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By Wesley Wark
CIPS Working Paper, June 2016

• On a Friday in early June 2013, a leak of a highly classified US intelligence document concerning a surveillance program called PRISM, which tapped into the servers of major US internet companies such as Apple, and Google, made the headlines of the UK newspaper, The Guardian. It was the beginning of an unprecedented saga that roiled US politics and the US intelligence community, and impacted many other countries around the world, including Canada, because it touched on the sensitive issue of the interception of global and domestic communications. The source of the leaks was soon identified as Edward Snowden, a National Security Agency (NSA) contractor. Snowden had fled to Hong Kong and had chosen to give selected media representatives whom he trusted (especially Glenn Greenwald, then working for The Guardian newspaper, and documentary film maker Laura Poitras) full access to the material he had acquired, leaving it to them to frame the news reporting. Snowden also included, with a preliminary batch of NSA records he sent to Greenwald, a manifesto that he wanted to publish.
• It read: “The US government, in conspiracy with their client states, chiefest among them the Five Eyes—the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand—have inflicted upon the world a system of secret, pervasive surveillance from which there is no refuge. They protect their domestic system from the oversight of citizenry through classification and lies, and shield themselves from outrage in the event of leaks by overemphasizing limited protections they choose to grant the governed…”
• This was the beginning of Snowden’s own perilous journey into whistleblowing, into exile, and into a version of fame, and the beginning of a massive and sustained period of media reporting about a subject that rarely made its way into the news—the practice of global signals intelligence.

Wesley Wark is currently a Visiting Professor at the University of Ottawa’s Graduate School of Public and International Affairs. He is a professor emeritus at the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs. He holds a Ph.D. from the London School of Economics and an MA from Cambridge University.