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Sarah Harrison: the woman behind whistleblowers Edward Snowden and Julian Assange

She spent 40 days stranded in a Moscow airport with Edward Snowden and was Julian Assange’s closest confidante. Here, Sarah Harrison tells Susannah Butter about life with the super-hackers

With a modest smile, Sarah Harrison is describing her role in the WikiLeaks network: “I’m not Snowden or Assange; I’m just a blonde girl.” But despite appearing to be a normal woman from Kent, “with the most boring name ever”, Harrison, aged 34, is at the centre of a powerful global group of activists working to uncover what they believe are government cover-ups and data breaches.

When NSA leaker Edward Snowden had his passport blocked by the US and was stranded at Moscow’s Sheremetyevo airport for 40 days in July 2013, it was Harrison who was by his side, working around the clock to get him asylum and not leaving the airport either. She “lived off horrible coffee and Burger King, which I still can’t eat”.

Before that she was Julian Assange’s personal assistant and girlfriend, spending a year holed up in Norfolk when he was under house arrest there in 2011, facing allegations of sexual assault in Sweden, and then visiting him every day at the Ecuadorian embassy.

The public latched on to the fact that a woman who went to the private Sevenoaks School in Kent was involved with Assange. Harrison is slim and tanned, with scraped-back curly hair and a gap-toothed smile. At first she is on edge and jumps when I say her name, but after that she relaxes and her manner is more like a friendly teacher than a hacker on the fringes of society.

She advised Stone on the section about Snowden’s escape, a period which she remembers in forensic detail. After Snowden leaked the NSA documents he contacted WikiLeaks for support and they sent Harrison to meet him in Hong Kong. From there she planned to take him to safety in Latin America, avoiding the US. “I first met him en route to the airport. He was a calm mix of resigned and hopeful, dealing with a tense situation,” she says.

“You don’t leak that many documents and think you’ll get away with it. He assumed he would be in prison or dead but we had a flight out so there was some hope.”

They pretended to be a couple on holiday. “I never realised there were so many stages to getting a flight. I remember holding my breath while they checked his passport. I lost perspective of time because it was so nerve-racking.”

Once they made it to Moscow they went to check in for their flights to Cuba but Snowden’s passport had been blocked. So began 40 days living in confinement with a man she had only just met, hiding from the world press in a tiny, windowless room that the “nice” airport staff gave them.

Harrison says that she “could have left at any time” but has a strong sense of duty. “You can’t abandon someone in that scenario. At each step there were more risks and it became more exciting so you keep going, but by that stage it was more that there was this great guy sitting next to me who needed help.”

When Snowden was eventually granted asylum in Moscow, Harrison stayed with him for three months “to make sure he was settled”. Now he has made a new life there, even though he was originally not keen to stay, and his girlfriend, a dancer, has come to live with him. “Their love story features heavily in the film,” says Harrison sweetly. “It’s romantic. She must be a strong lady. He kept her in the dark so she wouldn’t be implicated. Imagine waking up one day and seeing your boyfriend all over the news. But she stuck by him.”

Snowden is “not somebody who complains” and that stopped Harrison from “whining”. “It’s like complaining that it’s raining to Julian Assange, who can’t leave the embassy.”

She thought of Assange while she was there. “It gave me new-found respect for Julian. When I finally left the airport my eyes hurt focusing on long distances and I had bad headaches. I thought ‘imagine what it’ll be like for Julian when he hasn’t seen the horizon in four years’.”

https:// www.standard.co.uk/lifestyle/london-life/sarah-harrison-the-woman-behind-whistblowers-edward-snowden-and-julian-assange-a3342546.html

https:// www.standard.co.uk/lifestyle/london-life/sarah-harrison-the-woman-behind-whistblowers-edward-snowden-and-julian-assange-a3342546.html

Living off-grid, not knowing what country she will be in next, isn’t too hard for her. “I’ve never had a phone anyway.” Did it bother her family? “They just had to learn some encryption if they wanted to speak to me.”

The whistleblowers she’s met share a certain mindset. “It’s not just seeing illegality that seems to push them over the edge. It’s the hypocrisy they can’t stand. That’s why you see so many from the US — it makes these beautiful statements and is held up on a pedestal but working behind the scenes you see the lies, which enrages people to the point where they have to do something.”

Britain’s former counter-terrorism chief Cressida Dick has warned that Snowden’s leak made the world a more dangerous place and “handed the advantage to terrorists”. What does Harrison make of this argument? “This stems from propaganda spun by the government,” she says, speaking quickly, suggesting that this is a well-rehearsed rebuff. “They make these great rhetorical points but there’s nothing to back it up. You see it with Chelsea Manning. The government was at great pains to try and find any harm that had come from the releases yet they couldn’t find one person that had been harmed so came to the conclusion themselves that no harm had been done.”

Read more

Risk, film review – Assange exposed by own ambassador in documentary

At the moment WikiLeaks is criticising Hillary Clinton. “Julian said that choosing between Trump and Clinton is like choosing between gonorrhoea and syphilis.” She smiles indulgently at this “full-on way to put it”.

Does it ever feel as if she’s in the middle of an insurmountable challenge fighting against global governments, especially with Assange now in his fourth year at the Ecuadorian embassy? “It does. But once you’ve learned something you can’t unlearn it. If I were to walk away now I’d be abandoning friends I respect and that’s not in my nature. If I didn’t care about the work there are many other things I could be doing. I wake up every day and hear about people in prison for years, hiding in rooms, seeking asylum and you don’t walk away from that. My life is charmed compared to theirs.”

She continues: “People always wonder how I do such a risky job but it is living out my ideals. In many ways it is an incredibly exciting and privileged existence. I can’t imagine doing anything else.”

Follow Susannah Butter on Twitter: @susannahbutter

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MORE: #Manafort, who made his plea Thursday in Alexandria, Virginia, stands accused of 23 charges: preparing, filing, and subscribing to false tax returns, failing to report foreign bank accounts, bank fraud, and conspiracy to commit bank fraud https ://sptnkne.ws/gVn7 #Mueller

Should Manafort be convicted, he could face as many as 270 years in prison — but federal sentencing guidelines call for only four or five years.

His business partner Rick Gates was slammed with similar charges in late February. Both men were also charged with conspiracy against the US and making false statements in October, some of the first indictments in the Mueller probe. Manafort was also charged with conspiracy to launder over $30 million and failing to register as a foreign agent, and could face additional decades in prison if convicted.

After the February indictment, Manafort spokesman Jason Maloni announced that his client was innocent in a statement. "The new allegations against Mr. Manafort, once again, have nothing to do with Russia and 2016 election interference/collusion," the statement said. "Mr. Manafort is confident that he will be acquitted and violations of his constitutional rights will be remedied."

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https:// sputniknews.com/us/201803081062353624-fbi-us-fourth-amedment/

FBI 'End Run' Around Fourth Amendment Using Geek Squad Informants

US

22:00 08.03.2018(updated 22:03 08.03.2018)

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Documents released in response to a FOIA lawsuit show that the FBI has paid informants inside Best Buy’s computer repair service Geek Squad, which they use to sidestep the need for warrants to search people’s computers. This raises serious questions about whether the FBI-Geek Squad relationship enables the Bureau to bypass the Fourth Amendment.

After a year-long FOIA battle the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) recently obtained over a hundred pages of documents from the FBI on their 'particularly close relationship' with Geek Squad. They reveal that the Bureau has informants inside the company who perform searches on customers' computers and report illicit materials back to the FBI.

READ MORE: FBI Paid Best Buy’s Geek Squad to Search for Child Porn on Customer Computers

Sputnik spoke with Aaron Mackey, staff attorney for the EFF, who highlighted how the Bureau and the Geek Squad repair facility in Kentucky have worked together for a decade. Mackey commented:

"The most important new information is about the relationship between the repair facility and the FBI that goes back to at least 2008."

One memo from 2008 shows that Best Buy hosted a meeting of the FBI's Cyber Working Group at the Kentucky facility. FBI agents were taken on a tour of the premises, and documents describe how the agency's Louisville field office, ‘has maintained close liaison with the Geek Squad's management in an effort to glean case initiations and to support the division's Computer Intrusion and Cyber Crime programs.'

These 'case initiations' include paying Geek Squad employees to search customers' devices for illicit content, including child pornography. A fax records how the Louisville office paid $500 to a confidential informant inside Geek Squad, apparently as a reward for finding potentially illegal material on a computer that had been sent for repair. These payments from the FBI first emerged during legal proceedings against Mark Rettenmaier, a doctor charged with possession of child pornography after his computer was sent to the Kentucky repair facility.

READ MORE: Best Buy Employees Paid by FBI to Spy on Customers

The records show how over the years the FBI and Geek Squad developed a process for investigating the computers sent to Kentucky for repairs. A series of FBI investigations began when Geek Squad employees searched the computers, and then called the Louisville field office when they found suspected child pornography. An FBI agent then went to the facility to view the images or video for himself and assess whether the content was illegal. It was only at this point, after the FBI agent had already seen the computer files, that the Bureau applied for search warrants. This is what happened in Rettenmaier's case, though the FBI later admitted that the image that instigated their investigation did not meet the legal definition of illicit pornography.

https: //sputniknews.com/us/201803081062353624-fbi-us-fourth-amedment/

The exact nature of the FBI's relationship with the paid informants (or CHS — confidential human sources) is not clear. One page of notes shows that the FBI did not direct the Geek Squad techs to search customers' computers but those who did and then reported the contents to the FBI were paid for their help. This provides an incentive for Geek Squad employees to snoop on the devices while repairing them, whether or not they were explicitly asked to do so by FBI agents.

An'end run' around the Fourth Amendment

That these searches are being conducted by paid government informants, without a warrant or any kind of judicial oversight, begs the question of whether the FBI are sidestepping the Fourth Amendment rights of the people they are investigating. The EFF commented:

‘We think the FBI's use of Best Buy Geek Squad employees to search people's computers without a warrant threatens to circumvent people's constitutional rights.'

Sputnik spoke exclusively to constitutional lawyer and president of the Rutherford Institute John Whitehead, who said that in his view the FBI are breaching the rights of their targets by using Geek Squad employees. Whitehead explained that the Fourth Amendment provisions of the US constitution only apply to ‘government actors'. He elaborated:

"If a Federal Express employees searches, he find contraband and turns it over to the police, then there's no Fourth Amendment violation because the search was conducted by a private, non-government employee."

However, Whitehead made clear that the FBI's relationship with Geek Squad is a violation, because the government are using private sector workers as 'proxies':

"The fact that the government had paid or directed a Geek Squad employee to snoop through customers' computers serves to indicate that the employees, although they're not direct government employees, are acting as proxies for the government. If the government is doing an end run and using employees like that then I think the Fourth Amendment should apply, especially if they're paying them."

The Fourth Amendment isn't an obstacle to be worked around by hiring private contractors. https:// t.co/mcurGRMbit https:// t.co/LH4hdYsxna

— C M Curtin (@KD8TTE) March 8, 2018

​In Whitehead's view, ‘the courts are not keen on protecting the Fourth Amendment in this country', citing the Rettenmaier case where the judge ruled that by sending his computer to the Geek Squad he had consented to the search. The EFF also took issue with this ruling, saying:

"We disagree with the court's ruling that Rettenmaier consented to a de-facto government search of his devices when he sought Best Buy's help to repair his computer. But the court's ruling demonstrates that law enforcement agents are potentially exploiting legal ambiguity about when private searches become government action that appears intentionally designed to try to avoid the Fourth Amendment."

Documents disclosed under FOIA show the @FBI paid @GeekSquad staff to inform them of illegal content on the devices of customers: https:// t.co/Jv8olgaOAP

The @EFF says that may be a violation of the Fourth Amendment. It looks like a warrantless search of "personal papers" to us.

— Sunlight Foundation (@SunFoundation) March 6, 2018

​The Future for Fourth Amendment Rights

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CLAIM: Poisoned Russian spy linked to Trump dossier author (video) http:// dennismichaellynch.com/claim-poisoned-russian-spy-linked-to-trump-dossier-author-video/ … via @realDennisLynch

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Female agent speaks out!

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A FBI Agent in the Los Angeles Field Office has been accused of allegedly drugging and sexually assaulting a female FBI colleague, federal law enf…

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