Cyber secrets discussed at the Motel 6
Snowden didn’t tell us anything we didn’t already know
The next generation of Edward Snowdens queued on secret soil. These were two dozen high school students from as far away as California, participants in this summer’s University of Maryland CyberPatriot Boot Camp. Clad in black T’s and swagger, they seemed well suited for a life in the digital shadows.
“Do you think Edward Snowden is a hero or a traitor?” I asked one of the boys in line.
“Yes,” the young man cryptically agreed.
We were just outside the fortified sanctum of the National Security Agency, for which Comrade Snowden, age 30, briefly worked as an outside contractor before absconding to Hong Kong and the Moscow airport and expounding on how the U.S. government is fracking, cracking, tracking, and stacking every email, phone call, text message, and Mother’s Day card we issue, then caching them as evidence against us, just in case we ever get suspected of jaywalking, uttering, or murder.
About all that an unsecured tourist is allowed to see at the National Security Agency is a building that used to be a Motel 6, back when a room at a Motel 6 actually cost six dollars.
This musty old hostel now contains the National Cryptologic Museum, a comprehensive display of hot-war ciphers and Cold War skulduggery that is staffed by retired NSA workers. One of them is David McClellan, a 35-year veteran of the agency and its if-I-tell-you-I’ll-have-to-kill-you attitude.
“Do you think Edward Snowden is a hero or a traitor?” I asked McClellan as he led me through the exhibits. “No comment,” he replied. On one wall were photographs of 12 men who had been sent to prison for spilling state secrets. These were scoundrels such as NSA analyst Ronald W. Pelton, who was sentenced to three terms of life in prison in 1986 for dishing dirt to the Reds, and Jonathan Pollard, the Israeli mole who got off easy: only one lifetime in the brig.
Waiting to be similarly framed were Edward Snowden and Bradley Manning, the U.S. soldier whose court-martial on charges of communicating confidential files and videos to WikiLeaks was, at this writing, dragging through its second month at the Fort Meade army base, just a few hundred metres from the NSA and the Motel 6.
In the museum gift shop, which stocks a broad selection of NSA hoodies, the sales clerk, what a surprise, wouldn’t tell me her name.
“Do you think Edward Snowden is a hero or a traitor?” I asked her.
“He’s a traitor,” the vendor anonymously vouched. “But I don’t think he knows half as much as they’re saying. He was only here a few months.
“I read in Wired magazine last year that the NSA is building a new facility in Utah to keep records of everybody’s cellphone calls. So it’s not like he told us anything we didn’t already know.”
(Indeed, Wired had reported in March 2012 that the NSA’s gigantic new Utah Data Center was being erected to store, “in near-bottomless databases … all forms of communication, including the complete contents of private emails, cellphone calls, and Google searches, as well as all sorts of personal data trails — parking receipts, travel itineraries, bookstore purchases, and other digital ‘pocket litter.’ ”)
Central to this work, in the decades to come, would be men and women like the CyberPatriot Boot Campers, should they choose to pursue a career this century’s black arts.
One of their counsellors was a young woman named Triana McCorkle, a third-year student who is majoring in computer engineering at Maryland.
“Do you think Edward Snowden is a hero or a traitor?” I asked her.
“Everything you do is under surveillance,” McCorkle answered. “It’s too late for me to mind.”
“I don’t have anything to hide,” another group leader, a grad student named Cristin Caparotta, agreed. “I’m not interacting with terrorists.”
“Not knowingly, anyway,” Triana McCorkle inserted.
“I’m not doing anything that the NSA would be interested in,” Cristin Caparotta shrugged. “What are they going to look at? My text messages to my mom?”