The Snowden Effect Technology is at the center of most U.S.-China tensions today. Edward Snowdenʼs leaks helped put it there. By Eli Binder and Katrina Northrop — December 6, 2020 Illustration by Luis Grañena In March 2012, a 28-year-old federal contractor named Edward Snowden first reported to the National Security Agencyʼs Kunia Regional Security Operations Center on the Hawaiian island of Oahu. Though he would later hatch a complex plan to leak highly classified intelligence documents, Snowdenʼs original contract was for a straightforward task: detect and thwart Chinese hacking of U.S. government operations. The mission was urgent. Chinese cyber attacks against the U.S. were on the rise, and by the end of that year, attacks from China accounted for more than 40 percent of the worldʼs activity, according to a study by Akami Technologies. In the depths of the Kunia base — a decrepit former Navy Armory that NSA employees nicknamed “The Tunnel” — a team of NSA experts focused on what top defense officials had called “Chinaʼs cyber thievery.” By then, Snowden was well versed in Chinaʼs hacking operations. In 2010, when he worked at the NSAʼs Pacific Technical Center outside of Tokyo, he gave a training presentation on the China threat for U.S. intelligence employees. Danielle Massarini, the training organizer who had spent her entire career in Chinese counterintelligence, would later call Snowdenʼs session “without question the best cyber briefing on China intel weʼd ever had.”1 But along the way, Snowden grew increasingly disaffected with what he perceived to be the NSAʼs overreach. He began to anonymously communicate with journalists, and just over a year after his initial report date, he left Hawaii and fled to Hong Kong with a massive trove of digital documents that revealed NSA programs surveilling both American and foreign nationals with the help of major U.S. tech companies such as AT&T and Verizon. By sharing the classified documents with journalists, Snowdenʼs disclosures created an international firestorm and fueled debate in the U.S. about the proper balance between civil liberties and national security. But the leaked documents also had an unintended impact in Beijing, not far from where Snowden was holed up in a Kowloon hotel. Edward Snowden speaking in a 2013 interview in Hong Kong. Snowden revealed details of top-secret surveillance conducted by the United Statesʼ National Security Agency regarding telecom data. Credit: The Guardian via Getty Images For China, the leaks offered critical revelations. Not only could the U.S. governmentʼs complaints about Chinaʼs cyber thievery be seen as disingenuous — the U.S., after all, was shown to have hacked Huawei, Chinaʼs private telecom company — but America itself was monitoring its own citizens. Whatʼs more, it was using private tech companies as a backdoor to aid in that effort. Suddenly, the risks of relying on U.S. technology for Chinese technology infrastructure were painfully obvious. “The Snowden files were a really big deal for us,” recalls Lyu Jinghua, a PLA colonel at the time and now a visiting scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “What we read from the Snowden files showed that almost all the big companies in China were actually collaborating with American intelligence agencies. Some not quite actively, but some were collaborating really actively. That made China feel really insecure using all these components from American companies.” Although China had long sought to reduce its reliance on foreign technology, the Snowden revelations altered the trajectory of those plans, acting as a kind of accelerant that caught the U.S. and American companies off guard. Snowdenʼs actions also emboldened China to view cyberspace in the most cynical terms possible — not only as a new theatre for conflict, but as a space devoid of trust. The aftermath of this turning point is painfully evident today with Chinaʼs efforts to boost domestic giants like Huawei and ZTE, decouple from foreign internet infrastructure and expand its dragnet of digital surveillance of its own citizens. “The Snowden leaks dramatically changed Chinese policy towards the internet, its own people, the United States, and the world, with respect to the internet and cyber security,” says Max Baucus, the former Montana senator who eight months after the leaks arrived in Beijing as the U.S. Ambassador to China. “It was a watershed development. You could feel it.” The contents of the leaks from Snowden — who could not be reached for comment for this article — probably werenʼt a complete surprise to Beijing. China had its own sophisticated hacking capabilities, and was likely aware of the NSAʼs web of surveillance. But the scope of American operations was stunning, raising the possibility that China could be more vulnerable to U.S. efforts.2 And so with U.S. hypocrisy on stark display, Beijing had a field day. “These, along with previous allegations, are clearly troubling signs,” said a columnist for Xinhua, the official state-run news agency. “They demonstrate that the United States, which has long been trying to play innocent as a victim of cyber attacks, has turned out to be the biggest villain in our age.” In Snowdenʼs 2019 autobiography, Permanent Record, he recalls leaking classified information in 2013. Just before, on May 22, 2013 at the National Press Club in Washington, as Snowden was en route to Hong Kong, Dennis C. Blair, a retired Navy admiral and the former Director of National Intelligence under President Obama, and Jon M. Huntsman Jr., the former U.S. Ambassador to China, held a joint press conference to publicize the release of a detailed study of Chinaʼs industrial espionage, its effort to steal IP from American companies, sometimes through sophisticated cyber attacks. Members of the commission that published the report included Craig R. Barrett, the former chairman and chief executive of Intel, and former Deputy Secretary of Defense William Lynn. It was supposed to be a wake up call to American firms, and a warning to China to cease its cyber theft activities.3 Now, no one cared. It was the U.S. that was suddenly cast as a villain. Back in Beijing, Xi Jinping had been Chinaʼs president for just 12 weeks when Snowden told the world what the U.S. was doing. The beginning of Xiʼs term was already full of aggressive campaigns — like tackling corruption in the Communist Party and building a permanent military presence in the South China Sea — but after Snowden, an urgent focus on cybersecurity joined the list. “The Snowden revelations created a perfect event that galvanized concerns around U.S. technological dominance,” says Rogier Creemers, a postdoctoral scholar in Modern China Studies at Leiden University. “Thatʼs really where the ball starts rolling on what ends up being an almost complete reconstruction of the Chinese cyber governance system.” In 2014, Beijing established the Cyberspace Administration, a centralized body to oversee internet policy and digital propaganda, with Xi himself at the helm. Two years later, it enacted a cybersecurity law that required critical network equipment to be approved by the Chinese government and banned most of the countryʼs data from being stored outside of China. The result is an authoritarian cyber governance system that is distinct from American influence. China also pushed the accelerator on other initiatives aimed at building up its economy and challenging Americaʼs technological supremacy. There was the “Thousand Talents” program, which sought to attract global talents, Made in China 2025, a program begun in 2015 that aimed to fast-tracking high tech manufacturing capabilities, as well as government efforts to encourage Chinese firms to acquire foreign technologies overseas, especially in Silicon Valley. Looking back, Snowdenʼs revelations may have also helped set the stage for this darker period in U.S.-China relations, which emerged during the Trump administration. In the aftermath of the 2013 leaks, China stepped up its cyberattacks on U.S. companies and the U.S. federal agencies. China also found reasons to crack down on American companies doing business in China — including the tech giant Qualcomm — and to force U.S. firms to share technology. Trust quickly dissipated. Indeed, even before Washington began blacklisting Chinese firms and attempting to ban Chinese apps over national security concerns, Beijing had made it increasingly clear that, post-Snowden, American internet companies were no longer welcome in China. This would escalate, and Chinaʼs leaders would eventually test the limits of the open internet itself. PANDORAʼS BOX Most observers point to Chinaʼs introduction of the Great Firewall in 2000 as the first tear in the seams of the global internet. The vast censorship apparatus blocks overseas sites like Google, Facebook and The New York Times, and was the first attempt to control the vast flow of information online. “The founding of the Great Firewall was the Bunker Hill of the bifurcation of the internet,” says Orville Schell, the Arthur Ross director of the Center on U.S.-China Relations at the Asia Society. “Everything else is a footnote.” One of the first notable footnotes came in 2010, when anti-government activists in Tunisia used Facebook to organize the Jasmine Revolution. The ability of the internet to channel the unrest in Tunisia into political change — Tunisian President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali was ousted after 23 years in power — was touted in the West as proof of the internetʼs liberating potential and in China as proof of the Great Firewallʼs necessity. But if the Great Firewall is the Bunker Hill in the internetʼs bifurcation, the Snowden revelations were its Battle of Saratoga. Just two days after the first Snowden story appeared on the Guardianʼs front page, President Barack Obama and President Xi Jinping met in Rancho Mirage, California.