7. Wrongry Birds
This is a chapter from News of Devils: The Media and Edward Snowden. The next chapter is linked to at the foot of the page. This can also be read as part of the free ebook Need to Know, which you can download here.
A few decades from now, I suspect historians will be excavating Twitter’s servers to analyze the Snowden saga. Although the platform is still routinely dismissed as trivial—usually by those not using it—it has radically transformed how journalists and their readers communicate with each other, and it has been the public square in which a lot of the Snowden debate has taken place.
Almost all of the journalists and editors who have worked on the Snowden story are active on Twitter, and some are very avid users of it. Glenn Greenwald currently has over 400,000 followers, but a tweet from him will usually reach many more people, because lots of his followers will retweet him to their followers, who will then see it even if they don’t follow him, and so might in turn retweet it to their followers.
This has had a considerable impact on the debate around Snowden’s disclosures, because a tweet can and often is read by more people than an article it links to. There has been research suggesting that people often share links on social media to material that they haven’t fully read, listened to or watched. Traffic analysis company Chartbeat has examined this in some detail.[1] In a discussion about Upworthy in February 2014, the CEO of Chartbeat tweeted that the company had ‘found effectively no correlation between social shares and people actually reading’.[2]
That statement of his was retweeted over 100 times, and most people who did that would surely have read it. It’s simply a lot easier to read a few tweets than slog through a whole article, or even a book, and we’ve become used to it.
In effect, tweets often act like banners or headlines, and frequently give the Twitter user’s spin on an article. This can be very influential, especially if you then don’t read the story in full. Most of the Snowden documents that have been covered by the media have very complicated contexts: a bite-sized explanation of what a long article exploring an even longer document can be an attractive proposition, but also often results in a black and white impression. This is convenient for any journalists who are fudging a story or making it seem more important than it is. A lot of people will click on a new Snowden story, glance at the headline and the first few paragraphs and stop. If already shocked by previous revelations, there’s a good chance they’ll be shocked anew by the ‘take-home’ of the latest one. But if they read the whole story, a more nuanced picture would emerge.
A vivid example of this effect in practice is the story published by The Guardian, The New York Times and ProPublica in January 2014, working with each other. The Guardian’s headline was ‘Angry Birds and “leaky” phone apps targeted by NSA and GCHQ for user data’. The first three paragraphs read:
‘The National Security Agency and its UK counterpart GCHQ have been developing capabilities to take advantage of “leaky” smartphone apps, such as the wildly popular Angry Birds game, that transmit users’ private information across the internet, according to top secret documents.
The data pouring onto communication networks from the new generation of iPhone and Android apps ranges from phone model and screen size to personal details such as age, gender and location. Some apps, the documents state, can share users' most sensitive information such as sexual orientation—and one app recorded in the material even sends specific sexual preferences such as whether or not the user may be a swinger.
Many smartphone owners will be unaware of the full extent this information is being shared across the internet, and even the most sophisticated would be unlikely to realise that all of it is available for the spy agencies to collect.’[3]
Most people who read this far and who had ever played Angry Birds or anything like it were shocked and outraged. The impression they drew was that the NSA was spying on their apps and games, and extracting information about their lives from them. But if you read the whole piece, paragraph 17 states:
‘The documents do not make it clear how much of the information that can be taken from apps is routinely collected, stored or searched, nor how many users may be affected. The NSA says it does not target Americans and its capabilities are deployed only against “valid foreign intelligence targets”.’[4]
So there’s no evidence of wrongdoing, then—and the public interest defence in the story collapses as a result. If GCHQ and the NSA tried to do this on valid foreign intelligence targets, it’s a fair guess those targets weren’t aware that their apps could be accessed in such a way, making valuable intelligence vulnerable to being captured. But thanks to these articles, they might well have been alerted to the possibility. Western intelligence agencies might have lost several targets as a result of this—targets whose communications they wanted to infiltrate because they might provide valuable intelligence that would help protect national security.
The takeaway most people got from this story would have been ‘the NSA is currently exploiting Angry Birds’, and in some cases ‘the NSA might be gathering intelligence on me while I play Angry Birds’. This is a result of misrepresentations in the reporting. For instance, ProPublica’s headline was ‘Spy Agencies Probe Angry Birds and Other Apps for Personal Data’.[5] ‘Probe’ is in the present tense and the headline suggests the agencies are extracting personal data from it. But paragraph 19 of The Guardian’s article revealed that there wasn’t any evidence that Angry Birds had been exploited in this way—instead, a GCHQ document in 2012 had listed the code needed to do this, using the game as a case study to show what could be extracted from it. And to find the year of that GCHQ document I had to triangulate the reporting, as it’s mentioned by ProPublica and The New York Times, but not The Guardian. With all of these stories, there’s a bait and switch: an alarming claim at the top of the stories that, as you read further, you realise isn’t supported by the evidence. The New York Times story opened:
‘When a smartphone user opens Angry Birds, the popular game application, and starts slinging birds at chortling green pigs, spies could be lurking in the background to snatch data revealing the player’s location, age, sex and other personal information, according to secret British intelligence documents.’[6]
Well, yes, they could be. But there is no evidence they are. It’s not until paragraph 6 that the story comes clean and admits this:
‘The scale and the specifics of the data haul are not clear. The documents show that the N.S.A. and the British agency routinely obtain information from certain apps, particularly those introduced earliest to cellphones. With some newer apps, including Angry Birds, the agencies have a similar ability, the documents show, but they do not make explicit whether the spies have put that into practice.’[7]
And yet the reporting in all three publications leaned towards suggesting to their readers that this very thing was put into practice, and was current. ProPublica’s headline was flat-out misleading, but The New York Times and The Guardian did at least make some effort to add caveats early on. Attentive readers will have noted that hypothetical ‘could’ undermining the significance of the story in The New York Times’ opening paragraph, for instance. It’s true that spies could be lurking as you play Angry Birds, but they could be doing anything. These articles would have been in the public interest if they had presented any evidence that GCHQ and/or the NSA were indiscriminately accessing and actively using information of people who they had insufficient reasons to suspect were a threat to national security—but none of the three articles did that. Indeed, of nearly 300 articles published to date from Snowden’s material, almost none of them present evidence of that.[8]
The Guardian, meanwhile, used a photograph of Angry Birds in their piece but noted in the caption that this was as part of a case study. But newspapers know that people generally won’t read as carefully as this, and that they will give the wrong impression. They are trying to give the wrong impression, in fact, because they want the headline and early paragraphs to generate outrage among readers, so they read it and share it. That’s more likely to happen if they imply that a hypothetical proposal from 2012 is a current operation, and that it might be aimed at their own readers. That Guardian caption, for instance, read ‘GCHQ documents use Angry Birds—reportedly downloaded more than 1.7bn times—as a case study for app data collection’. Most won’t have read that caption, but simply seen the accompanying image and presumed that Angry Birds was being exploited. But even if you did read the caption, you would probably have assumed by its use of the present tense that the GCHQ documents in question were current rather than from two years earlier. One could argue that the caption was technically correct, as the documents exist in the present, but it’s misleading nevertheless, and deliberately so. Because ‘Internal GCHQ documents from 2012 discussed the hypothetical use of Angry Birds to collect intelligence against suspected targets’ isn’t as exciting a story. In fact, it’s not a story at all, as there’s no public interest to it—there’s no evidence of wrongdoing here, just the exposing of classified information about an idea our intelligence agencies had. It was an interesting story, certainly. But it wasn’t in the public interest.
This clickbait sensationalist approach is the pattern of a lot of media today, of course, but it’s disheartening to see it applied to our national security secrets, especially by newspapers as respected as The Guardian and The New York Times. And once it had appeared there, the Chinese whispers began and the story became even more baldly stated and lurid. In a White House press conference, Victoria Jones of Talk Radio News Service said: ‘The NSA is lurking in the background of your game of Angry Birds, waiting to scoop up all your personal data as you lob hapless creatures into the air. It feels like this is the last bastion of American freedom that’s been breached.’[9] ABC News ran a story headlined ‘A Little (Angry) Bird Told the NSA What You’re Up To’.[10]
That headline epitomises one of the biggest problems with the media’s approach to the Snowden leaks: it distorts the truth to drive traffic, misrepresenting an unrealized idea from 2012 to legitimately target suspected bad actors as a current operation directed at invading the privacy of you, the reader. This sort of story—and there have been hundreds of them in the coverage of Snowden’s documents—has created a new kind of scaremongering. Where national security state hawks once sold the public the message ‘BE AFRAID—THE TERRORISTS ARE PLANNING TO ATTACK US!’, the Snowden story has repeatedly sold the public a new but equally terrifying narrative: ‘BE AFRAID—YOUR GOVERNMENT IS SPYING ON YOU!’ As the public only knows what the Snowden documents contain through the distorted lens of this kind of coverage in the media, it’s little wonder that the debate over surveillance reform has largely been framed as being about the needless invasion of citizens’ privacy.