Plausible Denial
Dossiers

The Snowden Disclosures

2013-06-05

The June 2013 disclosures by NSA contractor Edward Snowden of the largest body of classified material on contemporary signals-intelligence operations in any single disclosure of the post-Cold War period.

Background

Edward Joseph Snowden was, in May 2013, a 29-year-old contractor at the National Security Agency facility in Hawaii, employed by Booz Allen Hamilton in a systems-administrator role at the NSA's Threat Operations Center. Snowden had previously held multiple positions in the US Intelligence Community, including with the Central Intelligence Agency in Geneva (2007–2009) and at the NSA's facility at Yokota Air Base in Japan (2009–2011). His successive technical roles had given him access to substantial volumes of classified NSA material across networks including NSANet, JWICS, and the NSA's intranet system.1

Snowden's stated motivations — articulated in successive published interviews from June 2013 onward and at greater length in his 2019 memoir Permanent Record — combined a sustained ethical concern over the scale of post-2001 US signals-intelligence collection authorities, particularly with respect to US persons and US-allied populations, with a substantive view that the institutional secrecy regime had concealed facts that the US public and Congress had a constitutional right to consider. Snowden had, in published accounts, attempted internal whistleblower channels in earlier periods; the December 2007 case of NSA whistleblower Thomas Drake — prosecuted under the Espionage Act on charges substantially reduced after extensive litigation — was, in Snowden's published accounts, a determinative reference for his decision to disclose externally.2

Across the period approximately late 2012 through May 2013, Snowden compiled a substantial body of classified material — the precise scope of which remains partially in dispute, with US Government estimates ranging from approximately 50,000 to 1.7 million documents. He made initial contact with the journalist Glenn Greenwald and the documentary filmmaker Laura Poitras through encrypted email in late 2012; the contact was successfully established with Poitras and progressively extended to Greenwald and Barton Gellman of the Washington Post across early 2013.3

The Disclosures

Snowden travelled from Hawaii to Hong Kong on 20 May 2013. He met Greenwald, Poitras, and Guardian defence correspondent Ewen MacAskill at the Hotel Mira in Hong Kong on 2 June 2013. The first published article — Greenwald's "NSA collecting phone records of millions of Verizon customers daily" — appeared in The Guardian on 5 June 2013, drawing on a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court order that required Verizon to provide on an ongoing daily basis comprehensive call-detail records to the NSA. The article confirmed for the first time the bulk-metadata collection of US-person telephony records under Section 215 of the USA PATRIOT Act.4

The substantive disclosures across the following months progressively documented an extensive set of NSA programmes and Five Eyes joint operations:

  • PRISM (disclosed 6 June 2013): Downstream collection of communications from major US technology providers — Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, Apple, and others — under Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act of 2008.5
  • Tempora (disclosed 21 June 2013): A joint UK GCHQ programme tapping fibre-optic cables landing in the United Kingdom, producing sustained collection of internet and telephone communications. Tempora was disclosed as having operated under the legal framework of the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000 — a framework subsequently superseded by the Investigatory Powers Act 2016.6
  • Boundless Informant (disclosed 8 June 2013): An NSA tool for visualising the volume of signals collected by location and target.
  • XKeyscore (disclosed 31 July 2013): An NSA system for the search and analysis of internet metadata and content collected at scale.7
  • BULLRUN / EDGEHILL (disclosed 5 September 2013): Joint NSA-GCHQ programmes to undermine commercial cryptographic systems through a combination of covert influence on standards bodies, partnerships with vendors, and direct cryptanalytic attack.8
  • Targeting of foreign leaders' communications (disclosed October 2013): Specific operations against the personal communications of Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany, President Dilma Rousseff of Brazil, and successive other foreign-government targets.9
  • Five Eyes operations: Specific operations of GCHQ (UK), CSE (Canada — including Operation OLYMPIA against the Brazilian Ministry of Mines and Energy), ASD (Australia — including the targeting of the Indonesian President), and GCSB (New Zealand).10

The disclosures continued at intervals across June 2013 through approximately 2016. The principal repository of disclosed material was eventually deposited at The Intercept, a publication established in 2014 specifically in part for the continued disclosure of Snowden documents under the editorial direction of Greenwald, Poitras, and Jeremy Scahill.11

Disclosure and the Subsequent Trajectory

Snowden's flight from Hong Kong on 23 June 2013 — initially intending to travel to Latin America via Moscow — ended with his being stranded at Sheremetyevo Airport in Moscow after the US Government revoked his passport. He remained in the airport's transit area for forty days before being granted Russian temporary asylum on 1 August 2013 and subsequently permanent Russian residency. He was granted Russian citizenship on 26 September 2022. The US Department of Justice has charged Snowden under the Espionage Act and the Theft of Government Property Act; the indictment remains active.12

The institutional response in successive Western jurisdictions has been substantial across the post-2013 period:

  • United States: The President's Review Group on Intelligence and Communications Technologies — the Clarke Group, December 2013 — produced 46 specific recommendations. The USA FREEDOM Act of June 2015 ended the bulk-metadata collection of US-person telephony records under Section 215 and made other modifications. The Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board's January 2014 Section 215 report and July 2014 Section 702 report produced public-record evaluations.13
  • United Kingdom: The Investigatory Powers Act 2016 substantially codified UK surveillance authorities. The European Court of Human Rights' Grand Chamber judgment in Big Brother Watch and Others v. United Kingdom (25 May 2021) held that the UK's pre-2016 bulk-interception regime had been incompatible with Articles 8 and 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights.14
  • Other Five Eyes jurisdictions: Successive Australian, Canadian, and New Zealand parliamentary reviews and statutory revisions.15
  • European response: The Court of Justice of the European Union's Schrems judgments — Schrems I (October 2015) and Schrems II (July 2020) — invalidated the EU-US data-sharing arrangements (Safe Harbour and the EU-US Privacy Shield) on grounds substantially related to the post-Snowden disclosures.16

Legacy

The Snowden disclosures have functioned, since 2013, as a load-bearing reference for substantively every contemporary debate over signals-intelligence authorities, mass surveillance, and the relationship between state security and individual privacy. The case has been substantially the subject of extensive academic, legal, and policy analysis; the body of subsequent literature — academic articles, legal briefs, court judgments, parliamentary reports, books — running to thousands of items.17

For the institutional history of the NSA specifically, the disclosures produced the most substantial public-record exposure of any modern Western signals-intelligence service. Successive NSA Directors — Alexander, Rogers, Nakasone, and successor — have addressed the consequences in published statements; the Agency's institutional culture and operational practice have been substantially reshaped.18

For the broader question of insider disclosure and the Espionage Act, the case has been the subject of substantial subsequent debate. Snowden's continued residence in Russia — and his Russian citizenship since 2022 — has been characterised by US officials as compromising the institutional case for treating him as a whistleblower acting in good faith; Snowden's defenders have characterised his position as the only realistic alternative under continuing US prosecution.19

This dossier relates principally to the National Security Agency (US), the Government Communications Headquarters (UK), the Communications Security Establishment (Canada), and the Australian Signals Directorate (Australia). The post-disclosure asylum trajectory relates to Russia. The country-level context is on the pages for the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, and Australia. See also the related dossier on Five Eyes / The UKUSA Agreement.

Sources & Further Reading

  1. Edward Snowden, Permanent Record (Metropolitan, 2019); Glenn Greenwald, No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the U.S. Surveillance State (Metropolitan, 2014).
  2. United States v. Thomas Drake, plea agreement, D. Md., June 2011; Snowden, Permanent Record, op. cit.
  3. Greenwald, No Place to Hide; Barton Gellman, Dark Mirror: Edward Snowden and the American Surveillance State (Penguin Press, 2020); Laura Poitras (director), Citizenfour (2014).
  4. Glenn Greenwald, "NSA collecting phone records of millions of Verizon customers daily," Guardian, 5 June 2013.
  5. Glenn Greenwald and Ewen MacAskill, "NSA Prism program taps in to user data of Apple, Google and others," Guardian, 6 June 2013; Barton Gellman and Laura Poitras, "U.S., British intelligence mining data from nine U.S. Internet companies in broad secret program," Washington Post, 6 June 2013.
  6. Ewen MacAskill et al., "GCHQ taps fibre-optic cables for secret access to world's communications," Guardian, 21 June 2013.
  7. Glenn Greenwald, "XKeyscore: NSA tool collects 'nearly everything a user does on the internet,'" Guardian, 31 July 2013.
  8. Nicole Perlroth, Jeff Larson, and Scott Shane, "N.S.A. Able to Foil Basic Safeguards of Privacy on Web," New York Times, 5 September 2013; James Ball, Julian Borger, and Glenn Greenwald, "Revealed: how US and UK spy agencies defeat internet privacy and security," Guardian, 5 September 2013.
  9. "Embassy Espionage: The NSA's Secret Spy Hub in Berlin," Der Spiegel, 27 October 2013; Glenn Greenwald and Roberto Kaz, "EUA espionaram milhões de e-mails e ligações de brasileiros," O Globo, 6 July 2013.
  10. Greg Weston, Glenn Greenwald, and Ryan Gallagher, "CSEC used airport Wi-Fi to track Canadian travellers," CBC, 30 January 2014; Ewen MacAskill et al., "Australia spied on Indonesian president, leaked Edward Snowden documents reveal," Guardian, 18 November 2013.
  11. The Intercept Snowden archive, established February 2014.
  12. United States v. Edward J. Snowden, indictment, E.D. Va., 14 June 2013; Russian Federation Presidential Decree on Russian citizenship, 26 September 2022.
  13. President's Review Group on Intelligence and Communications Technologies, Liberty and Security in a Changing World, 12 December 2013; USA FREEDOM Act, Pub. L. 114-23, 2 June 2015; PCLOB Section 215 report (23 January 2014) and PCLOB Section 702 report (2 July 2014).
  14. Investigatory Powers Act 2016, c. 25; Big Brother Watch and Others v. United Kingdom, ECtHR Grand Chamber judgment, 25 May 2021.
  15. Australian Intelligence Services Amendment Act 2018; Canadian Communications Security Establishment Act 2019; New Zealand Intelligence and Security Act 2017.
  16. <a href="https://curia.europa.eu/juris/document/document.jsf?docid=169195&doclang=EN">Schrems v. Data Protection Commissioner, CJEU Case C-362/14, 6 October 2015 (Schrems I); <a href="https://curia.europa.eu/juris/document/document.jsf?docid=228677&doclang=EN">Data Protection Commissioner v. Facebook Ireland Ltd. and Maximillian Schrems, CJEU Case C-311/18, 16 July 2020 (Schrems II).
  17. David Lyon, Surveillance after Snowden (Polity, 2015); Bruce Schneier, Data and Goliath: The Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data and Control Your World (W. W. Norton, 2015).
  18. Statements of successive NSA Directors and Directors of National Intelligence, 2013–present.
  19. Snowden, Permanent Record; statements of US national-security officials and Snowden's legal representatives across the post-2013 period.