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

13 THE BROOM CUPBOARD

The room is a glorified broom cupboard. A few paintings belonging to the late Arthur Sulzberger, Snr, are stacked against a wall. One print shows a newspaper man puffing on a cigar; above him are the words: ‘Big Brother is watching you’. (A note says Arthur will review the paintings ‘when he returns’. He died in 2012.) There are strip lights, a small table, a couple of chairs. No windows. On a metal shelf, boxes of cream-coloured envelopes. They belong to Arthur Sulzberger, Jr, – Arthur senior’s heir – and the current publisher of the New York Times. On the corridor outside are photos of the Times’s Pulitzer Prize winners. They are a distinguished bunch. From the staff cafeteria comes the hum of intelligent chatter.

The offices of the New York Times are on Eighth Avenue, in midtown New York. The paper’s executive stationery cupboard was to play an unlikely role in the Snowden story. It was from here that the Guardian carried on its reporting of the NSA files, in partnership with the Times, after its London operation was shut down. The cupboard was pokey. It was also extremely secure. Access was highly restricted; there were guards, video cameras and other measures. Its location on US soil meant that the journalists who worked there felt they enjoyed something they didn’t have in London: the protection of the US constitution.

In the US, the Obama administration distanced itself from the destruction of the Guardian’s hard drives – an act widely condemned by EU organisations, the rest of the world, and the UN’s special rapporteur on freedom of expression. Evidently, the White House wasn’t delighted by the Snowden revelations. But it understood the first amendment guaranteed press freedom. No such smashing up could happen in America, White House officials said.

Two days after the GCHQ hobbits supervised the destruction, the British government followed up Rusbridger’s offer. It asked the Guardian to identify the paper’s US media partners. The editor told them it was working with the New York Times and the non-profit ProPublica.

But it was another three and a half weeks before the UK’s foreign office did anything about the intelligence. On 15 August, Philip Barton, Britain’s deputy ambassador in the US, finally put in a call to Jill Abramson, the Times’s executive editor. He requested a meeting. Abramson had been planning to travel to DC anyway. She had arranged to see James Clapper, the embattled director of national intelligence. Not about Snowden but about the alarming frequency with which the administration was exerting pressure on the Times’s reporters, particularly those covering intelligence matters.

‘We have decades of experience publishing sensitive stories dealing with national security,’ Abramson says. In 1972 the Times published the Pentagon Papers, during the Arthur Sulzberger era. ‘We’re never cavalier. We take them [senior administration officials] seriously. But if a war is being waged against terrorism, people need to know the dimensions of that war.’

The deputy ambassador invited Abramson to drop into the British embassy. Rusbridger advised against doing so, on grounds of spycraft. So Abramson eventually agreed to meet at the ambassador’s residence, rather than at the embassy itself, which was technically on UK soil: who knew what British spooks might get up to there? At the meeting, Barton requested the return of the Snowden documents or their destruction. The UK-related leaks made his government uneasy, he said. Abramson neither confirmed nor denied that the Times possessed Snowden material. She promised to go away and think about it.

Two days later she called Barton back to say that the Times was declining his request. According to Abramson, ‘The meeting was a non-event. I never heard from them again.’ The British foreign office, it seemed, was merely going through the formal motions. Rusbridger had made clear that the material existed in many jurisdictions. ProPublica in New York had also been working with the Guardian for several months, as Number 10 knew. The British made no attempt to approach them.

That summer and autumn, Guardian US published several notable scoops. It revealed that the NSA was snooping on 35 world leaders, had subverted encryption, and was working with GCHQ to spy on British citizens – an apparent farewell present to the US from Tony Blair during his final days in office. The NSA also drafted procedures to spy on the British behind GCHQ’s back, if they felt US interests required it. This was most ungentlemanly: under the Five Eyes agreement, it was understood that the Brits and the Americans were not supposed to spy on each other. It was unclear whether the NSA had, accidentally or otherwise, eavesdropped on Cameron himself. He wasn’t on the list of 35, but some of his interlocutors were.

All these disclosures crossed the planet. Greenwald’s video talk had already set viewing records for the Guardian’s website. Snowden then performed a live question and answer session on the site, while still in hiding in Hong Kong. Gabriel Dance, the paper’s interactive editor in the US, produced a novel interactive guide to mass surveillance, ‘The NSA Decoded’, which combined conventional text and graphics with video inserts. The Snowden saga demonstrated that modern technology could generate global traction for such a story at a very high speed.

Not least in the US, of course, because there it was having a transforming effect on the political landscape. When the first revelations were published, reaction on Capitol Hill was negative. There was condemnation of both the leaks and Snowden himself. Members of Congress instinctively sided with the security services.

Some independent-minded individuals, though, supported Snowden from the outset. One was Snowden’s hero Ron Paul. Paul said the US should be grateful to the young whistleblower for the service he had done in speaking out about the ‘injustice’ carried out by the government. Paul’s son Rand, the Republican senator from Kentucky, echoed this. He described NSA surveillance of Americans as an ‘all-out assault on the constitution’.

Figures as diverse as the right-wing commentator Glenn Beck and the liberal Michael Moore praised Snowden, as did the New Yorker’s John Cassidy. Al Gore sent a supportive tweet. Elsewhere in the mainstream media there was striking hostility, usually expressed in ad hominem terms. For example, Jeffrey Toobin, also at the New Yorker, described Snowden as ‘a grandiose narcissist who deserves to be in prison’.

In public, most members of Congress delivered a similar anti-Snowden message. But not so much in private. The members of the House and the Senate may not have liked the leaks or even Snowden personally, holed up as he was in Russia. But among some of them there was a niggling concern about the scale of surveillance he had revealed. As the disclosures mounted, so too did unease in Congress.

Just how much disquiet there was on Capitol Hill became apparent in late July, almost two months after the first Snowden stories had appeared. A young and relatively new congressman, Justin Amash, tabled an amendment to the annual Defense Department authorisation bill. His goal seemed extravagant: to put an end to the NSA’s bulk collection of Americans’ phone records. As Amash put it, he wanted to ‘defend the fourth amendment… and the privacy of each and every American’.

Amash didn’t stem from the liberal wing of the Democrats, as one might expect. He was a Republican. A second-generation Arab-American of Palestinian Christian and Syrian Greek Orthodox descent, Amash came from the libertarian wing of the party. He, too, was a supporter of Ron Paul. Paul was the leading advocate of small government and deference to the constitution. He was an opponent of military adventurism and a fierce critic of government intrusion into privacy. Amash donated to Paul’s presidential run in 2008 – as did Snowden in 2012.

Nobody had expected Amash’s amendment to get very far. However, it made it past the House rules committee. The Obama administration, the intelligence agencies and their allies in Congress then waged an all-out effort to crush it. In a marathon series of closed-door meetings in the Capitol basement General Alexander warned of dire consequences for national security; Clapper said the NSA might lose a vital intelligence tool. The White House took the unusual step of publicly objecting to a proposed amendment to a bill.

On the evening of Wednesday 24 July 2013, the Guardian’s Spencer Ackerman was one of only a few reporters who bothered to turn up to watch the vote in the House of Representatives. Suddenly, something was in the air. Since 9/11, the US security state had moved in one direction only: it had got bigger. Now, for the first time, there was a push-back. ‘It was electric, the outcome uncertain until the end,’ Ackerman says.

In a Congress normally wracked by deep partisan division, two wings of the Republican and Democratic party were coming together. Since the early days of Obama’s presidency the feuding parties had been unable to agree on pretty much anything. From outside, Washington looked tribal and dysfunctional; the only topic on which there was bipartisan consensus was Iran. On domestic issues the politicians were fractious and unreconciled.

On this occasion a Democrat, John Conyers, co-sponsored Amash’s amendment. The Republican and Democratic leaderships in the House, as well as the White House, bitterly rejected it. Civil liberties Democrats and libertarian Republicans formed a pro-Amash alliance. The divisions in Congress weren’t the usual ones. Rather, the divide was Washington insiders versus libertarians. Institutionally, it was between intelligence committees, which oversee secret operations, and the judiciary committees, which oversee fidelity to the law and constitution.

The debate turned into one of the most impassioned for years; speakers for and against the amendment were applauded from the aisles. Leading against Amash was Mike Rogers, a former FBI agent, the chair of the House intelligence committee and a straight-talking NSA defender. ‘Have we forgotten what happened on September 11th?’ he asked. He mocked an online campaign backing Amash, and said: ‘Are we so small we can only look at how many Facebook likes we have?’ Republican Tom Cotton, speaking against the Amash proposal, declared: ‘Folks, we are at war.’

But some members opposed to warrantless surveillance invoked comparisons with colonial days. They likened the NSA’s programs to the general warrants that allowed British customs officers to search private property. This was about the most emotive charge that could be laid by an American politician. (The lawyer for Snowden’s father, Bruce Fein, made the same resonant comparison in a TV interview to those British ‘writs of assistance’.)

The debate found strange bedfellows. Ted Poe, a leading member of the Tea Party, united with liberal Zoe Lofgren, something that nearly never happens in Washington. But Nancy Pelosi, the top Democrat, whipped against the Amash amendment. Feelings were high. During the debate Rogers scowled and smacked his rolled-up papers into his empty hand like a truncheon, pacing the rows of desks. Amash was laughing – this was a career-making moment for him – and joking with colleagues.

When it came, the vote was a shock. The amendment was defeated, but only just – by a margin of 217 to 205. Few had anticipated that dissatisfaction in Congress had reached this level. It reflected a polarisation across America. The country was engaged in full-on debate. For some, it was security versus privacy. For others, it was whether Snowden was a whistleblower or a traitor. There were those who thought it mattered and those who didn’t.

For the White House, the NSA and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence the vote was a near-death experience. It was clear that something had to change. The absolutist mantra that Snowden was a ‘little traitor from Hawaii’, as Alexander put it, was no longer enough. The White House began to hint at compromise. Congressional hearings were pencilled in for the autumn; there were calls for legislative change to curb the NSA; work began to frame new bills.

In his press conference before the summer break, on 9 August, Obama made his first substantial remarks on the crisis. He laid out a strategy of greater transparency. But, crucially, he didn’t announce any restrictions on the surveillance.

Obama proposed a new panel to review intelligence policies. He also announced greater oversight of FISC, the foreign intelligence surveillance court, and the declassification of the legal rationale that underpinned the collection of phone records under section 215 of the Patriot Act.

The president acknowledged the US had ‘significant’ spying capabilities. But he said that unlike other, repressive regimes it behaved with restraint, and didn’t throw its ‘own citizens in prison for what they say online’. His reforms, he said, were designed to ensure Americans could trust US intelligence efforts and have confidence they were ‘in line with our interests and our values’.

He had a message, too, for non-Americans, a subspecies under US surveillance laws with no apparent privacy rights whatsoever. ‘To others around the world, I want to make clear once again that America is not interested in spying on ordinary people.’

All of this sounded reasonable. But sceptics wondered whether Obama meant reform or ‘reform’. In other words, a simulacrum of reform in which the NSA’s more egregious bulk surveillance practices would be allowed to carry on unhindered. In late August the new review panel was unveiled. Obama had promised a ‘high-level group of outside experts’. These ‘independent’ experts, it turned out, were virtually all former intelligence officials with close links to the Obama administration.

Civil libertarians sniffed a large rodent. The panel’s chair was Michael Morell, Obama’s former deputy CIA director; two other members included Richard Clarke, a former counter-terrorism co-ordinator under Clinton and George W Bush, and Peter Swire, Clinton’s privacy director. The panel enjoyed the lugubrious name, ‘Director of National Intelligence Review Group on Intelligence and Communications Technologies’. In it was a clue: the advisers were working out of the offices of the DNI, headed by James Clapper. The committee’s report – to be written by the end of 2013 – went to the White House.

Critics dismissed the panel as pretend transparency, and its members as White House stooges. This may have been unfair. But it was hard to tell, since the panel’s meetings were conducted in secrecy. In September it held an inaugural session with civil liberties groups including the ACLU. Another hearing followed with representatives from Facebook and other tech giants, still reeling from the PRISM disclosures.

Silicon Valley lashed out at the White House. Executives from Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Apple and Yahoo all said the Snowden revelations had been a disaster for their businesses, with their Europe- and Asia-based operations distinctly harmed. Billions of dollars had been lost. The administration needed to get a handle on the situation and do something expeditiously, the tech giants said. This conversation took place before it emerged that the NSA had hacked into Google and Yahoo’s data centres – in effect, a state cyber-raid on two major US firms.

Throughout the summer the tech companies had pumped out the same message: that the NSA was coercing them, legally, to co-operate. Any data they handed over wasn’t done voluntarily, but in response to a court-approved stick-up. A few days before their appearance at the review panel, Silicon Valley CEOs had gathered at the TechCrunch Disrupt Conference in San Francisco. The mood was mutinous. Yahoo’s Marissa Mayer said her company had to obey FISA court orders, even though it didn’t like them: ‘When you lose and don’t comply, it’s treason.’ Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg put it succinctly. The ‘government blew it,’ he said.

During meetings with the review panel, however, the tech companies didn’t say anything about restricting NSA surveillance. Instead, some attendees suggest, the companies’ chief aim was to tell the customers a good story about how they were all protecting their data.

The news that the NSA had hacked Google and Yahoo’s data centres, however, proved a game changer. In their most concerted deed yet, the tech giants united to demand sweeping changes to US surveillance laws. In an open letter to Obama and Congress, they called for a ban on bulk data collection by spy agencies.

They wrote: ‘The balance in many countries has tipped too far in favour of the state and away from the rights of the individual – rights that are enshrined in our constitution. This undermines the freedoms we all cherish. It’s time for a change.’

The signatories were Apple, Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Yahoo, LinkedIn, Twitter and AOL. They were, naturally, acting in their own economic interests. But the firms also set out a series of five ‘reform principles’. Chief among them was that governments – the US, UK and the rest – should end suspicion-less surveillance. Instead of spying on everybody they should focus on ‘specific known users for lawful purposes’.

The Snowden revelations, Google added, were in danger of turning the internet into the ‘splinternet’. ‘The ability of data to flow or be accessed across borders is essential to a robust, 21st-century global economy,’ they argued.

In this new post-Snowden world, the NSA faced a full-blown public relations calamity. Since it was founded – appropriately enough in total secrecy – the agency had experienced four distinct epochs. The first was creation. It lasted from 1952 until 1978. The era ended with a series of reports by the Senate committee, led by Frank Church, into unforgivable domestic abuses: the FBI’s harassment of Martin Luther King, CIA assassination programs and the watch-listing of 75,000 Americans. The Church committee ushered in wide-ranging reforms. Among them was the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which established there must be court approval for foreign intelligence surveillance inside the US.

The NSA’s second era from 1978 to 2001 was one of restriction, with the agency operating within Church committee parameters. What followed after 9/11 was a second unleashing: a decade in which the intelligence agencies enjoyed popular support and a boom in White House funding. This came crashing to a stop with Snowden, and the beginning of a new, uncertain fourth era. The NSA was now under the heaviest and most uncomfortable scrutiny since the 1970s.

It was also the target of some rather amusing jokes.

LOVEINT was a pun on SIGINT. This was when NSA employees used the agency’s powerful snooping tools to spy on a partner or girlfriend. NSA officials insisted the number of LOVEINT cases was small, that all the individuals involved had been fired or punished, and that most violations were self-reported. Senator Dianne Feinstein, chair of the Senate intelligence committee and the NSA’s loyal friend, said LOVEINT only happened once a year.

Still, the story was a gift to Twitter. Within hours, the hashtag ‘#NSApickuplines’ trended. The New York University media pundit Jay Rosen opened with: ‘You’re free Friday. Would you like to have dinner?’

@sickjew essayed: ‘You come here often.’

@Adonish_P continued in the same vein with: ‘I know exactly where you have been all my life.’

Perhaps the most imaginative joke came from @benwizner, who riffed off the NSA’s bulk-collection habits. He tweeted: ‘NSA walks into a bar and says, “Give me all your drinks. I need to figure out which one to order.”’

For General Alexander this was humiliating stuff. In his eight years in charge of the world’s biggest intelligence agency, Alexander had amassed more power than any previous spy chief. His imperium included three mighty domains: the NSA, the Central Security Service and US Cyber Command – set up by the Department of Defense in 2009 to spearhead the nation’s cyber-war efforts. Officially, Alexander was known by the acronym DirNSA. His subordinates came up with other names: Emperor Alexander, or Alexander the Geek.

On first impression Alexander seems nerdy. He is diminutive, has a slight lisp, and appears preoccupied with hyper-technical detail. But he is a polished political operator, his success underpinned by targeted schmoozing. Before anyone had ever heard the name Snowden, Alexander took influential congressmen on recreational tours of the NSA. He would show them his command centre at Fort Meade, a replica of the bridge of the Starship Enterprise. Those who know him say he has a strong sense of history and his own role in it. It is a place where Great Men Do Great Deeds Against Evil.

But if Alexander and his senior leadership team had hoped for White House support in their hour of need, they were to be badly disappointed. In his August speech Obama did pay tribute to the ‘men and women of our intelligence community’. He described them as ‘patriots’ who love their country and its values. But there was no presidential visit to Fort Meade, no noisy show of solidarity before the cameras.

It was left to the NSA to defend its own surveillance activities, and to make the case that that the agency’s controversial dragnet programs were actually legal. It did so against a backdrop of rising public antagonism. (One YouTube video in which Alexander features has more than 16,000 ‘dislikes’.) In the wake of Snowden, attitudes towards the intelligence community were changing for the first time since 9/11. In July a Washington Post/ABC poll showed that 39 per cent believed it was more important to preserve privacy than to investigate terrorism; in 2002 the figure was just 18 per cent.

With the surveillance issue now so obviously toxic the Obama administration did something it was good at: it sat on the fence. Inside a defensive Puzzle Palace there was incredulity at this, mixed with peevishness. The agency, an inward-looking institution, was used to getting its own way. Serving officials were unable to speak out. But former NSA staff made no secret of the fact they felt the White House had chucked them under the bus.

‘There has been no support for the agency from the president or his staff or senior administration officials, and this has not gone unnoticed by both senior officials and the rank and file at the Fort,’ Joel Brenner, the NSA’s former inspector general, moaned in the pages of Foreign Policy, referring to the view from Fort Meade. The magazine quoted former intelligence officials who said morale inside the NSA was low. The scrutiny following Snowden’s leaks, coupled with budget cutbacks, meant that the spies were ‘hurting’, one said.

An official White House photo captures this administration–agency estrangement. In November Obama and Vice President Biden met with senior military leaders. The venue was the White House cabinet room. Obama sits in the middle, facing towards the camera, his right hand raised to make a point. At the far end of the oval table is a lonely General Alexander, framed by two oil paintings, in the seating equivalent of Siberia. The president and NSA chief may have chatted later over dinner. But if they did, no photo was ever released.

In large part, the NSA had itself to blame for this lack of a political embrace. Alexander’s early response to the Snowden leaks was bungled. He initially claimed that the NSA’s controversial domestic bulk-collection programs had stopped an impressive 54 terrorist plots, implying that these took place in the US.

Alexander’s deputy Chris Inglis subsequently conceded that only about a dozen of these plots had any connection to the US homeland. Then he said that just one of them might have been disrupted as a result of mass surveillance of Americans. (He was also ambiguous as to whether the plots were real ‘plots’; some of the citations he gave had more to do with financial transactions.)

But the biggest damage to the NSA’s case on Capitol Hill came not from Alexander but from Clapper, the overall head of the spy agencies. Clapper had given a false answer to Ron Wyden back at the Senate hearing in March. Asked if the NSA collected ‘any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans’, he gave an unqualified and emphatic reply: ‘No, sir. Not wittingly.’

This answer came back and bit him. Lying to Congress would be serious. After the Snowden revelations Clapper sought to finesse his reply, describing it as ‘the least untruthful answer’ possible in a public hearing. But this didn’t work: Wyden’s office had given him 24 hours’ notice of the question and an opportunity to correct the record shortly afterwards. Clapper changed his account to say he had simply forgotten about collection of domestic phone records. This erroneous testimony sparked calls for his dismissal or resignation. Clapper publicly apologised to the Senate panel – notably not to Wyden specifically – after the outcry over his prevarication spread.

Still, there were loyal supporters who defended the NSA with gusto. One was Feinstein, in charge of the agency’s oversight. On the day after Snowden revealed himself as the leaker her response was uncompromising. ‘I don’t look at this being a whistleblower. I think it’s an act of treason,’ she said. ‘He violated the oath. He violated the law.’ Feinstein denied that collecting phone records and internet communications amounted to any kind of surveillance, saying the NSA merely scooped up the kind of information found on a telephone bill.

After news that the agency had hacked Merkel’s personal mobile, however, Feinstein did a volte-face. She called for a ‘total review’ of all intelligence programs, and grumbled that her Senate intelligence committee had not been ‘satisfactorily informed’. Spying on friendly nations and prime ministers wasn’t on, she said: ‘With respect to NSA collection of intelligence on leaders of US allies – including France, Spain, Mexico and Germany – let me state unequivocally: I am totally opposed.’

Feinstein’s position was confusing, both for supporters and for critics of the NSA. On the one hand, she seemed to have flipped on an activity that had always been a part of the agency’s key mission: the collection of foreign signals intelligence. On the other, she remained an advocate of its extraordinary and novel bulk-collection programs, the very programs that had prompted Snowden to blow the whistle. It was deeply odd.

Despite this wobble Feinsten’s loyalty to the agency was never seriously in question. In the autumn of 2013 she proposed a bill to ‘reform’ the NSA, one of several legislative initiatives. Hers was by far the most sympathetic to the agency. It suggested limited changes while basically maintaining the status quo, and in some cases even expanding its already formidable powers.

This wasn’t immediately apparent. On 31 October a dozen reporters gathered outside the closed-door session of the Senate select committee on intelligence on the second floor of the Hart Senate Office building. The suspicion was that Feinstein would deliver a whitewash – but the senator had gone rogue days before, when she criticised the NSA’s targeting of allied leaders. Nobody had seen the secret text of her proposed bill.

Half an hour after the session started, Feinstein’s press team announced her bill, the FISA Improvements Act, had been approved 11–4. It increased ‘transparency of critical intelligence programs’ and prohibited the ‘bulk collection of records’. Within minutes, however, this news unravelled. On closer examination it turned out the bill stopped the mass collection of content, something the NSA had never done in the first place. The press release was misleading. The reality was that Feinstein’s proposal amounted to an entrenchment, and even an expansion, of the NSA’s bulk surveillance powers.

Specifically, it codified that the NSA could sieve foreign phone and email communications for information on Americans. Speaking afterwards, Feinstein was unrepentant. She said that the threat from terrorist attacks had never been greater, and added: ‘I think there’s a huge misunderstanding about this NSA database program and how vital I think it is to protecting this country.’

Other senators, however, came up with tougher proposals to rein in the agency. One was Jim Sensenbrenner, chair of the House judiciary committee. Sensenbrenner was the primary author of the Patriot Act, which he devised to ensure American spooks could fight terrorism in the post-9/11 world. Now he said that the Bush and Obama administrations had misinterpreted his legislation – using it to spy on innocent Americans. It was a classic Dr Frankenstein moment, when the scientist realises his creation isn’t the beautiful thing he had wished for, but an out-of-control monster.

By way of corrective, Sensenbrenner introduced a ‘USA Freedom Act’. The act, proposed with Senator Patrick Leahy, envisages major reforms. Among them an end to bulk-collection programs and a new ‘special advocate’ who could represent civil liberties and challenge secret government requests in the FISA court. In essence, Sensenbrenner proposed a return to the targeted model of spying. He asserted: ‘Intelligence professionals should pursue actual leads – not dig through haystacks of our private data.’

Meanwhile, Senators Wyden and Udall, the two critics of the NSA in pre-Snowden times, introduced their own draft legislation to stop warrantless snooping on Americans. Wyden suggested that the Senate should have the power to confirm the NSA’s new director.

In Kremlinological fashion, the White House had let it be known that it favoured a clear-out at the top. Alexander – a four-star general – confirmed his departure from the NSA in March 2014. (The Wall Street Journal, citing a senior US official, said Alexander offered his resignation in June. The White House declined it.) Other officials whispered that it would be a good idea if Clapper moved on at the same time. In theory Clapper was supposed to be conducting the government’s intelligence review. In practice he was a dead man walking, fatally damaged by his false statement before Congress.

The NSA used every opportunity to remind Americans of 9/11 and of its role in keeping America safe. The NSA’s critics pointed out that Angela Merkel wasn’t exactly al-Qaida. In an interview with Der Spiegel, Senator John McCain called for a ‘wholesale housecleaning’ in the US intelligence community, starting from the top. Asked why US spooks had bugged Chancellor Merkel, he offered a concise reply: ‘The reason I think they did it is because they could do it.’

New faces, then, but by 2014 it seemed that the most of the programs exposed by Snowden would carry on. The White House had promised transparency but seemed unwilling to pull the plug on mass surveillance, and its electronic equivalent of Bentham’s panopticon.

According to the New York Times, Obama had reluctantly concluded there was no workable alternative to the bulk collection of metadata, including metadata from Americans. The administration hinted that it might reduce the number of years it keeps this information – from five to three. But this was hardly a concession.

The judiciary, however, took a different view. In December 2013, Richard Leon, a federal judge, delivered a massive legal blow to the NSA. He ruled that the agency’s bulk collection of Americans’ phone records probably violated the US constitution. The program was ‘almost Orwellian’ in its scope, he said, adding ‘The government does not cite a single case in which analysis of the NSA’s bulk metadata collection actually stopped an imminent terrorist attack.’ Leon said the constitutional challenge – brought by two plaintiffs – was likely to succeed. There was one crumb of comfort for the government: it was allowed to appeal.

Snowden had achieved the debate he had always wanted, and then some. But in terms of legislative reform it was too early to say whether meaningful change would happen.

In the meantime, hostility towards the leaker from the administration was undimmed. Neither Obama nor Secretary of State John Kerry showed any backtracking in their attitude towards a man whom Kerry dubbed a ‘traitor to his country’. Presidential pardon? Nope. The espionage charges against him still stood. These were unauthorised communication of government property and wilful communication of classified intelligence to an unauthorised person.

Were he to return from Moscow he would face a total of 30 years in jail. Further charges could be added. The death penalty is also available under a section of the act. Despite changing the course of political history by his extraordinary disclosures, it would be a long time before Snowden saw home again.