The Snowden Archive-in-a-Box: A year of travelling experiments in outreach and education

Abstract

The Snowden Archive-in-a-Box is an offline wireless network and web server providing private access to a replica of the Snowden Digital Surveillance Archive. The online version is hosted by Canadian Journalists for Free Expression. A work-in-development since April 2015, the Archive-in-a-Box is both a research tool and a tool for public education on data surveillance. The original version is powered with battery packs and housed in a 1960s spy style briefcase. When it is turned on, anybody in the vicinity can access the archive by connecting their wireless device to the Snowden Archive WiFi network and browsing to a website. Open the briefcase up and one finds a wood panel with a flatscreen inset, playing back the IP traffic of the archive's current users. Thus, while an audience such as a class of students or workshop group can access the Snowden documents and learn about mass surveillance from primary materials, they are also shown what data surveillance ‘looks like’. This Commentary explores my experiences during the first year of the Snowden Archive-in-a-Box. I examine my experiences as an international traveller carrying a suspicious briefcase of Top Secret materials and this project's reception by certain audiences. The project is still a prototype, yet it is quickly gathering a following and a number of permanent installations around the world. What could this mean for the future of surveillance education and leaks-enabled research?

Introduction

The Snowden Digital Surveillance Archive was launched on 4 March 2015 at Ryerson University in Toronto, Canada. ¹ It is an archive of all of the documents leaked by Edward Snowden that have been subsequently published in the media and, when it was launched, the Archive was the first effort of its kind. The Snowden Archive-in-a-Box (SAIB) ² is an offline version of this archive that permits users to conduct research securely wherever they may be. It runs on a RaspberryPi ³ mini computer and can be built for around $100. A second module permits for the visual display of surveillance, playing back the actions of the archive's users for all to see. This Commentary explores my experiences of travelling and interacting with a diversity of audiences during the first year of the SAIB. I examine the reactions of different audiences in different contexts and my experiences as an international traveller carrying a suspicious black briefcase overflowing with Top Secret materials and tiny computers. While the SAIB project is still a prototype, it is quickly gathering a following and today boasts a number of permanent installations around the world. This short piece explores the journey thus far and asks: what could the experience of the SAIB mean for the future of leaks research and surveillance education?

The beginning

Shortly after the launch of the Snowden Digital Surveillance Archive, I emailed Andrew Clement, professor at the University of Toronto Faculty of Information and instigator of the Archive, to ask if I could develop an offline version. My initial inspirations were two-fold. First, as explained by Greenwald (2014) and others, much of our online communications are monitored by intelligence agencies and browsing certain websites can potentially mark an individual as worthy of targeted, rather than simply mass, surveillance. An online archive of the Snowden can thus be viewed as a honeypot, one that enables targeted mass surveillance by attracting interested parties to its top secret nectar. If users were able to anonymously use an offline network – one with no connection to the Internet – their actions would not be subject to mass surveillance. Secondly, I did not want this noble effort to fall victim to the sort of pressure tactics that pushed WikiLeaks off-line be they denial-of-service (DDOS) attacks or financial pressures. Since publishing leaks of American diplomatic cables, WikiLeaks had been victim of infrastructural attacks, denied service by American infrastructure providers and denied service by financial services companies (Cannon, 2013: 306). In order to decentralize the distribution of the archive's contents, a simple image could be offered for download and distributed through peer-to-peer networking, eliminating any central chokepoint. Designed to run on a RaspberryPi, the SAIB could be replicated by anybody with $100 and a little know-how. Finally, I decided to add a visualization module in order to expand the educational possibilities of the project. Often, when speaking with individuals and audiences, I find it is difficult to succinctly explain and demonstrate what is “wrong” with mass surveillance and to show “what” it is. The visualization module “plays back”, in real-time, the TCP/IP (Internet protocol) conversations taking place between a user's wireless device and the Archive.

Baby steps

The SAIB was born from experiments with the PirateBox ⁴ and a collaboration with Iannis Zannos ⁵ of Ionian University in Corfu, Greece, a member of an EU-funded travelling installation project called Performigrations. ⁶ An early protype with a touchscreen interface was included in Performigrations' Montreal performance series entitled Mobile Interventions: YUL. ⁷ Installations were mounted at the Blue Metropolis literary festival (23–26 April 2015) ⁸ and at the Italian Cultural Institute (28 April–10 May 2015). ⁹ I then brought the Archive-in-a-Box to the Union for Democratic Communication conference at the University of Toronto (1–3 May 2015). In all three of these settings, its presence was subtle. There was a simple black briefcase (Figure 1) sitting in a room, or on a shelf, or on a table. Anybody looking would see the SnowdenArchive WiFi network, but I hadn't begun to make an effort to draw the two together.

Figure 1.

The Snowden Archive-in-a-Box.

Following public interest emerging from these events, I was invited to bring the Archive-in-a-Box to the Biografilm Festival ¹⁰ in Bologna, Italy where, on 12 June 2015, I gave a lecture on freedom of expression and mass surveillance as part of the festival's summer school ¹¹ and collaborated with my students to mount an installation during the festival's awards ceremony. It was a perfect match – I would arrive towards the end of a festival that had opened with a screening of Citizenfour (Poitras et al., 2015), Laura Poitras' documentary that captured the hand-over of Snowden's documents to journalists. The topic of mass surveillance would thus already be in the air. These were the archive's first public performances and the results were quite interesting. During my summer school lecture to a group of 30 students, average age 23, I explained the legal and human rights concept of privacy, had them connect their cellphones to the Archive, and guided them through some of the Snowden documents. Having mined their social media accounts, I also presented them with somewhat anonymized profiles of themselves. ¹² They were also free to explore. This was the first chance any of these students had to access the Snowden documents and one can see smiles of wonderment in the photo in Figure 2.

Figure 2.

Biografilm lecture.

Throughout the initial part of the lecture, the black briefcase containing the archive was casually sitting next to me on-stage. Once they were familiar with the concepts and mechanics of privacy and mass surveillance I asked one of the students to come to the stage, open the suitcase and show it to the class. While not quite captured by the pictures (Figure 3), their reactions quickly turned from inquisitive elation to genuine concern. Understanding now how fundamentally simple it is to conduct mass surveillance when one controls the digital infrastructure, my students asked me for practical resources to protect themselves. ¹³

Figure 3.

Student asking for secure communication tools, Biografilm lecture.

Finally, the majority of students volunteered to be my assistants in putting together a public installation of the Archive during the Biografilm Festival awards ceremony cocktail. They quickly commandeered a table, made signs and set it up in the middle of the plaza. Over the course of 90 minutes, while the crowd of festival-goers came to drink wine and meet the actors, directors and producers, this wonderful crew of students interviewed attendees about their perspectives on mass surveillance and privacy and invited them to use the Archive. Some photos and video interviews are shown in Figure 4.

Figure 4.

Biografilm school. https://youtu.be/p55lVoZhqis; https://youtu.be/OqQqR5NILEQ; https://youtu.be/yvF6y7R739U.

From Bologna, I made my way to the UK where I and the archive would make three stops. For my trip to Bologna and then on to the UK, I disassembled the Archive-in-a-Box, assuming I would attract less airport attention travelling with a suitcase laden with electronics than with the fully functional artifact itself. My first stop in the UK was the office of Privacy International (PI) for an interview with then-Deputy Director Eric King. The Archive in its most minimal form made an appearance in the PI kitchen for an afternoon – a circuit board plugged into a battery, set in a baking dish to protect it from spills. The following day I would board a bus to Cardiff where the Archive was made its first appearance in front of an international audience of academics, activists and journalists at the Surveillance and Citizenship Conference. ¹⁴ All festival attendees were greeted by this image when they arrived (Figure 5).

Figure 5.

Surveillance and Citizenship conference.

In addition to talking about on-going research on shareholder activism, I gave an informal presentation on the Archive-in-a-Box and getting into the details of how it operates (Figure 6).

Figure 6.

The insides of the Snowden Archive-in-a-Box.

Figure 7.

Snowden Archive-in-a-Box at International Association for Media and Communication Research (IAMCR).

Figure 8.

Twitter attention.

Figure 9.

Snowden Archive-in-a-Box, Cambridge University.

This event was the beginning of a snowball. Vian Bakir and Andrew McStay of Bangor University in Wales invited me to a September DATA-PSST ¹⁵ workshop on visualizing transparency. Chris Patterson, of the University of Leeds, invited me to bring the Archive-in-a-Box to the International Association of Media and Communication Researchers conference in Montreal where on 14 July 2015 it would share the stage with PI's then Legal Director Carly Nyst ¹⁶ and David Lyon, the director of the Surveillance Studies Centre at Queen's University (Figure 7). ¹⁷

With a live audience of over 900 in a large theatre at the Université du Québec à Montréal, the Archive-in-a-Box attracted a fair bit of attention. Conference attendees posted pictures on Twitter and a large group approached me at the end (Figure 8).

One of the attendees was Ella McPherson from Cambridge University's Ethics of Big Data Research Group ¹⁸ who invited me to give a seminar and to build an Archive-in-a-Box for Cambridge.

The contradictions of attention

Since the beginning, the SAIB has almost taken on a life of its own, attracting quite a bit of attention with zero investment in public relations and a minimal amount spent on hardware. The software used is all open-source. While I was, of course, hoping this project would be seen as interesting enough to be adopted by others, it has also served as somewhat of a litmus test for the algorithmic logic of mass surveillance. It may seem obvious to say: research and activism around mass surveillance attracts mass surveillance. While I lived in Montreal for 20 years and carried out all of this work while based there, I am originally American. As an American living abroad and involved in the dissemination of the Snowden files, I assume I am subject to targeted mass surveillance. While I haven't let this interfere with my personal life, in August 2015 it introduced a palpable level of fear into my United States-based family. While I won't go into details out respect for their privacy, my family's experience – and experiences I would have in the UK and Germany two months later, made it clear that my work has made it onto the National Security Agency (NSA) radar. I have always expected to be targeted by machines; I never expected to targeted and surveilled by humans.

Super-charged autumn

In September 2015 I headed back to the UK for a brief trip, again lugging along the SAIB. My travels thus far had taken me by air through airport security and border crossings in the United States, Canada, Italy and the UK and nobody had so much as commented on my luggage or asked me what I was doing. This time I decided to leave it assembled in order to (1) save myself a lot of trouble; and (2) see if it was of interest to any customs or airport security agents. My flight route sent me from Montreal to Amsterdam, Amsterdam to Manchester. Eventually I would arrive in Leeds by train for Capitalism, Culture and the Media. ¹⁹ I attracted no attention whatsoever.

October 2015 brought a whirlwind. Following a couple guest lectures in Montreal, I returned to Europe, this time four events in three cities in the UK and Germany in eight days. I would give talks in Cambridge, Berlin and Bournmouth. Two days before I was due to speak at Cambridge University news broke that Barton Gellmann, who had covered the Snowden leaks for the Washington Post, had been subjected to a frightening bout of censorship at Purdue University in the United States. Over the course of a 90-minute keynote address about the NSA, Gellmann used a few slides taken from Snowden documents. Afterwards, he was informed by numerous attendees that the documents he had displayed were still considered classified. As Gellmann explains here, ²⁰ his acts were in violation of an agreement that Purdue University maintains with the US Department of Defense as a research institution that receives funding for classified research. Thus, they were under obligation to destroy any copies of classified information that may have been divulged – including any video of the event. Thus, I was a little wary when preparing for my trip. Plus, this time I would be travelling with a full set of components to build a second archive at Cambridge.

Travelling a second time with the Archive-in-a-Box fully assembled, I finally caught the eye of a security agent manning the x-ray machine in Charles de Gaulle Airport. Asked to put all my computers through the machine, I explained what I had inside the briefcase. When I took out the Archive – flatscreen inset in a stained wooden panel, mounted on a platform of plexiglass with two RaspberryPis, video controller, and 3-D printed screws his reaction was somewhat unexpected. “Wow, did you make that with plans you found online? C'est vraiment chouette, ça! That's very cool!” Please proceed.

At Cambridge, I was met by a box of tools from the Queen's College carpenter and spent the night sawing and drilling. The following day, 21 October 2015, I gave a talk much like the one presented in Bologna, but with more technical detail and speaking to a expert audience of researchers. At the end, we assembled their archive, which was then put on display for the remainder of the semester and is now used for teaching about the political economy of mass surveillance. The Cambridge archive can be seen in Figure 9.

Thirty minutes after my talk I ran for the train to get my flight from London-Stansted Airport to Berlin's Schönefeld Airport. My first flight on Ryanair, my exhaustion moderated the sensory harshness of the experience. Everything seemed pretty normal. A prisoner of some sort being returned to Berlin by uniformed police, a large mid-fifties rugby type with bald head, handlebar moustache and two pairs of sunglasses on his head … this man would somehow be on my return flight – on British Airways, from Tegel Airport to London Heathrow.

In Berlin, I attended the UN|COMMONS ²¹ conference organized by the Berliner Gazette. ²² They had gotten wind of both the online archive and the offline projects and the SAIB was ultimately the centre of a two-day workshop entitled Snowden Files for All? ²³ My time with them was peaceful and inspiring, never a sign or suspicion that I was “being watched”. When I travel, I tend to connect my computer to my university's virtual private network (VPN), ensuring an encrypted connection between my hotel and my university and while at the UN|COMMONS, this worked perfectly from the EasyHotel where I was staying. Following this, I shared the stage with MI-5 whistleblower Annie Machon, Der Spiegel journalist Marcel Rosenbach and University of Bangor's Vian Bakir at the European Broadcasting Union's 10th News Assembly. ²⁴ The EBU brings together all of Europe's public broadcasters plus a number of others around the world for a combined viewership of over one billion people. In retrospect, a crowd like this is bound to draw attention. After my first night at the Park Inn Radisson, I began to feel uneasy. ²⁵ My VPN was dysfunctional, but my normal Internet connectivity was fine. When I explained the situation to the manager of my university's VPN, she said “things are fine here, sounds scary, leave that hotel”. While this was easy enough to cope with, I would be in for a shock when the 50-something rugby type appeared on my return flight, a flight booked by different people, on a different airline from a different airport. And on my return to the UK, I was to experience my most probing customs and immigration questioning to date.

In line at London Heathrow, the non-EU resident queue. Rugby type a few heads ahead of me, although he is British. My bus to get the train to get to Bournemouth leaves in 30 minutes. With 10 minutes left, and a suitcase to find, I reach the front. The agent is a man of East Asian descent in his mid-30s. He looks at my passport with curiosity.

Agent: You were just here four days ago. And last month, and a few months before. What are you doing here?

Me: (Holding suspicious black briefcase laden with Snowden documents) I'm an academic researcher. I'm giving some talks.

Agent: Well what are these talks about?

Me: Mass surveillance

Agent: Um, what?

Me: I've been giving talks about mass surveillance.

Agent: Um, ok. Who paid for your travels?

Me: For the most part, the people who invited me.

Agent: And the rest?

Me: I have some funds from my university to cover the difference.

Agent: OK, you can go. Have a nice day.

Winter in Berlin

Following the UN|COMMONS, Andrew Clement and I were invited to bring our projects to the transmediale festival in Berlin in February 2016. ²⁶ Invited in conjunction with the Snowden Document Search team and the duo behind Cryptome, we spent three days immersed in Snowden archives. This event usually draws around 20,000 attendees over four days in the Haus de Kulturen der Welt ²⁷ and we blanketed the public space with Snowden Archive WiFi. Our presence was largely organized, again, by the Berliner Gazette and we spent a solid 10 hours in a workshop with the other Snowden archive creators as well as a diverse mix of other participants. ²⁸ After months of feeling somewhat like a travelling salesman, lugging my briefcase on planes and running through airports, being here felt like a final arrival. My flight path took me through two cities that come to mind when one thinks of Five Eyes surveillance – New York and London – before I finally landed in what has become somewhat of a Mecca for American hackers looking to work below-the-radar. Having overcome previous bouts of fear and uncertainty, I proudly walked the airport security and customs gauntlets with my black case, this time with a black and red Snowden Archive-in-a-Box sign on the side. No questions asked. Ever.

In sum

Like many, I was not astonished but was appalled when Glenn Greenwald's partner David Miranda was detained at London Heathrow while carrying USB keys of Snowden documents. ²⁹ Over the past year, I've engaged in an effort to make these documents accessible to the public and to provide a mechanism for using an archive of them securely and off-line. I've done so in a very public manner and perhaps this is bit of why I have felt only subtle symbolic pressure suggesting that I am being watched. Academia can be a wonderfully privileged world to do critical work within and I am far from the only individual with stakes in this project. To date, there are SAIB installations either in progress or installed at Concordia University (Montreal), University of Toronto, Ryerson University (Toronto), York University (Toronto), Queen's University (Kingston, Ontario), University of Victoria (Victoria, British Columbia), Cambridge University (UK), London School of Economics (UK), University of Paderborn (Germany) and Victoria University of Wellington (New Zealand). Would you, dear reader, wish to setup your own Archive-in-a-Box at your university/library/cafe/bar, please feel free to get in touch. ³⁰