Ten years ago Edward Snowden revealed the massive spying programs of the US Secret Service, the NSA and its allies. The former intelligence agent fled to Russia. What did his revelations do?
There is occasional applause for Edward Snowden in the United States, for example at a conference on cryptocurrencies organized by the website CoinDesk in June 2022. Snowden was joined by video from Moscow. When asked what he did, Snowden said:
“Before 2013, there were experts, scientists who understood that this mass surveillance was possible, that it was likely to happen. But it was only a guess. In 2013, the world changed, and it became certain that it was true.”
A hero or a traitor?
In retrospect, is Snowden a hero or a traitor? The two terms go a long way, says Eric Dahl, a former intelligence officer and now a professor at the U.S. Naval Academy in Monterey, California:
“He certainly didn’t act that way, so to speak, to work with America’s enemies. It didn’t work for him to become a Russian citizen today,” says Dahl. “On the other hand, he broke the law and committed treason.”
According to Dahl, Snowden can only be a hero of sorts if he returns to America and faces the consequences of his actions here: “Then he will be a real hero in my eyes.”
What do the Secret Services care about?
Thomas Riet, a German political scientist who teaches at the prestigious Johns Hopkins University, analyzed and cataloged nearly 2,700 Snowden files. They correspond to about 4500 pages of documents. In Ritt’s view, America’s counterintelligence capabilities are particularly impressive.
The NSA has developed “sophisticated methods” to detect hostile services it has infiltrated into networks. If she entered a computer network, she first wanted to know who entered the network next to her. If you find someone, ask yourself if this intruder is being tapped too – “not only to learn something about his target, but also about what interests them most”.
Ritt considers the so-called Five Eyes, a network of secret services from the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and Great Britain, to be unique in global comparison: “This community, this ‘intelligence community’ in five countries, is very creative, for other services – Germany, but for opposing services like China. – I think it’s very difficult to be agile and innovative as Five Eyes exemplifies.”
What works between partners and what doesn’t?
The Snowden leaks also revealed that the NSA tapped Chancellor Angela Merkel’s cell phone. How reliable is the US as a partner from a German perspective?
It is true that allies sometimes spy on each other, says intelligence expert Ritt. On the other hand, one has to take into account that intelligence services also share their findings with each other and indicate processes worth further research. The federal government actually found out about the British through the 2015 Bundestag hack.
Ultimately, Ritt says, everyone who uses the Internet or services like WhatsApp or Signal will have benefited from the knowledge gained from the Snowden leaks, for example through newly developed encryption technologies: “Whether you think Snowden is a traitor or you think he’s wrong, these revelations have improved Internet security in general.” More to be recognized.”
The next leak – only time
Ritt insists that what 21-year-old US soldier Jack Teixeira recently released on the gaming platform is very different from Snowden. In the most recent case, it was not about technical files, but about texts, reports of intelligence services, for example about the details of the war against Ukraine – which Teixeira published online to show to friends of the same age.
But in the future, the Teixeira case means the next data leak is sure to come. The writ calculates that there have been five mega-spills in the US in the last 13 years – an average of every 2.6 years. Such a repeat is “rather embarrassing” for US intelligence. Ritt’s conclusion: “I’m sure this won’t be the last mega-leak.”
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