What we all can learn from the story of Edward Snowden

The world changed in May 2013, when Edward Snowden flew from Hawaii to Hong Kong and offloaded a huge trove of NSA documents to investigative journalists. Before that point, while we may have suspected the US government was engaged in mass data collection and wholesale surveillance, there was no hard evidence to prove it.

When the Snowden revelations emerged, the security state was rocked to its core. Every day, new information came to light about the NSA and its “5 Eyes” partners across the world, the bulk collection of Verizon phone records, and incredibly invasive keylogging techniques.

But 5 years down the line, have we learned anything from the Snowden affair? With fears of surveillance and online crime still rising, maybe not. So it’s time for a quick recap of what we should have learned, and how we need to respond to Snowden’s famous data leak.

1. Private companies and the state are more or less one organization

This was the first thing that jumped out of the Snowden revelations. Time after time, companies that were technically distinct from the US government were found to be handing over customer information to the NSA. Verizon ws the most famous example, but almost all telecoms giants were implicated.

Has this changed since 2013? Yes, but not in a good way. As the New York Times reported in May 2018, the NSA has tripled the amount of call data it collects from private companies, gathering over 500 million calls every year from the biggest communications corporations.

Then there were out and out bribes for tech companies to comply with NSA policies. Under the PRISM program, which Snowden unmasked, the NSA paid companies like AT&T, Facebook, Yahoo, and Microsoft to help them conform to PRISM requirements.

Revelations like this should make us continually vigilant and skeptical about corporate privacy promises. But most of us have slipped back into our complacent ruts following 2013.

2. Even gamers aren’t safe from the security state

Some of the most fascinating revelations detailed by the Snowden papers reached deep into the fictional worlds of Second Life and World of Warcraft.

Spooks went as far as creating characters to enter these online games, supposedly in a quest to detect terrorists who were using these games as forums to build networks and stage attacks. It’s hard to imagine what the NSA offices were like where these units operated. And it’s creepy to think that thousands of players slaughtering dragons were deep state plants.

But the spies went beyond just playing the game. As the Verge documents, they also “used open-source packet-sniffing software to filter out data using parsing scripts provided by the UK’s GCHQ.”

So, alongside actually posing as orcs and elves, the NSA was collecting user data as players built their guilds and fought battles. If that kind of attitude still exists, gamers need to be very concerned about privacy when joining any multiplayer environment.

3. Cryptocurrency communities have reason to worry

While gamers and telecoms customers should definitely learn from Snowden, the same applies to the crypto community. And by this, we don’t just mean encrypting communications and using tools like VPNs (although if there’s one lesson to learn here, it’s that VPNs are absolutely essential).

One of the most recent insights to come out of the Snowdwen data leak is how focused the NSA was (and is) on infiltrating cryptocurrency communities and finding ways to unmask currency holders.

According to the Intercept (whose Glenn Greenwald is one of Snowden’s key partners), an NSA memo from 2013 stated that “Bitcoin is #1 priority”. At the time, the NSA was gathering password details, MAC addresses, and internet usage data about Bitcoin owners.

And the agency also leveraged bulk data collection from private companies to help identify Bitcoin users (another corporate-state collusion known as OAKSTAR).

We don’t know whether the NSA has extended its identification and surveillance capabilities since 2013. But there is enough evidence for complacent crypto-fans to think harder about privacy and security. If nothing else, there’s a lesson here for all net users to internalize: if it’s online, the NSA will track it. We’ve never seen a state with these kinds of powers.

What about the future? Has Snowden led to a positive change?

All of these can seem pretty overwhelming. And a detailed reading of the Snowden revelations should cause people to take notice. The data he liberated shows that the US government under Bush and Obama developed unprecedented tools (and motivations) to track our every move.

In the future, we can hope for more Edward Snowdens. But we can’t count on them. All we can do is keep track of security solutions, keep sensitive data offline if possible, and use reliable VPN services (for example CyberGhost) to guard our privacy. And if individuals take those measures across the world, there’s a slim chance we can tame the excesses of the secret state.