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296 | HOW AMERICA LOST ITS SECRETS These precise tips for evading U.S. and British surveillance were not accidentally leaked. Snowden supplied them in written answers to interrogatives sent to him by Poitras and Appelbaum in May 2013 while he was still on the NSA payroll. He also carefully orches- trated the exposure of the PRISM surveillance programs, precisely specifying, as Greenwald writes in his book No Place to Hide, who was to release the “scoops” in which newspapers. He gave Gellman a seventy-two-hour ultimatum for exposing PRISM, as we know. He further provided Poitras with well-organized files for publications revealing, among other things, that the NSA had paid RSA, a lead- ing computer security provider, to build flawed encryption protocols, which allowed the NSA to read encrypted messages on computers and online video games. In short, he used these journalists to accom- plish his purpose. In light of the way he micromanaged the leaks, it is difficult to conclude that he did not deliberately plan to compromise and render useless these U.S. and British operations. Whatever he intended, he clearly succeeded in blowing the cover off NSA’s operations authorized under the Foreign Intelligence Sur- ) veillance Act for monitoring terrorists’ activities. After all, terrorist © groups are no different from other criminal enterprises in their need to keep their communications secret from the authorities pursuing them. If they find out that the police are tapping their phone lines or intercepting other channels of communication, they can be expected to either stop using them or use them to divert attention away from their real plans. In addition, Snowden suggested an alternative means to those who wanted to evade government surveillance. He recommended that they use end-to-end encryption, which results in messages being encrypted before they are sent over the Internet. He told Greenwald, for example, that encryption was “critically necessary” for anyone to evade NSA surveillance. Just as Robert Hanssen had deliberately compromised the NSA’s interception of Soviet communications in Washington, D.C., in the 1990s, Snowden deliberately compromised the NSA’s interception of concealed messages by potential terrorists on the Internet. We cannot know whether or not any of the jihadists involved in subsequent terrorist attacks (such as those in Paris or San Bernardino, California, in 2015) would have used the Internet | | Epst_9780451494566_2p_all_r.indd 296 ® 9/3016 8:13AM | | HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_019784