The Snowden Files: The Inside Story of the World's Most Wanted Man

12 DER SHITSTORM!

In the lobby is a statue of a man with a goatee beard. He is ‘Iron’ Felix Dzerzhinsky, the head of Lenin’s secret police. On the wall is a map. It depicts what used to be the German Democratic Republic (GDR), before its dramatic collapse in 1989. The map is divided into districts. Major cities are marked in bold: (East) Berlin – the capital in communist times – Dresden, Magdeburg, Leipzig.

This forbidding building in Berlin-Lichtenberg was once the headquarters of the GDR’s Ministry for State Security, an organisation better known by its abbreviation – the Stasi. The Stasi was modelled on Dzerzhinsky’s Cheka. It was in part a criminal investigation department. But it was also a secret intelligence agency and a political secret police. For nearly four decades – from 1950 until the collapse of the Berlin Wall – the Stasi conducted a sweeping campaign against the GDR’s ‘enemies’. These were, for the most part, internal. The Stasi’s declared goal was ‘to know everything’.

On the first floor are the offices of the man who directed this campaign, Erich Mielke, the Stasi boss from 1957 to 1989. Seen through modern eyes, his bureau seems modest. There is a comfy chair, 1960s furniture, an old-fashioned dial telephone and an electric typewriter. Next door is a day bed in case Mielke needed a snooze. Built into one of the cabinets is a concealed tape machine. There is a large conference room on the same floor. Whenever Mielke met with his fellow Stasi generals he recorded their conversations.

By the standards of the Soviet bloc, East Germany was a success. In a relatively brief period it managed to establish the most thorough surveillance state in history. The number of Stasi agents grew from 27,000 in 1950 to 91,000 in 1989. Another 180,000 worked as Inoffizielle Mitarbeiter (IMs), or unofficial informers. The true figure was probably higher. They spied on friends, workmates, neighbours and family members. Husbands spied on wives. By the time of the GDR’s demise, two in every 13 citizens were informers.

The Stasi’s favoured method of keeping a lid on dissent was eavesdropping. There was bugging, wiretapping, observation. The Stasi monitored 2,800 postal addresses; the agency steamed 90,000 letters a day. This was laborious stuff. Most of the voluminous information gathered was banal, of little intelligence value. The Stasi’s version of the Puzzle Palace came crashing down on 15 January 1990, when angry protesters stormed Mielke’s compound in Normannenstrasse and ransacked his files.

Given Germany’s totalitarian backstory – the Nazis then communists – it was hardly surprising that Snowden’s revelations caused outrage. In fact, a newish noun was used to capture German indignation at US spying: der Shitstorm. The Anglicism entered the German dictionary Duden in July 2013, as the NSA affair blew around the world. Der Shitstorm refers to widespread and vociferous outrage expressed on the internet, especially on social media platforms.

The ghosts of the Gestapo helped define the West German state, which existed next door to the Stasi. The cultural memory of state snooping still haunts its unified successor. Many of the most successful recent German films and books, such as The Lives of Others – a telling fantasy set in the GDR of 1984 – or Hans Fallada’s Nazi-era Alone in Berlin, dramatise the traumatic experience of being spied on.

For these reasons, the right to privacy is hardwired into the German constitution. Writing in the Guardian, John Lanchester noted that Germany’s legal history focused on carving out human rights: ‘In Europe and the US, the lines between the citizen and the state are based on an abstract conception of the individual’s rights, which is then framed in terms of what the state needs to do.’ (Britain’s common law, by contrast, is different and focused not on the existence of abstract rights but on remedying concrete ‘wrongs’.)

Germans have a visceral dislike of Big Brother-style surveillance; even today there are few CCTV cameras on the streets, unlike in the heavily monitored UK. Google met widespread resistance in 2010 to its Street View project; click yourself through a map of Germany and you’ll still find large areas pixelated. Germany published its first post-reunification census only in the summer of 2013 – previous ones in the 1980s were widely boycotted because people felt uncomfortable with giving the state their data.

The days of Adolf and the Erichs – Erich Mielke and Erich Honecker, the GDR’s communist boss – were over. Or that’s what most Germans thought. The NSA’s post-9/11 practices made the German constitution look like something of a bad joke. Snowden’s documents, dripped out in 2013, revealed that the NSA spies intensively on Germany, in many respects out-Stasi-ing the Stasi. For 10 years the agency even bugged the phone of German chancellor Angela Merkel, Europe’s most powerful politician. Merkel grew up in the GDR and had personal experience of living in a pervasive surveillance state. Of the agency’s many poor judgements this was perhaps the crassest: an act of spectacular folly.

The story began when the Hamburg-based news magazine Der Spiegel revealed that the NSA routinely harvests the communications of millions of Germans. In an average month it collects around half a billion phone calls, emails and text messages. On a normal day this includes 20 million telephone calls and 10 million internet exchanges. On Christmas Eve 2012 it collected about 13 million phone calls, the magazine reported. Sometimes the figures are higher. On 7 January 2013, the NSA had nearly 60 million communication connections under surveillance. This data was stored at Fort Meade.

In addition, the NSA carried out a sophisticated campaign of state-on-state espionage against foreign diplomatic missions in the US. Bugging the Chinese and the Russians was explicable. They were ideological adversaries. But the NSA also spied on friendly embassies – 38 of them, according to a leaked September 2010 file. Targets included the EU missions and the French, Italian and Greek embassies, as well as several other American allies, including Japan, Mexico, South Korea, India and Turkey.

The agency’s spying methods were extraordinary. It placed bugs in electronic communications gear, tapped cables, and collected transmissions using specialised antennae. Under a program codenamed DROPMIRE, the NSA put a bug in the fax machine at the EU’s office in Washington. It also targeted the EU’s Justus Lipsius building in the Belgian capital Brussels, a venue for top-level summits and ministerial get-togethers.

Germany and France were close US allies and NATO members. Their governments shared values, interests, strategic obligations. German and American soldiers had fought and died together in Afghanistan. As far as the NSA was concerned, however, France and Germany were fair game. Neither country was a member of Five Eyes, the exclusive Anglophone spy club. Instead they were ‘third-party foreign partners’. An internal NSA power point says bluntly: ‘We can, and often do, target the signals of most third-party foreign partners.’ According to BOUNDLESS INFORMANT, Germany is in the same top category in terms of level of US snooping as China, Iraq and Saudi Arabia.

By the time Barack Obama visited Berlin in June 2013 the NSA row was straining US–German ties. In the wake of the revelations, German commentators likened the NSA to the Gestapo. The comparison was overblown. But the disquiet in Germany triggered by Snowden’s disclosures was real enough.

Obama and Merkel held a press conference in the chancellor’s washing machine-shaped office in Berlin. It was a short but historically resonant walk to the Reichstag, with its transparent Norman Foster dome, and to the Brandenburg Gate. The NSA revelations dominated the agenda.

Obama sought to reassure. He described himself as a critic of his predecessor. He said he came in with a ‘healthy scepticism’ towards the US intelligence community. After closer inspection, however, he felt its surveillance programs struck the ‘appropriate balance’ between security and civil rights. The NSA focused ‘very narrowly’ on terrorism and weapons of mass destruction: ‘This is not a situation in which we are rifling through the ordinary emails of German citizens or American citizens or French citizens, or anyone else.’ Obama insisted the system was ‘narrowly circumscribed’. It had saved lives, including German ones.

Merkel was unconvinced. She acknowledged that intelligence-sharing with the US had helped prevent an Islamist terrorist plot in Germany’s Sauerland region in 2007. Nonetheless, Germans were worried: ‘People have concerns precisely about there having possibly been some kind of across-the-board gathering of information.’

In an interview with the Guardian and other European newspapers, Merkel was scathing. She described the spying scandal as ‘extremely serious’: ‘Using bugs to listen in on friends in our embassies and EU representatives is not on. The cold war is over. There is no doubt whatsoever that the fight against terrorism is essential… but nor is there any doubt that things have to be kept proportionate.’

Still, it appeared that Merkel was keen to avoid a full-scale confrontation, her legendary pragmatism once more to the fore. Meanwhile, Der Shitstorm billowed across Germany’s media, in print and online. Generally, the tone was alarmed. The German sage Hans-Magnus Enzensberger referred to the ‘transition to a post-democratic society’. Hans-Peter Uhl, a staunch conservative, called the scandal a ‘wake-up call’. Even the right-wing Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung was worried. Publishing the Snowden files was crucial if freedom were ‘to exist in the future’, it said.

Nevertheless Merkel chose to downplay the topic in the run-up to Germany’s September 2013 general election, while the opposition Social Democrats (SPD) tried to big it up. The SPD’s strategy backfired when it emerged Gerhard Schröder, the party’s former chancellor, had approved a wide-ranging intelligence-sharing agreement with the US back in 2002.

It was left to ordinary Germans to make a noise. Hundreds took to the streets and waved placards with anti-surveillance slogans; others heckled Merkel’s election rallies and blew vuvuzelas. In Berlin, one group wearing Snowden masks gathered in the Tiergarten, next to the classical victory column, where presidential hopeful Obama had made a memorable foreign policy speech in 2008. Participants held banners which read ‘Nobama’, ‘1984 is Now’ and ‘Those who sacrifice freedom and security deserve neither’. Down the road, along Unter den Linden, diggers were busy rebuilding a neo-classical palace on the spot where the communist Palace of the Republic once stood, an emblem of communist dictatorship.

By the time of the election most of the earlier indignation had ebbed away. Roland Pofalla, Merkel’s chief of staff, declared the NSA affair ‘over’. Merkel breezed to a third straight victory with an increased majority. The new and insurgent Pirate Party – which had done well in regional elections and campaigned on data protection – slumped to 2.2 per cent in the polls. It failed to enter parliament. Der Spiegel captured this debacle with the headline ‘Calm instead of Shitstorm’.

And then suddenly in October 2013 came a new and extraordinary claim: the NSA had bugged Frau Merkel’s phone!

Der Spiegel found Merkel’s mobile number on an NSA document provided by Snowden. Her number featured next to the words: ‘GE Chancellor Merkel’. The document, S2C32, came from the ‘European States branch’ of the NSA’s Special Collection Service (SCS). It was marked top-secret. Discovery would lead to ‘serious damage’ in the relations between the US and a ‘foreign government’, the document warned.

The magazine rang the chancellery. German officials launched an investigation. Their findings were explosive: officials concluded that it was highly likely the chancellor had been the victim of a US eavesdropping operation. German sources said Merkel was livid. Her spokesman Steffen Seibert said that such practices, if proved, were ‘completely unacceptable’, a ‘serious breach’.

Ironically enough, Merkel picked up the phone, called Obama and asked him what the hell was going on. The president’s reply was a piece of lawyerly evasion; Obama assured her that the US wasn’t bugging her phone and wouldn’t do so in the future. Or as White House spokesman Jay Carney put it: ‘The president assured the chancellor that the United States is not monitoring and will not monitor the communications of the chancellor.’

It didn’t take an Einstein to work out that the White House was saying nothing about what had happened in the past. It emerged the NSA had bugged Merkel’s phone since 2002, beginning during George W Bush’s first term. Merkel had a personal and an office phone; the agency bugged the personal one, which she used mostly in her capacity as Christian Democrat (CDU) party chief. The eavesdropping continued until a few weeks before Obama’s Berlin visit in June 2013. According to Susan Rice, Obama’s national security adviser, the president had been in the dark about this.

It was well known the German chancellor was a fan of the ‘Handy’, as Germans call their mobiles. Indeed, Merkel ruled by Handy. Her mobile phone was her control centre. At a 2008 EU summit in Brussels she had used it to speak to French president Nicolas Sarkozy; the pair had swapped text messages. In 2009 Merkel got a new encrypted smartphone. It seems the NSA found a way round the encryption. But if the president didn’t know about the bugging, who did?

This unedifying snooping may have given the US an edge in diplomatic summits and an insight into the thinking of friends and foes. But, as the revelations piled up, sparking diplomatic crises in Europe, Mexico and Brazil, it was reasonable to ask whether such practices were really worth the candle.

Certainly, they were causing enormous damage to the US’s global reputation. Obama appeared increasingly isolated on the world stage, and strangely oblivious to the anger from his allies. The man who had charmed the Nobel committee simply by not being President Bush was no longer popular. Europeans didn’t like him. ‘Barack Obama is not a Nobel peace prize winner. He is a troublemaker,’ Robert Rossman wrote in the Süddeutsche Zeitung. On its cover, Stern magazine called Obama Der Spitzel – the informer.

Excruciatingly, Obama’s fellow Nobel Laureates turned on him as well. More than 500 of the world’s leading authors warned that the scale of mass surveillance revealed by Snowden had undermined democracy and fundamental human rights around the globe. ‘In their thoughts and in their personal environments and communications, all humans have the right to remain unobserved and unmolested,’ the statement read. Snooping by states and corporations had rendered this basic right ‘null and void’, it added.

Ouch! For Obama, a president and an intellectual, this must have hurt. The statement’s signatories amounted to a who’s who from the world of letters, among them five winners of the Nobel Prize for Literature, Günter Grass, Orhan Pamuk, JM Coetzee, Elfriede Jelinek and Tomas Tranströmer – and numerous other grandees of countries from Albania to Zimbabwe.

The NSA affair was turning into a foreign-policy disaster for an administration that already seemed semi-detached. The Guardian’s diplomatic editor Julian Borger wrote: ‘With each leak, American soft power haemorrhages, and hard power threatens to seep away with it… Nothing could be more personal for a foreign leader than to find their own mobile phones tapped by a nation they considered an essential friend and ally.’

The storm unleashed by Merkel’s bugged mobile reached France the same week, when Le Monde published further embarrassing claims of NSA spying. Der Shitstorm became la tempête de merde. Using material fed by Greenwald, the paper revealed the US was also spying in France on a massive scale. The numbers were astonishing. Over a 30-day period, from 10 December 2012 to 8 January 2013, the NSA intercepted data from 70.3 million French telephone calls.

According to the paper, the NSA carries out around 3 million data intercepts a day in France, with 7 million on 24 December 2012 and 7 January 2013. Between 28 and 31 December no interception took place. Were the NSA’s spies having a festive rest? The documents don’t say.

There were intriguing clues as to how NSA operations work. Spying against France is listed under a secret codename, US-985D. Germany gets its own espionage codes, US-987LA and US-987LB. The programs include DRTBOX – used for data collection – and WHITEBOX, for recording content. Further clandestine acronyms are used to describe spying on French diplomats in the US. In Italy it was the same picture. The Special Collection Service that spied on Merkel was bugging the Italian leadership too, from embassy ‘sites’ in Rome and Milan. Italian metadata was ingested by the millions.

The French government’s response to this was double-layered. In what by now was a much-repeated ritual, the US ambassador to Paris, Charles Rivkin, was summoned to explain himself. François Hollande, the country’s struggling president, called Obama to remonstrate, while his foreign minister Laurent Fabius dubbed the affair ‘totally unacceptable’. ‘Rules are obviously needed when it comes to new communication technologies,’ France’s interior minister Manuel Valls said.

But French reaction was milder than in Germany, and more outrage than outrage. In June, Hollande had threatened to suspend transatlantic trade talks but overall his response was half-hearted, with his rhetoric aimed at domestic voters. One paper, Le Parisien, characterised it as ‘gentlemanly’. Everyone knew that France had its own spying operation, and was a leader in industrial snooping. More importantly, Paris was clearly keen to preserve good relations with Washington. That said, French politicians did seem genuinely stunned by the sheer scale of NSA trawling.

By this point the US was giving the same stock response to anxious allies around the world. The White House said that questions raised by France and other disgruntled Europeans were ‘legitimate’, adding that Washington was reviewing ‘the way that we gather intelligence’ so that ‘we properly balance’ security and privacy. On the other hand, Caitlin Hayden, the National Security Council spokesperson, said: ‘The US gathers foreign intelligence of the type gathered by all nations.’ In other words, ‘We spy on you and you spy on us. Get over it, dude.’

Director of national intelligence James Clapper – the man who misled Congress – said Le Monde had got its facts wrong. Clapper denied that the NSA recorded 70.3 million French phone calls. He gave no further details but seemed to imply that the NSA only scooped up the metadata. He suggested that western intelligence agencies were themselves behind much of this European spying.

In effect, the Europeans were hypocrites. Was Clapper right?

The answer – up to a point – was yes. Western intelligence agencies also spied, albeit with fewer resources than the NSA. They worked closely with the US intelligence community, and had done so for decades. Germany’s domestic intelligence body, the BND, for example, shared information with Fort Meade including metadata and had even handed over copies of its two digital spy systems, Mira4 and Veras. Snowden himself flagged these close connections, telling the journalist and internet freedom activist Jacob Appelbaum that the NSA was ‘under the same roof’ as the Germans, and ‘most other western states’.

The extent of this collaboration could be confusing. One BOUNDLESS INFORMANT slide, shared by Greenwald with the Norwegian tabloid Dagbladet, suggests the NSA is hoovering up 1.2 million Norwegian telephone calls daily. Norway’s military intelligence service, however, said the slide had been misread. It said Norway itself collected the calls from Afghanistan, and passed them on to Fort Meade. This claim, however, is difficult to reconcile with NSA’s own PowerPoint, subtitled: ‘The mission never sleeps.’ It makes clear that collection of metadata under the program is against a country rather than from it. There is a separate slide for each country, including Norway and Afghanistan.

The big picture was obvious. And troubling. With or without help, the NSA was sucking in everyone’s communications. One document seen by Le Monde said that between 8 February and 8 March 2013 the NSA collected 124.8 billion telephone data items and 97.1 billion computer data items. These figures were for the entire world. In an editorial the paper noted that new technology had made possible a ‘Big Brother’ planet. There were no prizes for guessing which nation played the role of Winston Smith’s nemesis.

The NSA’s core mission was national security. At least that was the idea. But by the end of 2013 it appeared that the agency’s intelligence-gathering operations were about something much simpler – global power.

Merkel, it transpired, wasn’t the only foreign luminary whose phone the NSA had hacked. An NSA memo from 2006, published by the Guardian, showed it was bugging at least 35 world leaders. The agency had appealed to other ‘customer’ departments such as the White House, State and the Pentagon to share their ‘Rolodexes’ so it could add the phone numbers of leading foreign politicians to the NSA’s surveillance system. One eager official came up with 200 numbers, including the 35 world leaders. The NSA immediately ‘tasked’ them for monitoring.

The NSA subsequently targeted other leaders as well, including the president of Brazil, Dilma Rousseff, and her Mexican counterpart Enrique Peña Nieto. On the face of things this tasking was bizarre, since both countries enjoyed positive relations with the US. Rousseff’s predecessor, the leftist populist Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, had annoyed Washington by inviting Iran’s then president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad for a visit. After taking office in 2011, however, Rousseff sought to improve ties with the White House. She distanced herself from Tehran and hosted Obama, who had previously cancelled his Brazil trip.

The NSA wasn’t interested in these good vibrations; what interested US spies was Rousseff’s private thinking. An NSA slide obtained by Der Spiegel shows that analysts managed to get access to Rousseff’s messages. Fort Meade investigated ‘the communication methods and associated selectors of Brazilian president Dilma Rousseff and her key advisers’, Spiegel reported. It also discovered other ‘high-value targets’ inside her inner circle.

As well as bugging democratically elected leaders, the NSA was secretly targeting the country’s most important company, the state-run oil firm Petrobas. Petrobas is one of the 30 largest businesses in the world. Majority-owned by the state, it is a major source of revenue for the Brazilian government. It is developing several massive new oilfields, which are in a region deep under the Atlantic.

Files given by Greenwald to Brazil’s news programme Fantástico show the NSA managed to crack Petrobas’s virtual private network. It did this using a secret program codenamed BLACKPEARL. Other targets identified by BLACKPEARL include the Swift network for global bank transfers, the French foreign ministry and Google. A separate GCHQ document, titled ‘network exploitation’, suggests that UK–USA routinely targets the private network traffic of energy companies, financial organisations, airlines and foreign governments.

Unsurprisingly, Rousseff took a dim view of the NSA’s snooping, seeing it as an outrageous violation of Brazil’s sovereignty. The White House responded to her protests with generalities; it used the same template with the Germans and the French. In September, Rousseff announced she was cancelling her official visit to Washington, due to take place on 23 October. Obama called Rousseff in a vain attempt to get her to change her mind. In the absence of a ‘timely investigation… there aren’t conditions for this trip to be made,’ the Brazilian government said.

At best, the NSA’s activities in Brazil looked distinctly un-fraternal. At worst, they appeared to be a clear-cut example of industrial espionage, and precisely the kind of economic spying the US heartily condemned when the Chinese or the Russians did it. The NSA said it was doing something different, telling the Washington Post: ‘The department does not engage in economic espionage in any domain including cyber.’ In a somewhat pained statement, Clapper insisted that the US didn’t steal trade secrets from foreign entities and pass them to US companies, so as to give them a competitive advantage.

But Clapper’s vague defence of the NSA’s goals did little to assuage Rousseff. In a blistering speech to the UN in September, the president said the US’s now exposed ‘global network of electronic spying’ had caused worldwide anger. Not only was this ‘meddling’ an affront to relations between friendly states, it was a breach of international law, she said. Rousseff stamped on the idea that the NSA was somehow fighting terrorism. ‘Brazil knows how to protect itself,’ she said.

If anything, the US’s southern neighbour Mexico was the subject of even greater intrusion. According to Der Spiegel, the NSA mounted a sophisticated spying campaign against President Nieto, and his pro-US predecessor Felipe Calderón. A special NSA division, Tailored Access Operations (TAO), carried out this delicate mission.

In May 2010, TAO managed to hack into the mail server hosting President Calderón’s public email account. Other members of Mexico’s cabinet used the same domain. The NSA was delighted. It could now read ‘diplomatic, economic and leadership communications’ which provided ‘insight into Mexico’s political system and internal stability’. The operation was called FLATLIQUID. Two years later the NSA was at it again; it managed to read Peña Nieto’s private emails, when he was a presidential candidate, according to Brazil’s TV Globo.

The US’s main clandestine objective in Mexico was to keep tabs on the country’s drug cartels. A secret April 2013 document seen by Der Spiegel lists Washington’s priorities from 1 (high) to 5 (low). Mexico’s drug trade is 1; its leadership, military capabilities and foreign trade relations 3; with counter-espionage at 4. In another August 2009 operation the NSA successfully hacked the email accounts of top officials from Mexico’s public security secretariat, yielding useful information on drug gangs and ‘diplomatic talking points’.

How is this spying done? The NSA, it appears, monitors Mexico’s mobile phone network under an operation called EVENINGEASEL. The NSA’s facility in San Antonio, Texas, is involved, together with US listening stations in Mexico City and Brasilia. The agency’s resources are formidable. In the early summer of 2012, alarmed that Nieto might shift resources away from fighting the drug cartels, the NSA zoned in on Nieto’s mobile phone as well as the phones of ‘nine of his close associates’. Software sifted out Nieto’s most important contacts; they too were then placed under surveillance, Der Spiegel said.

By early 2014 it was clear that the ramifications from Snowden’s revelations were far greater than those caused by WikiLeaks. The publication of secret US diplomatic cables from around the world in late 2010 did have consequences. A handful of US ambassadors were forced to depart; others shifted posts; the cables fed into the Arab Spring, crystallising popular resentment against corrupt regimes in Tunisia, Libya and Egypt. Not all of the consequences were negative. Paradoxically, the reputation of the US foreign service went up. American diplomats, broadly speaking, emerged as intelligent, principled and hard-working. A few had genuine literary talent.

With the Snowden files, however, the consequences were more profound. It felt, slowly and not always coherently, as if the world was re-ordering itself – coming to terms with the fact that the US was spying not just on foreign leaders but on entire civilian populations. The question – for European allies, and for rival authoritarian powers – was how to react? The NSA seemed to view close US allies with shared values and history not really as allies at all. Rather, they were ‘frenemies’, part friend and part enemy.

There were several trends. In the aftermath of the ‘Handy crisis’, Merkel called for a new framework to regulate spying between partners. In the early stages of the Snowden affair the NSA and BND had been trying to patch things up. Now Merkel and Hollande said they wanted a new transatlantic no-spy accord negotiated by the end of 2013. Britain and other EU states were free to sign up to this code of conduct, which would regulate the behaviour of the security and intelligence services.

In the meantime Merkel was keen to get answers – something the Obama administration had been frugal about. In particular she wanted to know the scope of the NSA’s surveillance operations against Germans. There were also lingering questions about her personal situation. Just who had signed off on this? What was the justification?

Documents suggested that the US and its British GCHQ partner were using their embassies abroad as rooftop listening stations to spy on host governments. In Berlin this was especially brazen: the US embassy in Pariser Platz is only a few hundred metres away from the parliament building and Merkel’s office. From here, the NSA and CIA can spy on the entire government quarter. Spiegel branded the antennae bristling from the top of the embassy ‘Das Nest’.

It was the same story elsewhere. In 2010 the NSA operated 80 embassy spy stations worldwide. Nineteen of them were in European cities, including Paris, Madrid, Rome, Prague and Geneva – where Snowden worked for the CIA. The Americans also had a station in Frankfurt.

Other Five Eyes partners were doing snooping of their own. A Snowden document, published jointly by Guardian Australia and the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, revealed that Australia’s spy agency had eavesdropped on Indonesia’s president Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, plus his wife, Ani, senior minsters and confidants. The top-secret slide presentation is from Australia’s Department of Defence and the Defence Signals Directorate. It dates from November 2009. Another leak, meanwhile, shows that the NSA spied on 25 heads of state attending a 2010 G20 summit in Toronto. The covert operation was carried out from the US embassy in Ottawa. Canada’s own spy agency, the Communications Security Establishment Canada (CSEC), was closely involved.

Like his German, Mexican and Brazilian counterparts, Indonesia’s president was furious at Australia’s un-neighbourly behaviour. He downgraded diplomatic relations with Canberra, and stopped co-operation on issues such as people-smuggling and boat-people. Australia’s prime minister Tony Abbott refused to apologise. Nor would he confirm if the snooping had taken place. Instead, the debate in Australia was a depressing echo of the one in Britain, with some politicians and Murdoch-owned newspapers attacking the media that broke the story.

In Europe, displeased politicians were trying to formulate a response to the Snowden revelations. The topic dominated an EU summit in Brussels. Merkel told fellow European leaders the issue at stake wasn’t her mobile but what it represented – ‘the phones of millions of European citizens’. German politicians called for talks on a trade agreement with the US to be suspended until the White House responded fully. There were calls to take witness evidence from Snowden in Moscow. And to offer him asylum, something Merkel had declined.

The summit put Britain in a tricky position. David Cameron found himself the target of veiled criticism. He declined to say whether GCHQ had been involved in top-level bugging, or if he had seen a readout from Chancellor Merkel’s mobile. It is highly likely that any information gleaned by the NSA would have been shared with GCHQ. It’s even possible that the eavesdropping was conducted through Menwith Hill, the NSA’s European hub in North Yorkshire. Cameron merely defended Britain’s ‘brave spies’.

European parliamentarians voted for tough new rules on data privacy. Their aim was to stop EU data collected by firms like Google, Yahoo or Microsoft from ending up in the NSA’s servers. The proposal, an explicit push-back against PRISM, envisaged restricting the sharing of EU information with non-EU countries. It also proposed the right of EU citizens to erase their digital records from the internet, as well as big fines for firms that broke the rules.

The measure had dropped out of the original proposal made by the European Commission in 2012, following US lobbying. The US argued these new regulations were bad for business. Silicon Valley agreed. But the accusations of NSA spying hardened the mood in the European camp, giving impetus to those who wanted reform. (In the end Britain came to the US’s rescue, with Cameron persuading EU allies to postpone any new rules until 2015.)

The EU’s response was part of a wider post-Snowden trend to ‘de-Americanise’ the internet. Already, in 2012, countries including Russia, China and several Middle Eastern states had made moves to bring cyberspace under greater domestic control. Now, the Europeans and Latin Americans were going in the same direction. Brazil and Germany began work on a resolution in the UN’s general assembly to place boundaries on NSA spying.

The new buzzword was ‘cyber-sovereignty’. The shared goal among the US’s disgruntled allies was to make it harder for the NSA to get access to national data. For authoritarian countries such as Russia, there was an added bonus. Greater state control of the internet made it easier to snoop on their own citizens and keep a lid on dissent.

The most vociferous reaction came from Brazil. In October, Rousseff announced plans to build a new undersea cable linking South America with Europe. This would, in theory, shut out the US and make it harder for the NSA to siphon off Brazilian information. The president also mulled over legislation that would force Google and other US tech giants to store the data for Brazilian users on local servers. Thousands of federal workers, meanwhile, were ordered to adopt a form of highly encrypted email. The policy was accelerated after Snowden’s disclosures.

Some experts doubted the effectiveness of Brazil’s fight-back. They pointed out that, unless Brazil came up with a rival to Google, the NSA would still be able to get hold of its data – if necessary by court order. Either way, Snowden’s disclosures seemed to have triggered what Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt dubbed the ‘Balkanization’ of the internet. What was supposed to be a universal tool was in danger of becoming fragmented and ‘country-specific’, he warned.

In Germany, state-backed Deutsche Telekom floated plans for a new national internet network. Its slogan, ‘Email made in Germany’, suggested consumers could have the same confidence in their email as they would expect to have in a German dishwasher. Emails between German users would no longer go via US servers. Traffic, mostly, would be kept within the EU’s Schengen area (which, helpfully, excluded Britain). The aspiration was to keep out the nosy Anglophone spies.

Perhaps the most unexpected corollary of the Snowden affair was the return of the typewriter. After discovering that the NSA bugged its diplomats, the Indian government turned to old technology. From the summer of 2013 the Indian High Commission in London began using typewriters again. Nothing top secret was stored in electronic form, high commissioner Jaimini Bhagwati told the Times of India. Diplomats had taken to strolling outside: ‘No highly classified information is discussed inside the embassy building. And it’s very tedious to step out into the garden every time something sensitive has to be discussed.’

The Russians had reached the same conclusion. The Kremlin’s super-secret Federal Protection Service (FSO) – a branch of the FSB, that some believe is guarding Snowden – put in a large order for typewriters.

The personal computer revolution that transformed communications had crashed to a halt. Those who cared about privacy were reverting to the pre-internet age. Typewriters, handwritten notes and the surreptitious rendezvous were back in fashion. Surely it was only a matter of time before the return of the carrier pigeon.

The NSA’s clumsy international spying operation generated much heat and light. One document revealed the agency was even spying on the pornographic viewing habits of six Muslim ‘radicalisers’, in an attempt to discredit them. None of the radicalisers were actually terrorists. The snooping – on individuals’ private browsing activities – was redolent of the kind of unjustified surveillance that led to the original Church committee.

There was a distinct sense of history repeating itself. Some old hands suggested that the US had been engaged in similar activities for decades.

Claus Arndt, a former German deputy responsible for overseeing Germany’s security services, saw echoes of previous scandals in the current Snowden one. Arndt told Der Spiegel that up until 1968 the US had behaved in West Germany like the occupying power they once had been – bugging whomever they wanted. After that, the Americans had to ask permission from German officials to conduct surveillance. In West Berlin, however, the US behaved ‘as if it had just marched in’ up until 1990, Arndt said. He recalled how one US major had a row with his girlfriend and gave an order for her phone to be tapped and her letters read. Arndt said he had had no choice but to agree the request.

What about the US’s modern methods? Arndt said indiscriminate collection was ineffective, and that evaluating a vast ‘data-heap’ was virtually impossible. Nevertheless, the Americans had always been ‘crazy about information’, he said, and were still ‘hegemons’ in his own country.

He summed up the impact of the Snowden revelations in a single phrase: ‘Theoretically we are sovereign. In practice we are not.’