to hack into computers and/or illegaly obtain and disclose classified information to WikiLeaks, WikiLeaks maintained on its website a list of “The Most Wanted Leaks of 2009,” which stated that documents or materials nominated to the list must “[b]e likely to have political, diplomatic, ethical or historical impact on release … and be plausibly obtainable to a well-motivated insider or outsider,” and must be “described in enough detail so that … a visiting outsider not already familiar with the material or its subject matter may be able to quickly locate it, and will be motivated to do so.”

Effectively, Snowden is included in this indictment not because the government is alleging any ties between Snowden and WikiLeaks in advance of his leaks (Snowden’s own book lays out reasons to think there was more contact between him and Appelbaum than is publicly known, but the superseding Assange indictment makes no mention of any contacts before Snowden’s first publications), but because WikiLeaks used their success at helping Snowden to flee as a recruiting pitch.

Snowden admits Harrison got involved to optimize his fate

This is something that Snowden lays out in his book. First, he addresses insinuations that Assange only helped Snowden out of selfish reasons.

People have long ascribed selfish motives to Assange’s desire to give me aid, but I believe he was genuinely invested in one thing above all—helping me evade capture. That doing so involved tweaking the US government was just a bonus for him, an ancillary benefit, not the goal. It’s true that Assange can be self-interested and vain, moody, and even bullying—after a sharp disagreement just a month after our first, text-based conversation, I never communicated with him again—but he also sincerely conceives of himself as a fighter in a historic battle for the public’s right to know, a battle he will do anything to win. It’s for this reason that I regard it as too reductive to interpret his assistance as merely an instance of scheming or self-promotion. More important to him, I believe, was the opportunity to establish a counterexample to the case of the organization’s most famous source, US Army Private Chelsea Manning, whose thirty-five-year prison sentence was historically unprecedented and a monstrous deterrent to whistleblowers everywhere. Though I never was, and never would be, a source for Assange, my situation gave him a chance to right a wrong. There was nothing he could have done to save Manning, but he seemed, through Sarah, determined to do everything he could to save me.

This passage is written to suggest Snowden believed these things at the time, describing what “seemed” to be true at the time. But it’s impossible to separate it from Appelbaum’s explicit comparison of Manning and Snowden at CCC in December 2013.

Snowden then describes what he thinks Harrison’s motive was.

By her own account, she was motivated to support me out of loyalty to her conscience more than to the ideological demands of her employer. Certainly her politics seemed shaped less by Assange’s feral opposition to central power than by her own conviction that too much of what passed for contemporary journalism served government interests rather than challenged them.

Again, this is written to suggest Snowden believed it at the time, though it’s likely what he has come to believe since.

Then Snowden describes believing, at that time, that Harrison might ask for something in exchange for her help — some endorsement of WikiLeaks or something.

As we hurtled to the airport, as we checked in, as we cleared passport control for the first of what should have been three flights, I kept waiting for her to ask me for something—anything, even just for me to make a statement on Assange’s, or the organization’s, behalf. But she never did, although she did cheerfully share her opinion that I was a fool for trusting media conglomerates to fairly guard the gate between the public and the truth. For that instance of straight talk, and for many others, I’ll always admire Sarah’s honesty.

Finally, though, Snowden describes — once the plane entered into Chinese airspace and so narratively at a time when there was no escaping whatever fate WikiLeaks had helped him pursue — asking Harrison why she was helping. He describes that she provided a version of the story that WikiLeaks would offer that December in Germany: WikiLeaks needed to be able to provide a better outcome than the one that Manning suffered.

It was only once we’d entered Chinese airspace that I realized I wouldn’t be able to get any rest until I asked Sarah this question explicitly: “Why are you helping me?” She flattened out her voice, as if trying to tamp down her passions, and told me that she wanted me to have a better outcome. She never said better than what outcome or whose, and I could only take that answer as a sign of her discretion and respect.

Whatever has been filtered through time and (novelist-assisted) narrative, Snowden effectively says the same thing the superseding indictment does: Assange and Harrison went to great lengths to help Snowden get out of Hong Kong to make it easier to encourage others to leak or hack documents to share with WikiLeaks. I wouldn’t be surprised if these excerpts from Snowden’s book show up in any Assange trial, if it ever happens.

Snowden’s own attempt to optimize outcomes

Curiously, Snowden did not say anything in his book about his own efforts to optimize his outcome, which is probably the most interesting new information in Bart Gellman’s new book, Dark Mirror (the book is a useful summary of some of the most important Snowden disclosures and a chilling description of how aggressively he and Askhan Soltani were targeted by foreign governments as they were reporting the stories). WaPo included the incident in an excerpt, though the excerpt below is from the book.

Early on in the process, Snowden had asked Gellman to publish the first PRISM document with a key, without specifying what key it was. When WaPo’s editors asked why Gellman’s source wanted them to publish a key, Gellman finally asked.

After meeting with the Post editors, I remembered that I could do an elementary check of the signature on my own. The result was disappointing. I was slow to grasp what it implied.

gpg –verify PRISM.pptx.sig PRISM.pptx

gpg: Signature made Mon May 20 14:31:57 2013 EDT

using RSA key ID ⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛

gpg: Good signature from “Verax”

Now I knew that Snowden, using his Verax alter ego, had signed the PowerPoint file himself. If I published the signature, all it would prove to a tech-savvy few was that a pseudonymous source had vouched for his own leak. What good would that do anyone?

In the Saturday night email, Snowden spelled it out. He had chosen to risk his freedom, he wrote, but he was not resigned to life in prison or worse. He preferred to set an example for “an entire class of potential whistleblowers” who might follow his lead. Ordinary citizens would not take impossible risks. They had to have some hope for a happy ending.

To effect this, I intend to apply for asylum (preferably somewhere with strong Internet and press freedoms, e.g. Iceland, though the strength of the reaction will determine how choosy I can be). Given how tightly the U.S. surveils diplomatic outposts (I should know, I used to work in our U.N. spying shop), I cannot risk this until you have already gone to press, as it would immediately tip our hand. It would also be futile without proof of my claims—they’d have me committed—and I have no desire to provide raw source material to a foreign government. Post publication, the source document and cryptographic signature will allow me to immediately substantiate both the truth of my claim and the danger I am in without having to give anything up. . . . Give me the bottom line: when do you expect to go to print?

Alarm gave way to vertigo. I forced myself to reread the passage slowly. Snowden planned to seek the protection of a foreign government. He would canvass diplomatic posts on an island under Chinese sovereign control. He might not have very good choices. The signature’s purpose, its only purpose, was to help him through the gates.

How could I have missed this? Poitras and I did not need the signature to know who sent us the PRISM file. Snowden wanted to prove his role in the story to someone else. That thought had never occurred to me. Confidential sources, in my experience, did not implicate themselves—irrevocably, mathematically—in a classified leak. As soon as Snowden laid it out, the strategic logic was obvious. If we did as he asked, Snowden could demonstrate that our copy of the NSA document came from him. His plea for asylum would assert a “well-founded fear of being persecuted” for an act of political dissent. The U.S. government would maintain that Snowden’s actions were criminal, not political. Under international law each nation could make that judgment for itself. The fulcrum of Snowden’s entire plan was the signature file, a few hundred characters of cryptographic text, about the length of this paragraph. And I was the one he expected to place it online for his use.

Gellman, Poitras, and the Post recognized this would make them complicit in Snowden’s flight and go beyond any journalistic role.

After some advice from WaPo’s lawyers, Gellman made it clear to Snowden he could not publish the key (and would not have, in any case, because the slide deck included information on legitimate targets he and the WaPo had no intent of publishing).

We hated the replies we sent to Snowden on May 26. We had lawyered up and it showed. “You were clear with me and I want to be equally clear with you,” I wrote. “There are a number of unwarranted assumptions in your email. My intentions and objectives are purely journalistic, and I will not tie them or time them to any other goal.” I was working hard and intended to publish, but “I cannot give you the bottom line you want.”

This led Snowden to withdraw his offer of exclusivity which — as Gellman tells the story — is what led Snowden to renew his efforts to work with Glenn Greenwald. The aftermath of that decision led to a very interesting spat between Gellman and Greenwald — to read that, you should buy the book.

To be clear, I don’t blame Snowden for planning his first releases in such a way as to optimize the chances he wouldn’t spend the rest of his life in prison. But his silence on the topic in his own account, even while he adopted the WikiLeaks line about their goal of optimizing his outcome, raises questions about any link between Harrison’s plans and Snowden’s.

The government is using Snowden as inspiration in other cases

The superseding Assange indictment is the first place I know of where the government has specifically argued that WikiLeaks’ assistance to Snowden amounted to part of a criminal conspiracy (though it is totally unsurprising and I argued that it was clear the government was going there based on what they had argued in the Joshua Schulte case).

But it’s not the first place they have argued a tie between Snowden as inspiration and further leaks.

The indictment for Daniel Everette Hale, the guy accused of sharing documents on the drone program with Jeremy Scahill, makes it clear how Hale’s relationship with Scahill blossomed just as the Snowden leaks were coming out (and this detail makes it clear he’s the one referred to in Citizenfour as another source coming forward).

15. On or about June 9, 2013, the Reporter sent HALE an email with a link to an article about Edward Snowden in an online publication. That same day. Hale texted a friend that the previous night he had been hanging out with journalists who were focused on his story. Hale wrote that the evening’s events might provide him with “life long connections with people who publish work like this.”

Hale launched a fairly aggressive (and if it weren’t in EDVA, potentially an interesting) challenge to the Espionage Act charges against him. It included (but was not limited to) a Constitutional motion to dismiss as well as a motion to dismiss for selective prosecution. After his first motions, however, both the government’s response and Hale’s reply on selective prosecution were (and remain, nine months later) sealed.

But Hale’s reply on the Constitutional motion to dismiss was not sealed. In it, he makes reference to what remains sealed in the selective prosecution filings. That reference makes it clear that the government described searching for leakers who had been inspired “by a specific individual” who — given the mention of Snowden in Hale’s indictment — has to be Snowden.

Moreover, as argued in more detail in Defendant’s Reply in support of his Motion to Dismiss for Selective or Vindictive Prosecution (filed provisionally as classified), it appears that arbitrary enforcement – one of the risks of a vague criminal prohibition – is exactly what occurred here. Specifically, the FBI repeatedly characterized its investigation in this case as an attempt to identify leakers who had been “inspired” by a specific individual – one whose activity was designed to criticize the government by shedding light on perceived illegalities on the part of the Intelligence Community. In approximately the same timeframe, other leakers reportedly divulged classified information to make the government look good – by, for example, unlawfully divulging classified information about the search for Osama Bin Laden to the makers of the film Zero Dark Thirty, resulting in two separate Inspector General investigations.3 Yet the investigation in this case was not described as a search for leakers generally, or as a search for leakers who tried to glorify the work of the Intelligence Community. Rather, it was described as a search for those who disclosed classified information because they had been “inspired” to divulge improprieties in the intelligence community.

Hale argued, then, that the only reason he got prosecuted after some delay was because the FBI had a theory about Snowden’s role in inspiring further leaks.

Judge Liam O’Grady denied both those motions (and most of Hale’s other motions), though without further reference to Snowden as an inspiration. But I’m fairly sure this is not the only case where they’re making this argument.

On the Curious Timing of Daniel Everette Hale’s Arrest

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By all appearances, the FBI executed a search on the home of Daniel Everette Hale, an intelligence analyst the government has accused of being Jeremy Scahill’s source for his Drone Papers reporting, on August 8, 2014. In the search, they found a thumb drive with a PowerPoint on drone operations that he had printed off at work over five months earlier.

By that time, Hale had already printed out all 23 documents, unrelated to his work at Leidos, that are charged in his indictment. He also had an unclassified document he printed off at work on his home computer. He had a separate thumb drive with Tails on it, the operating system that the Intercept recommended users use to share files. Somewhere along the way, the government obtained Hale’s location data.

The August 2014 search was done a month after the Intercept published — in July 2014 — the first of the documents Hale printed out, and fourteen months before the Intercept first published that drone war PowerPoint, in October 2015. So the entire time the Intercept was publishing these documents, the government had solid evidence on who their suspected source was.

By the time FBI did that search, Hale had been in contact with Scahill — in largely unsecure form — for fifteen months. Even before Hale left the Air Force in July 2013, Hale had done a Google search on the NSA unclassified computer assigned to him for details on Scahill’s Dirty Wars book tour. He attended an event at Politics and Prose that month, and told a “confidant” he had met Scahill, who wanted to tell his story. Hale played a public role in some of Scahill’s events about the US war on terror. They emailed (including about Edward Snowden) through the summer and spoke at least once on the phone.

It wasn’t until September 2013 that Scahill and Hale switched to Jabber (but even there, the government has evidence of at least three of their Jabber chats before Hale started printing off files from work), perhaps because Hale at least once texted Scahill about getting on Jabber, apparently the day before he printed out a bunch of drone war documents.

All that suggests that, as soon as a month after the Intercept first published documents from Hale, the government had all the same evidence they’ve shown in this indictment substantiating the very strong case that Hale was Scahill’s source.

That was almost five years ago (the statute of limitations for the 793 Espionage Act crimes with which they’ve charged Hale is 10 years).

Just as curious, the government indicted Hale (in EDVA, based off work Maryland FBI Agents did) on March 7, apparently with a newly installed grand jury. The indictment has been sealed since then, waiting for Hale’s arrest in Nashville.

It is not at all surprising that the government indicted Hale. Even under the Obama Administration’s aggressive prosecutions of whistleblowing leakers, the case would be among the type they prosecuted (even though the drone documents he allegedly leaked exposed really damning details about a dysfunctional side of our war on terror, so the prosecution might have embarrassed Obama). The Trump Administration has gotten even more aggressive with journalists.

According to his criminal cover sheet, Hale is represented by Abbe Lowell who, along with being Jared Kushner’s lawyer, is also one of the best lawyers in the country on defending leak cases.