HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_019720.jpg

232 | HOW AMERICA LOST ITS SECRETS tell it to that can’t.” In the same vein, Poitras could hardly rely on these five confidants not to tell her secrets (and Snowden’s) to others. Hours after he was told, Greenwald told his lover, David Miranda, about the source in great detail. He even asked him to evaluate the source’s bona fides for him. Gellman, for his part, raised the matter with a former high official at the Justice Department. Moreover, as the intelligence world knew, Poitras was herself a veritable lightning rod for attracting ex-NSA employees who objected to some of its surveillance programs. In 2012, her previ- ously mentioned filming in Berlin of NSA insiders could make her communications of interest to intelligence services that wanted to keep tabs on possible NSA dissidents. Nor was Snowden himself overly discreet. It will be recalled that he had also advertised his Tor-sponsored CryptoParty activities over the Internet and supplied Runa Sandvik, who worked with Appel- baum, his true name and address in Hawaii. Sandvik had no reason not to share the identity of her co-presenter with others in the Tor movement. Snowden, of course, had his girlfriend make a video of ) his presentation as well. He also bragged about operating the largest ® Tor outlets in Hawaii. Even if his Tor software provided him with a measure of anonymity, it was not beyond the ability of the world- class cyber services to crack it. Under Putin, Russia had built one of the leading cyber-espionage services in the world. According to a 2009 NSA analysis of Russian capabilities, which was obtained by The New York Times in 2013, Russia’s highly sophisticated tools for cyber espionage were superior to those of China or any other adversary nation. For example, inves- tigators from FireEye, a well-regarded Silicon Valley security firm, found that in 2007 Russian hackers had developed a highly sophis- ticated virus that could bypass the security measures of the servers of both the U.S. government and its private contractors. According to one computer security expert, the virus had made protected Inter- net websites “sitting ducks” for these sophisticated Russian hackers. The cryptographer Bruce Schneier, a leading specialist in computer security, explained, “It is next to impossible to maintain privacy and anonymity against a well-funded government adversary.” Nor has the Russian cyber service made a secret out of the fact that | | Epst_9780451494566_2p_all_r.indd 232 ® 9/3016 8:13AM | | HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_019720