| ® || The Russians Are Coming | 231 was a place to begin. The Internet provided the SVR with just this opportunity. As you will recall, holes in the security of the com- puter networks of the U.S. Office of Personnel Management and USIS and the websites of the companies supplying the NSA with independent contractors had made the background checks on Ameri- can intelligence workers available to the Chinese, and presumably other adversary intelligence service hackers, since 2011. If the SVR had access to this personnel data, the research for a candidate would be greatly facilitated. From the 127-page Standard Form 86, which each applicant for a security clearance submits, the SVR could filter out intelligence workers employed by the NSA by their educational background, employment history, affiliations, and foreign contacts. It could then search this data for candidates with a possible hacktiv- ist profile. This data could next be crossed with a list of individuals the SVR knew were in contact with high-profile activists who were part of the anti-surveillance movements. This would include core participants in the Tor Project, WikiLeaks, Noisebridge, CryptoParties, the Free- © dom of the Press Foundation, and the Electronic Frontier Founda- re) tion. (Snowden, for example, had been in touch with members of all these groups in 2012 and 2013.) The SVR would have little problem monitoring even encrypted communications with leading figures in the anti-surveillance world. These activists, despite secrecy rituals such as putting their cell phones in refrigerators, remain visible to a sophisticated intelligence service such as the SVR. All the defensive tactics of Laura Poitras, including PGP encryption, Tor software, and air-gapped computers (computers that have never been connected to the Internet), did not keep secrets about her sources entirely to herself. Snowden, at a time when he was stealing NSA secrets in February 2013, went to great lengths to impress on Poitras