a US twenty- dollar bill, files to make a 3D- printed gun, and books
describing how to receive illegal goods in the mail without getting
caught. There were, too, links to rape and child abuse videos.”
To operate effectively on the dark net, one often needs a mask
of anonymity. But it is not easy to completely hide one’s tracks
in cyberspace. The way that the Internet ordinarily works is that
whenever an individual sends e- mails or instant messages or visits
a website, his or her identity can be referenced by the IP address
assigned to him or her by the Internet service provider. If dark net
users’ IP addresses are discoverable, they obviously cannot remain
anonymous. So, to evade this built- in Internet transparency, dark
side users have come to rely on ingenious software to hide their
IP addresses. The most commonly used software for this purpose
is Tor, which was first called the Onion Router, because it moves IP
addresses through multiple layers. Tor software hides the IP address
by routing messages through a network of Tor- enabled relay stations,
called nodes. Each node further obscures the user’s IP, even
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from the next node in the network. This scrambling allows messages
to exit the chain of Tor nodes without an easily discoverable IP. By
doing so, it “anomizes” each user of the dark side.
Because of the anonymity it provides, Tor became the software of
choice for individuals and organizations who wanted to hide their
identities. For example, Tor software made possible Silk Road, which
acted as an exchange for drug dealers, assassins, safecrackers, and
prostitutes until it was closed down by the FBI in 2013. It was created
by Ross Ulbricht, a Libertarian who wore a Ron Paul T- shirt,
as a website where “people could buy anything anonymously, with
no trail whatsoever that led back to them.” (Ulbricht received a life
sentence for running this criminal enterprise in May 2015.)
Tor software was also employed by Private Bradley Manning
(now Chelsea Manning) to transfer some fifty thousand diplomatic
cables and military reports from his laptop to Assange’s WikiLeaks
website. Eventually, Manning was identified by a fellow hacker, convicted
by a military court for violations of the Espionage Act, and
sentenced to thirty- five years in prison. Tor enabled WikiLeaks to
publish other secret data, such as material acquired in the theft of
Sony’s files, allegedly by the North Korean intelligence service, in
2015. It was the means for guaranteeing anonymity to the IT workers
who responded to Assange’s by now famous clarion call to unite.
It allowed system administrators who opposed the “surveillance
state,” as well as other disgruntled employees of government agencies
or corporations, to send documents they copied to the WikiLeaks
website without revealing their IP addresses.
Because WikiLeaks did not know the identity of its sources, it
could not be legally compelled to reveal them. “Tor’s importance
to WikiLeaks cannot be overstated,” Assange said in an interview
with Rolling Stone in 2012. Indeed, without the anonymity provided
by its Tor software, WikiLeaks could not have easily entered into a
document- sharing arrangement with major newspapers, including
The Guardian, The New York Times, Der Spiegel, Le Monde, and El
País. Through the magic of Tor, these newspapers simply attribute
their sources to WikiLeaks, which, in turn, made Assange a major
force in international journalism.
Ironically, Tor was a creation of U.S. intelligence. In the early years
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of the twenty- first century, the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory and
the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency developed it to
allow American intelligence operatives to cloak their movements on
the Internet. They could anonymously manipulate websites operated
by Islamic radicals, for example, and create their own Trojan
horse sites to lure would- be terrorists and spies. As it turned out,
that use of Tor software had a conceptual flaw. If U.S. intelligence
services used it, the targets could figure out that anyone visiting a
site without an IP address was using Tor software to hide it. If Tor
was exclusively used by U.S. intelligence services, the targets could
further deduce that all the anonymous visitors were avatars for
American intelligence. It would be analogous to undercover police
using pink- colored cars that civilians did not use.
To remedy this flaw, the U.S. government made Tor software open
source in 2008 and freely available to everyone in the world. It even
provided funding for its promulgation, with the State Department,
the National Science Foundation, and the Broadcasting Board of
Governors financing Tor’s core developer. The public rationale for
this generosity was that Tor could serve as a tool for, as the State
Department called it, “democracy advocates in authoritarian states.”
While Tor software remained a useful tool in covert operations by
the CIA, the DIA, and the FBI, it was anathema to the NSA because
it made it more difficult for it to track potential targets.
As Tor software became widely used by adversaries (as well as
common criminals), the NSA sought to find vulnerabilities in it. “It
should hardly be surprising that our intelligence agencies seek ways
to counteract targets that use Tor software to hide their communications,”
explained an NSA spokesperson. The NSA’s adversaries also
took an interest in identifying Tor users because they might include
political dissidents and potential spies.
Tor software also took on a cultlike importance to hacktivists concerned
with the U.S. government’s tracking their activities. Catherine
A. Fitzpatrick provides an illuminating insight into the mind- set of
these hacktivists in her 2014 book, Privacy for Me and Not for Thee.
She describes them as largely “radical anarchists” who believe “the
state is all- powerful, that law- enforcement is so strong that it will
prevail anyway, and that they are a persecuted minority.” As a refuge
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against the surveillance of the state, and in particular the NSA, they
not only attempt to hide their own identities but also use encryption
to obscure their messages. Their goal is to free their movements “of
any interference from law- enforcement.” In this mind- set, according
to Fitzpatrick, “they believe government intelligence agencies
will stop at nothing to stop them from absolute encryption.”
Tor software was a means to defeat the NSA, but for it to be successful,
there needed to be such a proliferation of Tor servers that
the NSA could not piece together IP addresses. The problem was that
the Tor Project, as they called it, was still a very tiny operation in
2012. It employed fewer than a hundred core developers, who were
located mainly in Germany, Iceland, Japan, Estonia, and the United
States. Its staff worked mainly out of a single room in Cambridge,
Massachusetts.
The guiding spirit behind the Tor movement in the private sector
was Jacob Appelbaum, a charismatic twenty- eight- year- old who had
grown up in Northern California. Like Snowden, he had dropped
out of high school. Appelbaum identified himself to his followers on
the Internet as a “hacktivist” battling state surveillance. For him, as
for many in the hacktivist culture, the main enemy was the NSA.
After all, the NSA had a vast army of computer scientists working
to defeat Tor software. Appelbaum was well connected in this culture,
having been the North American representative for WikiLeaks
before he moved to Berlin in 2013. He also managed WikiLeaks’s
cyber security when it released the classified documents it obtained
from Manning in 2010. He was so well regarded among hacktivists
that Assange chose him as his keynote speaker replacement at
the Hackers on Planet Earth (HOPE) convention in New York City.
Assange told Rolling Stone, “Jake [Appelbaum] has been a tireless
promoter behind the scenes of our cause.” For its part, Rolling Stone
titled its profile of Appelbaum “Meet the Most Dangerous Man in
Cyberspace.” (Assange needed a replacement for this particular event
because he feared if he came to New York, he would be arrested for
releasing the Manning files on WikiLeaks.)
In Berlin, Appelbaum went to extreme lengths to protect himself
from American surveillance. For example, when George Packer
interviewed him for The New Yorker in 2014, he insisted on meet-
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ing with Packer naked in a sauna so he could be sure Packer did not
have a recording device (other than his notebook). Appelbaum stated
repeatedly in interviews that he was being spied upon by America.
While his claims might have sounded paranoid to his interviewers,
as a character in Joseph Heller’s Catch- 22 famously said, “Just
because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they aren’t after you.”
Runa Sandvik, a close associate of Appelbaum’s, also worked
tirelessly to extend Tor’s cloak of anonymity in the private sector
against the surveillance of the NSA and other would- be intruders
of privacy. A Norwegian national in her mid- twenties, she wrote a
well- followed blog on Internet privacy for Forbes in 2012, in which
she identified herself as a privacy and security researcher working
at the intersection of technology, law, and policy. Appelbaum and
Sandvik both came in contact with Snowden before he went public
and while he was still working for the NSA in Hawaii.
In 2012, Snowden become involved in the effort to encourage
the use of Tor software to protect privacy. He made no secret of his
concerns about electronic interceptions. According to an anonymous
co- worker, he even wore a jacket to work with a parody of the
NSA insignia, which, instead of merely depicting the NSA eagle,
showed the eagle clutching AT&T phone lines. He had also become
a member of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the digital rights
organization that was helping finance Tor. He saw Tor software as a
remedy. “Without Tor,” he later wrote, “when you walk the streets
of the Internet, you’re always watched.” His efforts on behalf of Tor
were not limited to symbolic gestures. In 2012, he set up a twogigabyte
server called “The Signal,” which he described as the largest
Tor relay station exit node in Honolulu. He apparently paid for
it himself.
Through his work as a system administrator for Dell, he found
documents revealing NSA efforts, not yet successful, to defeat Tor’s
ability to camouflage a user’s identity on the Internet. He found that
the NSA was attempting to build backdoor entry ways into Tor software.
One of the NSA documents that he illicitly downloaded, titled
“Tor Stinks,” described the agency’s continuing efforts to penetrate
Tor servers. In addition, he downloaded NSA documents describing
programs begun in 2012 that aimed at searching the Internet for the
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cyber signatures of foreign parties suspected of hacking into U.S.
government systems.
He also made efforts to directly contact Sandvik. She recalls
first hearing from Snowden in November 2012. He first wrote to
her under the alias Cincinnatus but later supplied his real name
and mailing address in Hawaii because he wanted her to mail him
authentic computer stickers from the Tor Project that he could use
as “swag,” as he wrote her, to attract further interest in Tor software
in Hawaii. As a result, she knew his identity seven months before he
went public in Hong Kong. He would later tell Sandvik from Moscow
that he had been “moonlighting” by working to advance the Tor
Project. He added, with some understatement, that his moonlighting
was “something the NSA might not have been too happy about.”
On November 18, 2012, while still working for Dell at the NSA,
his dual role led him to begin organizing a “CryptoParty” aimed at
finding new recruits for Tor. The CryptoParty movement had been
started in 2012 by Asher Wolf, a radical hacktivist and anarchist living
in Melbourne, Australia. She promoted the get- togethers not
unlike the Tupperware parties of the 1950s. The party organizer,
usually with a representative of the Tor Project, advertised the party
on the Internet. Attendees were encouraged to bring their own laptops
so they could install Tor as well as encryption software in them.
The attendees would then be instructed on how to use it. Finally,
those converted to Tor software would be told to proselytize about
its virtues by holding their own CryptoParty. Wolf’s idea was to use
these gatherings to expand the realm of Tor.
Snowden called his fete the Oahu CryptoParty. It had its own web
page. He told Wolf that it would be the first CryptoParty in Honolulu.
She wrote back advising him to “keep it simple.” (Wolf later
said she did not know he was working at the NSA.)
Snowden apparently had no inhibitions in staging a party that the
leadership of the NSA might consider subversive of its battle against
Tor. He even invited fellow NSA workers in Hawaii, as well as others
in the local computer culture. He asked Sandvik, who was living in
Washington, D.C., at the time, to participate, proposing that she cohost
the party with him. He scheduled it for December 11, 2012, in
Honolulu. According to Sandvik’s account, Snowden informed her
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that he “had been talking some of the more technical guys at work
into setting up some additional fast servers” for Tor. His “work”
place at the time was the NSA. So, if he was telling the truth, he
had already attempted to find co- workers at the NSA who might be
interested in attending an anti- NSA surveillance presentation.
Sandvik not only agreed to be Snowden’s co- presenter but made
the Oahu CryptoParty a Tor- sponsored event. Sandvik flew to
Honolulu on December 6, 2012. It was a fourteen- hour flight and
a relatively expensive one. She later told Wired magazine that the
invitation from Snowden coincided with her plan to take a “vacation
in Hawaii.” Whatever her reason, it brought her in direct contact
with a Tor supporter with access to the computers of its main enemy,
the NSA.
On December 11, following Snowden’s instructions, Sandvik
arrived shortly before 6:00 p.m. at the Fishcake gallery in downtown
Honolulu. She proceeded through a maze of furniture display rooms
to BoxJelly, a public space. She was then directed to a small back room
in which there were folding chairs and worktables already set up for
the event. Rechung Fujihira, the owner of BoxJelly, told me that Hi
Capacity, a “creative collective” of computer buffs, had arranged the
logistics for the event. As he recalled, Snowden had requested their
help for the CryptoParty.
Sandvik found Snowden waiting for her with Lindsay Mills,
whom he introduced to Sandvik as his girlfriend. He told Sandvik
that Mills was there to make a video of the event. Mills did not mention
the party in her blog. But that Snowden brought her and introduced
her to Sandvik suggests that he did not keep secret from her
his activities to further Tor.
The event started at 6:00 p.m. sharp. By Sandvik’s count, about
twenty people gradually filled the room. She reckoned that about
half of the attendees were from Snowden’s workplace. Snowden
began the presentation by giving reasons why Internet users needed
to defend their privacy by using both encryption and Tor software.
According to one attendee who asked not to be identified by name,
Snowden, while not revealing that he worked for the NSA, spoke
with such precise knowledge about government surveillance capabilities
that the attendee suspected Snowden worked for the govern-
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ment. Snowden next introduced Sandvik, who took the podium and
discussed the work of the Tor Project, stressing the importance of
expanding the Tor network. Following their presentations, Snowden
and Sandvik took questions from the audience.
The Oahu CryptoParty, according to Sandvik, ended about
10:00 p.m. No one objected to Mills’s making a video of the meeting,
even though it was dedicated to the idea of protecting personal
privacy. The video was not posted on the Internet, so presumably
Snowden wanted it for his own purposes. Afterward, Sandvik went
to a local diner called Zippy’s for a late dinner. She left Hawaii two
days later.
Not all the hacktivists that Snowden invited were able to attend.
Parker Higgins, for example, a prime mover in the Electronic Frontier
Foundation and founder of the San Francisco CryptoParty, wrote
back to him that he was unable to attend the December CryptoParty
because of the high price of the airfare that month between San Francisco
and Honolulu. He added that he would try to attend Snowden’s
next CryptoParty, which was scheduled for February 23, 2013. (Higgins
would make headlines in 2013 by flying a chartered blimp over
the NSA’s secret facility in Utah and photographing it from the air.)
Snowden’s double duty continued: downloading secret documents
while remaining in touch with some of the leading figures
in the Tor Project under his various aliases. He also continued to
invite activists to his CryptoParties, and he openly advertised them
on the Internet until 2013. The CIA’s former deputy director Morell,
who reviewed the security situation at the NSA in 2014 as a member
of President Obama’s NSA Review Committee, found that the
NSA in the post– Cold War age had encouraged its technical workers
to freely discuss challenges that arose in its computer operations.
“The idea was to spread knowledge and learn from the successes
of others,” Morell wrote, “but it created enormous security vulnerability,
given the always- existent risk of an insider committed to
stealing secrets.” According to a former intelligence executive, this
new “open culture,” exemplified by largely unrestricted entry to the
NSANet by civilian contractors, fit the culture of the young civilians
on the “geek squads” who now ran the NSA’s computer networks.
It was remarkable that even in such an “open culture,” Snowden’s
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CryptoParty, Tor station, and other anti- NSA activities could go
unremarked upon. After all, ten or so NSA workers attended the
first party, and it is not unlikely that many of them recognized
him as their co- worker. If so, they knew (as did Sandvik and Mills)
that the Tor advocate “Cincinnatus” was Snowden. He had also not
been shy in contacting notable enemies of the NSA via e- mail, such
as Jacob Appelbaum, Parker Higgins, and Asher Wolf. If anyone,
including the security staff of the NSA, had been on the lookout for
dissident intelligence workers, this well- advertised gathering and its
organizer might have been of interest.
In 2014, I asked a former top NSA executive whether such activities
on behalf of Tor by an NSA employee would arouse the attention
of the NSA’s own “Q” counterespionage unit. He answered,
“Snowden was not an NSA employee.” Because Snowden was a
contract employee of Dell’s residing in the United States, the NSA
could not legally monitor his private activities or intercept his communication.
To do so would require a court- approved FBI request. So
Snowden/Cincinnatus was free to operate openly in recruiting NSA
workers, hacktivists, and computer buffs for his events. Ironically,
adversary intelligence services searching for disgruntled intelligence
workers had no such constraints.
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chapter 7
String Puller
It wasn’t that they put it on me as an individual— that I’m uniquely
qualified [or] an angel descending from the heavens— as that they
put it on someone, somewhere.
— edward snowden, Moscow, 2013
Downloading NSA documents was not Snowden’s only rogue
activity while working at the NSA for Dell in 2012. Three
weeks after the CryptoParty, Snowden began anonymously contacting
a high- profile journalist. He used the same alias, Cincinnatus,
that he used with Sandvik and to advertise the Oahu CryptoParty.
The journalist to whom he wrote on December 1, 2012, was Glenn
Greenwald, the previously mentioned Rio- based columnist for The
Guardian.
Greenwald had not always been an activist journalist. He had
been a litigation lawyer at the elite New York firm of Wachtell, Lipton,
Rosen & Katz. He was also an entrepreneur, owning part of
Master Notions, a company that, among other things, had a 50 percent
financial interest in the pornographic website HJ (an acronym
that originally stood for “Hairy Jock”). All did not go well with this
enterprise. In 2004, Greenwald became involved in an acrimonious
lawsuit with his other associates in HJ. As a result, he had a number
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of open legal judgments filed against him, including an $85,000 lien
by the IRS.
After resigning from his law firm in 2005, he moved to Rio de
Janeiro and began a new career as a blogger for the Internet magazine
Salon. He wrote fierce, and often brilliant, polemics against U.S.
government surveillance and other perceived intrusions on personal
privacy. The extent of his bitter antagonism toward the activities of
the “surveillance state,” as he called it, was reflected in the title of
his 2006 book, How Would a Patriot Act? Defending American Values
from a President Run Amok. His position on surveillance was
unrelenting, even when it came to the president. “By ordering illegal
eavesdropping, the president had committed crimes and should be
held accountable for them,” Greenwald wrote. When Barack Obama
became president in 2009, Greenwald also attacked him for breaking
the law by “ordering illegal eavesdropping.” Because of his opposition
to Obama, he contributed money to the libertarian campaign of
Ron Paul, the same candidate to whom Snowden gave money.
In August 2012, he had transferred his provocative blog, which
had amassed a following of nearly one million readers (including
Snowden), from Salon to The Guardian. The British newspaper
shared his powerful anti- surveillance position, having first published
the WikiLeaks documents that had been illicitly leaked by Manning
and published by Assange in 2010.
Greenwald was an activist as well as a journalist. He joined the
board of directors of the Freedom of the Press Foundation (eventually
Runa Sandvik would join too). It had been set up expressly to
funnel money to both Assange’s WikiLeaks site and the defense fund
for Manning after he was arrested. Such a financial intermediary
was necessary because American credit card companies were blocking
money transfers to these two causes in 2012. This “blockade”
was taking its toll on WikiLeaks. According to Assange, “WikiLeaks
had been cut off from more than 90 percent of its finances.” The
Freedom of the Press Foundation came to its rescue. John Perry Barlow,
one of the songwriters for the Grateful Dead, was one of its
chief financial backers. “The first serious info war is now engaged,”
Barlow declared. “The field of battle is WikiLeaks.” He served with
Greenwald and Poitras on its board.
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Snowden was an avid reader of Greenwald’s screeds against the
government. If he were to assume the role of a modern- day Prometheus,
delivering forbidden NSA secrets to the public, Greenwald
would be a logical candidate to break the story. Snowden could safely
assume that Greenwald would be sympathetic to exposing NSA surveillance
from his many blogs, tweets, and YouTube comments on
the subject. For example, on November 13, 2012, just eighteen days
before Snowden contacted him, Greenwald had written a blog for
The Guardian asserting that the United States was “a surveillance
state run amok.” In it, echoing very closely what Snowden said at his
CryptoParty, Greenwald wrote, “Any remnants of internet anonymity
have been all but obliterated between the state and technology
companies.” Citing a story in The Washington Post, he continued,
“Every day, collection systems at the National Security Agency
intercept and store 1.7 billion e- mails, phone calls and other types
of communications.”
As a result, Greenwald called for action in that blog posting, writing,
“The US operates a sprawling, unaccountable Surveillance State
that, in violent breach of the core guarantees of the Fourth Amendment,
monitors and records virtually everything even the most
law- abiding citizens do.” That same week, Snowden invited Runa
Sandvik to co- host his CryptoParty.
One problem for Snowden in reaching out to Greenwald was
Greenwald’s lack of any encryption for his e- mails. Communicating
with a journalist like Greenwald who famously attacked the very
organization for which Snowden worked was itself a risky undertaking,
especially if he wanted to pass classified NSA documents to
him. If his e- mails were intercepted by the NSA in Brazil (where
Greenwald lived) and where the NSA was not restricted by U.S. law,
he could lose his job or even be arrested. As Cincinnatus, he told
Greenwald that he needed to immediately encrypt his computer. To
make his point, he cited Greenwald’s November 12, 2012, blog. In it,
Greenwald noted that General David Petraeus, then the CIA director,
had been caught in a sex scandal because his personal e- mails
had been intercepted. Snowden wrote to Greenwald that Petraeus
would not have been exposed if he had used encryption. Snowden
sent Greenwald instructions on how to install the necessary encryp-
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tion software and a link to a twelve- minute video on encryption
(which might have been the same video he used at his CryptoParty
a few weeks earlier).
Greenwald did not manage to encrypt his computer, however,
and Snowden, unwilling to deal with Greenwald through an unencrypted
channel, broke off contact with him in January 2013. Even
so, he did not give up his plan of using Greenwald in his enterprise.
He merely sought an intermediary who used encryption.
He chose Laura Poitras. He knew she and Greenwald were founding
board members of the Freedom of the Press Foundation. Greenwald
had written about her extensively. For example, he wrote an
entire blog about her confrontation with the U.S. government and
her plans to make a documentary about the “US Government’s
increasing powers of domestic surveillance [through] its expanding
covert domestic NSA activities.”
Since 2011, Poitras had been diligently filming the construction
of a massive NSA repository for data in Bluffdale, Utah. In the antisurveillance
culture, the structure had become symbolic of the powers
of the NSA. In fact, it was the same NSA site that Parker Higgins
photographed from a blimp in the fall of 2013 and posted on the
Internet after Poitras had released her documentary about the NSA’s
use of the Bluffdale repository for domestic spying.
Aside from her connections with Greenwald, Poitras had other
impressive credentials. Born in 1964 in Boston, she came from a
wealthy family that donated large sums of money to philanthropic
causes, including $20 million for research on bipolar disorders. After
graduating from the New School for Public Engagement in 1996,
she pursued a career as an activist filmmaker. Her focus quickly
became exposing NSA surveillance. One of her short documentaries
about the NSA’s domestic surveillance program was featured on the
New York Times website and attracted enormous attention in 2012.
As a dedicated opponent of the surveillance state, she participated
in public events with William Binney, the ex- NSA whistle- blower,
and Jacob Appelbaum. In April 2012, for example, she made a presentation
at the Whitney Museum in New York with Binney and
Appelbaum. She had become such a leading activist against the NSA
by December 2012 that Appelbaum, after lauding her work, inter-
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spersed clips from her short film in his keynote address at the Chaos
Computer Club convention of hacktivists in Berlin that month.
Snowden also closely followed her rise in this world. By simply
googling Poitras’s name in January 2013, he would have learned
about her connections with Greenwald, Appelbaum, Binney,
Assange, and other leading figures in the anti- surveillance camp.
When asked later by Poitras why he had chosen her to help him,
Snowden replied, “I didn’t. You chose yourself.” The problem for
Snowden was anonymously drawing her into his enterprise.
Poitras was living in Berlin in January 2013, which made her vulnerable
to NSA surveillance. To get to her through an encrypted
channel, Snowden chose a circuitous approach. On January 11, he
wrote to Micah Lee in Berkeley, California. Given Lee’s residence
in the United States, as Snowden knew, the NSA would be legally
barred from monitoring his communications without a warrant.
He used Lee, who was the chief technology officer at the Freedom
of the Press Foundation, as the encrypted gateway to Poitras. Lee
was also well- connected to others whom Snowden had contacted
for his CryptoParty. Lee had been an associate of Runa Sandvik’s at
Tor and was a prominent member of Noisebridge, an eclectic antigovernment
hackers’ commune based in Northern California, of
which Appelbaum was also a member.
To contact Lee, Snowden chose the alias Anon108. Anon is an
alias frequently used by members of the Anonymous commune
of hacktivists. “I’m a friend,” Snowden wrote to Lee. “I need to get
information securely to Laura Poitras and her alone, but I can’t find
an email gpg key for her.” The “gpg” encryption key he asked for,
more commonly called a PGP key, was the so- called public key for
an encryption system called Pretty Good Privacy, or, for short, PGP.
This encryption system required both a public and a private key.
Snowden asked Lee to provide the former one, because Poitras had
the latter one. Lee wrote to Poitras about Anon108. The next day,
with the approval of Poitras, Lee supplied Poitras’s public key to
Snowden, or, as he knew him, Anon108.
With it, Snowden contacted Poitras directly. He asked her as a first
step to open an anonymous e- mail account using Tor software. Poitras
later wrote about this initial contact, “I was at that point film-
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ing with several people who were all being targeted by the [U.S.]
government.” Many of the people she was filming, including Appelbaum,
Assange, Binney, and the former NSA employee Thomas
Drake, could attract interest by U.S. or foreign intelligence services.
Snowden asked Poitras to take out a new enciphering key to use
exclusively for her liaison with him. It provided them both with an
extra layer of protection from any surveillance by law enforcement.
Presumably, she accommodated his requests because she anticipated
that the anonymous person would use this encrypted channel to
send her highly sensitive material.
On January 23, Snowden wrote to Poitras under yet another alias.
This time he called himself Citizen Four. He wrote, “At this stage I
can offer nothing more than my word.” He then said falsely, “I am
a senior government employee in the intelligence community.” She
had no way of knowing at this “stage” that despite giving her his
“word,” he was not who he claimed to be. He was not a “government
employee,” he was not a “senior” official, and he was not a member
of the “intelligence community” (which is composed of the intelligence
services of the U.S. government). He would later also claim
to her that he had been “a senior adviser to the CIA” and “a senior
adviser to the DIA.” That was untrue, too. In January 2013, he was
merely a contract employee of Dell’s working as a computer technician
at the NSA base in Hawaii.
Snowden told her in his initial e- mail that he was well acquainted
with her career as an anti- surveillance activist. He said that he had
read Greenwald’s account in Salon that past April, a blog in which
Greenwald detailed the forty times in which Poitras was searched by
U.S. authorities. The story also said that Poitras believed she was on
a special watch list and under constant U.S. government surveillance.
She had come under such scrutiny by U.S. authorities, it turned out,
because of her documentary about American military abuses of civilians
in Iraq in 2006, titled My Country, My Country. While filming
it, she was at a place close to an insurgent ambush of U.S. troops in
Iraq. Her presence at the ambush site led army intelligence officers
to suspect (without any evidence) that she might have been tipped
off by the insurgents. She firmly denied the charge, and the government
never substantiated it. Even so, because of this incident, since
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2006 she had been kept on a list that caused authorities to search her
at airports. As a result, she took elaborate countermeasures to evade
any possible surveillance of her communications.
Snowden knew about this incident because Greenwald described
it in great detail in a blog that Snowden read (as he later told Greenwald).
“Poitras is now forced to take extreme steps— ones that hamper
her ability to do her work,” Greenwald wrote. “She now avoids
traveling with any electronic devices. She uses alternative methods
to deliver the most sensitive parts of her work— raw film and interview
notes— to secure locations. She spends substantial time and
resources protecting her computers with encryption and password
defenses. Especially when she is in the US, she avoids talking on
the phone about her work, particularly to sources. And she simply
will not edit her films at her home out of fear— obviously well
grounded— that government agents will attempt to search and seize
the raw footage.” She claimed, as she told journalists, she was the
victim of “Kafkaesque government harassment.”
Snowden was duly impressed with her concerns about government
surveillance, which he agreed was ubiquitous. Indeed, he later
described her as “more paranoid when it comes to electronic security
than I can be.” He meant it as a compliment. Such functional paranoia
or “operational security,” as Greenwald would call the precautions
that she took, dovetailed with Snowden’s growing conviction
that universal encryption was necessary to defeat the surveillance
state. It also made her the perfect channel for Snowden to safely pass
some of the classified documents he stole to Greenwald and other
journalists.
It was not difficult to get her to cooperate in his plot. He wrote,
for example, “The surveillance you’ve experienced means you have
been ‘selected’— a term which will mean more to you as you learn
how the modern SIGINT [signals intelligence] system works.” Just
as she had been “chosen” by her work to act as his conduit, according
to Snowden, she had been chosen by the NSA as a target because
of her work. The idea of her being “selected” by an invisible signals
intelligence agency, the NSA, could only excite her longtime concerns
about being watched by the government.
“Your victimization by the NSA system means that you are well
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aware of the threat that [the NSA’s] unrestricted, secret abilities pose
for democracies,” he continued. “I hope you understand that contacting
you is extremely high risk and if you are willing to agree
to the following precautions before I share more, this will not be a
waste of your time.” Further playing on her concern, he asked her to
confirm to him “that no one has ever had a copy of your private key
and that it uses a strong pass phrase.” Such precautions were necessary
because “your adversary is capable of one trillion guesses per
second.” That “adversary” was, as she knew from her previous film,
the NSA. At this point, she knew she was entering into a dangerous
liaison with an unknown party in pursuit of NSA secrets. She wondered
if he might be part of a plan to entrap her or her contacts like
Assange and Appelbaum, as she noted in her diary. “Is C4 a trap?”
she asked herself, referring to her Citizen Four source. “Will he put
me in prison?”
To elude this “adversary,” Snowden stressed to Poitras that she
would have to adopt a conspiratorial frame of mind. “If the device
you store the private key and enter your pass phrase on has been
hacked, it is trivial to decrypt our communications,” he explained. “If
you publish the source material, I will likely be immediately implicated.”
If her correspondent could be “immediately implicated,” it
meant that he was a person authorized to handle these secrets. So
Poitras knew, as early as January 2013, that she was creating an
encrypted channel for someone with access to NSA secrets who
would be incriminated by providing them to her.
The key source for Poitras’s previously referred to short video
was Binney. Like her new source, he had been authorized to handle
NSA secrets. Binney had been an NSA technical director until he
had retired in 2001. The NSA’s domestic surveillance program that
Binney told the press about years before being interviewed in Poitras’s
film was called Stellarwind. It involved data mining domestic
communications and financial transactions that had been authorized
by President George W. Bush in 2001 after 9/11 as commander- inchief
under the war powers given to him following the attacks. It
indeed led to a major exposé on domestic spying by The New York
Times in December 2005.
Binney had never provided Poitras with any NSA documents
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to back up the charges he made that Stellarwind was an unlawful
domestic surveillance operation. He could not have done so without
violating his sworn oath and, for that matter, U.S. anti- espionage
statutes. Binney made it clear to her and other journalists that he
was not a lawbreaker. But her new source, C4, was willing to do
what Binney (and other insiders) had refused to do. He was offering
in these e- mails to provide her with secret government documents,
even though it would implicate him as an outlaw. To further
whet her appetite, he told her that these up- to- date NSA documents
would fully substantiate the allegations that Binney made in her
film. Even more important, he said Binney’s 2001 disclosures were
still relevant to her cause. “What you know as Stellarwind has
grown,” he wrote to her. “The expanded special source operations
that took over Stellarwind’s share of the pie have spread all over the
world to practically include comprehensive coverage of the United
States.” In fact, as Snowden knew from the Inspector General report
he had read, the NSA had terminated Stellarwind almost a decade
earlier. President Bush ended it after top officials of the Justice
Department insisted that he did not have the legal authority for the
domestic part of Stellarwind. Instead, he asked Congress to revise
FISA to meet the objections of the Justice Department. The result
was the FISA Amendment Act of 2006. Unlike the previous Stellarwind
program, it did not permit domestic surveillance. It specified
that the government could not target any person in the United
States or anywhere else in the world under this authority. Nor could
it target any foreign person, even one residing outside of the United
States, to acquire information from a particular known person inside
the United States. As the act recognized that information about U.S.
citizens might mistakenly be intercepted by the NSA, it required
that such data about Americans be expunged in a bimonthly review
by a Justice Department task force. Although the NSA program in
place in 2013 was not the comprehensive domestic surveillance that
Snowden claimed it to be, Poitras had no way of knowing at this
early state that her source was misleading her.
He offered to substantiate her worst fears about the growth of
NSA surveillance: “I know the location of most domestic interception
points, and that the largest telecommunication companies in the
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US are betraying the trust of their customers, which I can prove.”
He even proffered evidence implicating President Barack Obama in
illegal surveillance. “There is a detailed policy framework, a kind of
martial law for cyber operations, created by the White House. It’s
called presidential policy 20,” he wrote to her. It was an eighteenpage
directive that Obama had signed four months earlier in October
2012. Snowden was offering to reveal to her up- to- date evidence
of a surveillance state in America presided over by the president
himself. It was what she had been searching for over the past three
years. How could she, as an activist filmmaker, resist such a sensational
offer?
He further explained to her that he had placed great trust in her
discretion. “No one, not even my most trusted confidante, is aware
of my intentions, and it would not be fair for them to fall under suspicion
for my actions,” he said.
Poitras must have found it flattering that a total stranger was
willing to disclose to her in e- mails what he would not tell even his
“most trusted confidante” about his intentions to commit an illicit
breach of U.S. national security. It also put her under enormous
stress. She noted in her journal that the pressure made her feel as if
she were “underwater.” “I am battling with my nervous system. It
doesn’t let me rest or sleep. Eye twitches, clenched throat, and now
literally waiting to be raided.”
Snowden was also taking an extraordinary risk. After all, he had
no way of knowing who else she told about him. She had long been
concerned, with good reason, that the U.S. government was out to
get her. An unknown person offering to supply her with secret documents
could be attempting to entrap her. So Snowden could not preclude
the possibility that she would consult with others about the
offer he was making her. Because her current documentary project
included interviews by her with Assange, Appelbaum, and three ex-
NSA executives, intelligence services with sophisticated surveillance
capabilities might also have taken a professional interest in her communications,
as Poitras herself had suspected. Even if Snowden was
somehow able to use his position as a system administrator at Dell
to ascertain that the NSA did not have Poitras under surveillance, he
could not be sure that other agencies, such as the Russian and Chi-
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nese intelligence services, were not monitoring his communications
with her. It was, however, a chance Snowden was willing to take.
Snowden, in any case, did not intend to conceal his identity for
more than a few months. He told Poitras he had a specific purpose
in allowing her to name him in her ongoing film project. Indeed,
he said it was essential in his plan to prevent others, including presumably
his “most trusted confidante,” from being suspected by law
enforcement of helping him in his enterprise. He prevailed on her
to accommodate his plan, saying, “You may be the only one who
can prevent that, and that is by immediately nailing me to the cross
rather than trying to protect me as a source.” His choice of the imagery
of crucifixion suggested that like Jesus Christ he was willing to
sacrifice himself for the sake of others.
In keeping with their operational security arrangement, Snowden
said that he would first send her an encrypted file of documents that
she would not be able to read. Only after his conditions were met and
“everything else is done,” he said, “the key will follow.” He was now
pulling the strings. To get that key, she had to follow his instructions.
One of his conditions was that she help him recruit Greenwald
and other outlets for his disclosures. “The material provided and
the investigative effort required will be too much for any one person,”
he wrote to Poitras. He next directed her to contact Greenwald.
“I recommend that at the very minimum you involve Greenwald. I
believe you know him.” (Snowden apparently did not tell her that
he had unsuccessfully attempted to reach out to Greenwald before he
had contacted her.)
His continued interest in Greenwald was understandable. Aside
from Greenwald’s opposition to what he called the “Surveillance
State,” he was a gateway to The Guardian. That publication had
become an important player in the business of disclosing government
documents by publishing a large part of the U.S. documents
supplied to WikiLeaks, as we have seen. By breaking whistleblowing
stories about U.S. intelligence, it had also greatly increased
the circulation of its website. As an establishment newspaper, it also
gave these WikiLeaks stories credibility with the media. So despite
Greenwald’s inability to create an encrypted channel, Snowden still
needed him. He had no reason to believe that Greenwald would turn
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down the opportunity for a whistle- blowing scoop for The Guardian.
After all, the classified documents Snowden would provide him
would also give credence to both Greenwald’s book and his many
blogs denouncing U.S. government surveillance.
Aside from Greenwald and Poitras, Snowden sought an outlet
inside the American establishment. So he had Poitras write to Barton
Gellman, the Pulitzer Prize– winning reporter for The Washington
Post. Poitras had met Gellman in 2010, when they were both fellows
at NYU’s Center on Law and Security. Poitras had requested help
in encrypting her computer from Karen Greenberg, the executive
director of the center, who took her “by the hand” to meet Gellman,
Greenberg’s resident expert on encryption software. Born in 1960,
Gellman graduated from Princeton in 1981 and became an awardwinning
investigative reporter for the Miami Herald, the Post, and
Time magazine. He was also the author of Angler: The Cheney Vice
Presidency. If Gellman could be drawn into the enterprise, he could
provide Snowden with a gateway to the prestigious American paper
credited with bringing down President Richard Nixon in the Watergate
scandal.
Poitras, as the go- between for Snowden, immediately contacted
Gellman. After telling him she was involved in a story about NSA
surveillance, she suggested that they meet in New York City.
For their rendezvous, Poitras took a number of precautions to
evade anyone attempting to follow her. She had Gellman first meet
her in one coffee shop in lower Manhattan. When he arrived, she had
him follow her on foot to another coffee shop, following her antisurveillance
tradecraft. Once assured no one was watching them, she
ordered coffee for herself and Gellman. Over coffee, she told Gellman
about Snowden, whom she described as her anonymous source.
She said that he was willing to supply Gellman with documents that
would expose domestic surveillance, if Gellman agreed to write a
story on it for the Post. Even though Gellman had left the staff of
the Post in 2010, he had previously written several stories on that
subject for the newspaper, and he was also highly regarded by the
editors there. Gellman was interested in Poitras’s offer (although he
would consult a friend at the Justice Department about the legality
of publishing NSA documents).
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Snowden had now laid the groundwork for at least two possible
outlets. Poitras, however, was having some difficulty in bringing
Greenwald in on the plan. Like Snowden, she did not trust writing
to him in unencrypted e- mails, and because Greenwald lived in Brazil,
she still had not found an opportunity for a face- to- face meeting
with him.
That opportunity arose in mid- April 2013. Greenwald had flown
to the United States to give the lead speech at an event in Yonkers,
New York, sponsored by the Council on American- Islamic Relations,
a pro- Muslim civil rights organization. He had delivered the
keynote speech at its previous meeting in San Jose, California, where
his impassioned depiction of the American “Surveillance State”
received a rousing ovation from the attendees. He was invited to
speak at this award dinner for its East Coast chapter.
Poitras flew from Berlin to New York to see him. On April 19,
2013, she arranged to meet Greenwald at noon in the restaurant of
the Marriott hotel where Greenwald was staying. When Greenwald
arrived at the restaurant carrying a cell phone, she explained to him
that the NSA could surreptitiously turn his cell phone into a microphone
and use it to eavesdrop on their conversation. She told him to
go back to his room and leave his phone there. When he returned,
phoneless, she took further precautions by having them change
tables several times. Greenwald accepted these tactics because, as he
later said, she was in charge of their “operational security.”
When they finally settled at a table in the nearly empty restaurant,
she showed Greenwald e- mails she had received from Citizen
Four. Greenwald, as he recounted, made “no connection” to the
“long- forgotten emails” he had received from Snowden under the
alias Cincinnatus. Reading the e- mails that Snowden had sent to
Poitras, he was impressed with the “sincerity” of the anonymous
correspondent.
When Poitras showed Greenwald Citizen Four’s mission statement
in which he said his motive was to end the U.S. “surveillance
state,” Greenwald was further impressed with the source. The surveillance
state Snowden described closely dovetailed with the surveillance
state that Greenwald had described himself in his speech
at the Council on American- Islamic Relations dinner in 2012. Of
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course, the similarity of the phrasing might not have been entirely
coincidental. Greenwald’s 2012 speech had been put on YouTube and
widely circulated on the Internet just a few days before Snowden
first wrote to him on December 1, 2012. Snowden identified himself
as a privacy advocate, which was also how Greenwald often identified
himself in his speeches. He also echoed other concerns Greenwald
had publicly expressed, including defending American privacy
from government intrusions.
Snowden promised the leaks he would supply would provide dramatic
results. He asserted in one of his e- mails to Poitras that the
“shock” of the documents he would give Greenwald would result in
the public’s learning about the secret “mechanisms through which
our privacy is violated.” According to Snowden’s assessment, following
that initial uproar, they could achieve another objective in their
common cause. “We can guarantee for all people equal protection
against unreasonable search,” he wrote. In light of this convergence
of views, it is not surprising that Greenwald was fully convinced
of Citizen Four’s bona fides. He said to Poitras, “He’s real,” and he
agreed to help break the story in The Guardian.
Poitras now revealed to Greenwald that Citizen Four would deliver
an entire trove of secret documents to them in six to eight weeks.
According to this timetable, the Greenwald scoop and the “shock”
Citizen Four promised would come in early to mid- June 2013.
At this point in April, Snowden was in full control. Although
his job at Dell involved endlessly monitoring largely meaningless
encrypted messages in the NSA tunnel, he had been able to get three
major journalists to react favorably to his proposal. None of them
knew his name, position, age, location, or where precisely he worked.
Nor did they know the means by which he planned to obtain the
secrets that he dangled before them. They also did not know where,
or even if, they would meet their source. Their total knowledge about
him was the description he improperly gave of himself: a “senior
government employee in the intelligence community” (Greenwald
speculated that he was a disgruntled CIA station chief).
Even though they were operating largely in the dark, these three
journalists acted as almost any other ambitious reporter would if he
or she were offered a major scoop about illegal acts of the govern-
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ment. In addition, the information was in line with what they had
previously investigated or written about. None of these journalists
had any reason to doubt at this point that their anonymous source
was anything but the sincere whistle- blower he claimed to be. They
could not have known from his anonymous e- mails that aside from
the whistle- blowing documents he promised them, he was in the
process of stealing a large number of other documents that concerned
the NSA’s sources and methods in foreign countries. These
documents, to which Snowden never referred in his correspondence
with them, had little if anything at all to do with domestic spying on
American citizens.
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chapter 8
Raider of the Inner Sanctum
They think there’s a smoking gun in there that would be the
death of them all politically.
— edward snowden, Moscow, 2014
The nightmare of the NSA is a penetration. As the CIA, the
FBI, and the NSA found out in the 1990s, no intelligence service
is invulnerable to it. Any employee of a large intelligence organization
can turn, or be turned, against it. Among the more than ten
thousand intelligence workers employed by the NSA, it is a near
certainty that over time more than one of them will become dissatisfied
with their work. A worker may have a personal grievance
about salary, lack of promotion, or treatment by his or her superiors.
Disenchantment with the NSA may also proceed from idealistic
objections. The NSA is in the business of secretly intercepting
messages, and an insider could come to find its spying activities at
odds with his or her own beliefs about the violation of privacy. For
any of these reasons, a disgruntled insider could go rogue. He or she
then might attempt to right a perceived wrong by disclosing NSA
secrets to another party. That party might then induce or blackmail
the rogue employee into disclosing further secrets.
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To guard against this, the NSA has developed a well- organized
system for stratifying its data so that obtaining critical secrets
required a rogue employee to burrow into its heavily protected inner
sanctum. As part of this system, the NSA divides its data into different
tiers depending on the importance of the secrets to its operations.
The first tier, Level 1, is mainly administrative material. This data
would include FISA court orders and other directives its employees
might need to check on to carry out their tasks. Level 2 contains
data from which the secret sources have been removed. This tier,
available to other intelligence services and policy makers, includes
reports and analysis that can be shared. Level 3 contains documents
that cannot be shared outside a small group of authorized individuals,
because they disclose the secret sources through which the NSA
surreptitiously obtained the information. This third tier includes,
for example, compiled lists of sources in China, Russia, Iran, and
other adversary countries. It also discloses the exotic methods the
NSA uses to get some of this data. Level 3 documents also include
reports on specific NSA, CIA, and Pentagon operations unknown to
adversaries. These Level 3 documents are described by NSA executives
as “the Keys to the Kingdom,” because they could invalidate
America’s entire intelligence enterprise if they fell into the hands of
an adversary. And, as far as is known, prior to 2013, there had been
no successful theft of any Level 3 documents.
Because of their extreme sensitivity, Level 3 documents were not
handled by most of the private firms providing independent contractors.
At Dell, Snowden had access mainly to Level 1 and Level 2 data
(which he could, and did, download from shared sites on NSANet).
These lower- level documents had whistle- blowing potential because
they concerned NSA operations in the United States. They did not
reveal, however, sources that the NSA used in intercepting the military
and civilian activities of foreign adversaries.
Snowden quit his job at Dell as a system administrator on
March 15, 2013, to take another job working for the NSA in Hawaii
at Booz Allen Hamilton. Unlike other outside contractors that serviced
the NSA, the firm he now chose specialized in handling the
NSA’s Level 3 data.
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When Snowden applied to Booz Allen earlier in March 2013, the
company had no opening for a system administrator at the National
Threat Operations Center, an NSA unit in which it dealt with
Level 3 data. It did have an opening for an infrastructure analyst, a
lower- paying job involving maintaining the computer technology
necessary to monitor threats. Despite a cut in pay, Snowden took
that job. “Snowden was an IT guy, not a SIGINT analyst,” a former
NSA Signals Intelligence officer pointed out. “He was working as a
contracted infrastructure analyst for NSA’s Information Assurance
arm, . . . [which, ironically as it turned out] protects classified U.S.
communications from potential intruders.” Steven Bay, the manager
at Booz Allen who hired and supervised Snowden, recalled that the
first “red flag” came up soon after Snowden began he training, when
“Snowden began asking about a highly classified mass-surveillance
program” to which Snowden did not have access (although Bay did).
In retrospect, Bay realized that Snowden had applied for the job for a
specific reason. “He targeted our [Booz Allen] contract directly,” Bay
said. “Somehow he figured out that our contract, and what we did
on that contract, were the types of gates he needed to get access to.”
Snowden subsequently told the South China Morning Post that
he took this job to “get access to lists of machines all over the world
the NSA had hacked.” If so, he was after the keys to the NSA’s kingdom
of global surveillance. Booz Allen held those keys. “He targeted
my company because we enjoy more access than other companies,”
Booz Allen’s vice- chairman Michael McConnell said with the benefit
of hindsight. As a result of the theft, he appraised, “an entire generation
of intelligence was lost.” McConnell, a former NSA director,
was in a position to know.
Snowden’s sudden career change had both advantages and disadvantages
for the enterprise he was planning. The main advantage
was that he would have proximity to the computers in which were
kept the “lists” he sought of NSA global sources. The main disadvantage,
aside from a cut in salary, was that he would no longer be a
system administrator. This change meant he would no longer have
privileges to bypass password restrictions or temporarily transfer
data. Instead, as an infrastructure analyst, he would not have pass-
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word access, at least during the two- month- long training period, to
the computers that he had not been specifically “read into,” which
did not include those computers that stored the Level 3 lists. Access
to these tightly controlled compartments was limited to only a handful
of analysts at the center who had a need to know.
Because the new job entailed handling higher- level secret documents,
Booz Allen had stricter requirements for applicants than
Dell. To slip by them, Snowden had engaged in a minor subterfuge.
He wrote on his application that he was expecting a master’s degree
from the online division of Liverpool University in England. In fact,
he had not completed a single course at Liverpool and would not be
receiving any sort of a degree from it. Booz Allen did not verify this
and had agreed to hire him as a trainee- analyst. It did not change
that decision even after it found out about his subterfuge.
According to Admiral McConnell, Snowden never actually
worked in the Booz Allen offices, which are housed in a skyscraper in
downtown Honolulu. Instead, he was immediately assigned to work
at the NSA’s highly sensitive National Threat Operations Center at
the Kunia base, the same location where he had worked for Dell.
Before he could begin working there, however, he needed to fly to
Maryland to take a mandatory orientation course at the NSA. The
course was given in an eleven- story building, with a sheer wall of
black glass, on the NSA’s 350- acre campus at Fort Meade. He arrived
there from Hawaii on April 1, 2013. Like every other Booz Allen
contractor who worked at the NSA’s center, Snowden was required
to sign the “Sensitive Compartmented Information Nondisclosure
Agreement.” In this document, Snowden acknowledged that he had
been granted access to sensitive compartmented information, called
SCI, as part of his work and that he understood that any disclosure
of that information to an unauthorized person would violate federal
criminal law. He was also told, as were all new contract employees
at Booz Allen, that its disclosure could damage the interests of
the United States and benefit its enemies. In signing the document,
he swore an oath not to divulge any of this information without
first receiving written approval from U.S. authorities. So less than
two months before he downloaded sensitive compartmented infor-
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mation, he was fully aware of what the consequences of divulging
this information would be. By this time, as we know, he had already
agreed to deliver classified data to three journalists.
Snowden believed that bringing complaints to NSA lawyers or
supervisors was, as he put it, “playing with fire.” “When I was at
NSA,” Snowden later said in Moscow, “everybody knew that for
anything more serious than workplace harassment, going through
the official process was a career-ender at best.”
Nevertheless, on April 5, 2013, while still in the training facility
in Maryland, he apparently sought to establish a paper trail for himself.
He wrote a letter to NSA’s Office of the General Counsel asking
whether or not NSA directives take precedence over acts of Congress.
A lawyer from the Office of the General Counsel responded
three days later, addressing Snowden as “Dear Ed.” The lawyer said
that acts of Congress take precedence over NSA directives. He also
suggested that “Ed” phone him if he needed any further clarification.
Presumably, Snowden had asked the question to elicit a reply
he could later use to bolster his claim that the NSA had ignored or
rejected policies regarding NSA directives. Instead, the “Dear Ed”
response was of little use to Snowden, because it did not dispute his
point that NSA directives must lawfully conform to the acts of Congress.
The NSA lawyer never heard back from “Ed.”
Snowden completed his orientation course at Fort Meade on Friday,
April 12, 2013. While he was in Maryland, he took time off to
pay visits to both of his divorced parents. It would be the last time he
would see either of them in the United States.
He returned on April 13 to Hawaii. One domestic task he had to
attend to was helping Mills pack up their possessions, which they
stored in boxes in the garage. The lease on their house was up on
April 30, 2013, and they had to move. According to Mills, they found
a temporary rental just a few blocks away.
On Monday, April 15, Snowden began on- the- job training as
an analyst at the National Threat Operations Center. He would
not complete the course. The same week he began the training, he
prepared his exit by writing to Booz Allen and saying he needed a
brief medical leave in May to undergo treatment for epilepsy symptoms.
As far as is known, he did not suffer from epilepsy. Booz Allen
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required a minimum of one month’s notice for foreign travel. By
making the request, he lessened the likelihood that it would arouse
undue suspicion when he departed for Hong Kong with stolen documents
on May 18. This brief window left him some four weeks to
take the lists that he coveted.
Snowden carried out the heist with precision reminiscent of a
Mission: Impossible movie caper. First, he needed to get passwords to
up to twenty- four compartments at the National Threat Operations
Center that he had not been read into. Even in the “open culture”
of the NSA, this was not an easy challenge. He would be asking
one or more intelligence professionals to break strict NSA rules
that not only prohibited them from disclosing their passwords to an
unauthorized party such as himself but required them to report any
unauthorized person who asked to use their passwords. Remarkably,
he accomplished this incredible feat. He gained access to twenty- four
compartments containing the NSA’s most closely guarded secrets in
a matter of a few weeks.
Next, he had to find the lists he was seeking in a vast ocean of
data. For this task, he used software applications called spiders to
crawl through the data and find the files he was after. He deployed
these robotic spiders, which presumably had been programmed in
advance, soon after he began working at the center. According to the
subsequent NSA damage assessment, Snowden’s spiders indexed
well over one million documents. Many of those that he copied and
moved were from Level 3 sensitive compartmented information,
according to the NSA analysis. The spiders also made his penetration
relatively safe. As previously mentioned, the Hawaii base did
not have a real- time auditing system. So alarm bells did not go off in
the security office when he indexed documents.
Finally, Snowden had to find a way to transfer this data to a computer
with an opened USB port. This task was complicated by a security
precaution. Most of the computers at the center had had their
ports sealed shut to prevent unauthorized downloads. Making the
transfer even more difficult, he was working as an analyst in training
in an open- plan office with closed- circuit security cameras. But it
was not impossible. System administrators sometimes used service
computers that had unsealed ports to back up data before they did
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maintenance work. Even though Snowden was no longer a system
administrator, he could still perhaps befriend a system administrator
or even steal or borrow a service computer.
Whatever the NSA’s and Booz Allen’s security measures, Snowden
succeeded in getting the files. In a matter of a few weeks, he managed
to download hundreds of thousands of Level 3 documents to an
unsealed computer. He also took some less sensitive documents from
the administrative file (which contained mainly Level 1 documents)
at the end of April. These later acquisitions included an order from
the FISA court issued on April 25, 2013.
He had completed the operation by May 17, the last day he would
ever enter the NSA facility. He transferred the data he had amassed
on the service computer, including the lists of the computers in Russia
and China that the NSA had succeeded in penetrating, onto storage
devices, which he later said were thumb drives. Then he coolly
walked past the security guards at the exit, who only seldom performed
random checks on NSA employees.
He carried out the entire operation with such brilliant stealth that
he left few if any clues behind as to how he obtained his colleagues’
passwords to multiple compartments, moved the data from many
different supposedly sealed computers to an opened service machine,
or downloaded these documents to multiple thumb drives without
arousing suspicion. The NSA would not discover the theft for fifteen
days.
His departure from Hawaii was also well prepared. Lindsay Mills
had departed that morning for a planned two- week visit to the outer
islands. This trip allowed him to pack his belongings without saying
anything to her that might be difficult for her to later explain. He
simply left a note that she could show to authorities saying that he
was away on a “business trip.” He informed Bay that he would have
to go in for epilepsy tests on the following Monday and Tuesday. If
the results weren’t good, he might have to be out even longer.
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chapter 9
Escape Artist
I’m not self- destructive. I don’t want to self- immolate and erase
myself from the pages of history. But if we don’t take chances, we
can’t win.
— edward snowden, Moscow, 2014
The next evening, May 18, Snowden drove to Honolulu International
Airport. He left his leased car in the parking lot. He
took with him only carry- on baggage, including a backpack and a
laptop with a Tor sticker on it. “I took everything I had on my back,”
he said, referring to the backpack. He also said that he took enough
cash to pay for his fugitive life and he took the thumb drives containing
the NSA’s keys to the kingdom.
At this point, of course, Snowden was not wanted by the authorities.
He had provided his employer and the NSA with a medical
excuse for his absence from work so he would not be immediately
missed. He had a valid passport, a credit card, and ID. Snowden’s destination
was Hong Kong. After crossing the international date line,
Snowden waited about three hours in the transit zone of Narita. He
then boarded a plane to Hong Kong. After the four- hour flight from
Narita, he arrived in Hong Kong early in the morning on May 20.
He had visited Hong Kong at least once before, with Lindsay
Mills, when he was stationed in Japan. According to Albert Ho, his
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Hong Kong lawyer, Snowden stayed at a residence arranged for him
in advance by a party whom Snowden knew prior to his arrival. As
noted earlier, for the next ten days, Snowden did not use his credit
card or leave any paper trail to his location. Wherever he was, “his
first priority,” as he later told Greenwald, was to find a place safe
from U.S. countermeasures. He brought with him a large number
of electronic copies of NSA documents marked TS/SCI/NOFORN,
which stood for “Top Secret, Sensitive Compartmented Information,
and No Foreign Distribution.” According to government rules,
data carrying these labels could not be removed from a governmentapproved
“SCI facility.” But Snowden, who brought them with him
into this semiautonomous zone in China, broke these rules.
Wherever Snowden was staying, apparently he believed he was
relatively safe. “That whole period was very carefully planned and
orchestrated,” Snowden later told The Guardian in Moscow. On
May 22, he sent an e-mail to Bay (who did not know he had left
Hawaii) saying that his epilepsy tests came back with “bad” results,
and he needed further medical attention. Here Snowden communicated
directly first with Gellman and then with Greenwald. He
e- mailed Gellman under the alias “Verax.”
Already, via Poitras, he had provided Gellman with PowerPoint
slides from an NSA presentation about a joint FBI- NSA- CIA
operation code- named PRISM. He believed it qualified as whistleblowing
because it revealed that the NSA, in intercepting e- mails,
tweets, postings, and other web interactions about foreign terrorists,
incidentally also picked up data about Americans. According to the
rules imposed on the NSA by a 2007 presidential directive, whatever
information was accidently picked up about Americans was supposed
to be filtered out, and hundreds of compliance officers were to
recheck the data every ninety days to assure that directive was being
carried out. Even so, it was likely some data was not expunged in this
process. So PRISM could cause embarrassment for the NSA.
Snowden had not yet made arrangements to meet journalists, but
now he proposed that Gellman join him in Hong Kong. In attempting
to convince him of the urgency of the trip, he wrote that he had reason
to believe that “omniscient State powers” imperiled “our freedom
and way of life.” He noted, with a touch of modesty, “Perhaps
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I am naive.” He also added dramatically, “I have risked my life and
family.” Even so, Gellman declined coming to Hong Kong. (According
to Greenwald, Gellman could not make the trip, because lawyers
for The Washington Post were uneasy with having a reporter receive
classified documents in a part of China.)
On May 24, 2013, Snowden attempted to apply more pressure on
Gellman by telling him that the story about the PRISM program
had to be published by the Post within seventy- two hours. Gellman
could not accede to such a condition, because the decision of when to
publish a story was made not by him but by the editors of the newspaper.
He told Snowden that the earliest the story could be published
was June 6, 2013, which was well past Snowden’s deadline.
Snowden next turned to Greenwald in Brazil. Both Poitras and
Micah Lee had made great efforts to tutor Greenwald on encryption
protocols, with Lee’s sending Greenwald a DVD by FedEx that would
allow him to receive both encrypted messages and encrypted phone
calls. Even then, Greenwald was unable to fully install it. As a result,
Greenwald still had not met Snowden’s requisites on encrypting his
computer.
With Gellman uncertain, Greenwald was now essential to Snowden’s
plan. If he was to have any newspaper outlet, he needed to
persuade Greenwald to come to Hong Kong. At this point, he took
matters into his own hands. On May 25, Snowden somewhat aggressively
e- mailed Greenwald, saying, “I’ve been working on a major
project with a mutual friend of ours. You recently had to decline
short- term travel to meet with me.” Although he did not specify the
“short- term travel” to which he referred, he added pointedly, “You
need to be involved in this story.” He suggested that they immediately
speak on the phone via a website that encrypts conversations.
Snowden began the call by complaining, “I don’t like how this
is developing.” He made it clear that he, not the journalist he had
selected, was pulling the strings. If Greenwald wanted the scoop, he
had to follow Snowden’s instructions, which included dividing the
scoops between The Guardian and The Washington Post. According
to his plan, Gellman would break the PRISM story in the Post, and
Greenwald would break the “mass domestic spying” story in The
Guardian. In addition, he insisted that The Guardian publish his per-
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sonal manifesto alongside its story. As he envisioned it, the media
event would also include a video component in which Greenwald
would interview him.
Greenwald agreed to this micromanaging, So Snowden said he
would send him what he called a “welcome package” of documents
to demonstrate his good faith. His plan also required a face- to- face
meeting. Snowden told him, “The first order of business is to get you
to Hong Kong.” The whole conversation lasted two hours, according
to Greenwald.
Snowden sent him twenty classified NSA documents labeled “Top
Secret.” He also included in the package his personal manifesto,
which asserted that the NSA was part of an international conspiracy
of intelligence agencies that were working to “inflict upon the world
a system of secret, pervasive surveillance from which there is no
refuge.”
Meanwhile, Snowden told Poitras he was sending her a number of
NSA documents, including a FISA warrant that had been issued less
than a month earlier. He wanted that FISA warrant to serve as the
basis of Greenwald’s scoop. It was perfect whistle- blowing material
for The Guardian because it ordered Verizon to turn over all its billing
records for ninety days to the NSA. It was as close to a smoking
gun as anything he had copied at the NSA. It would also get attention
because James Clapper, the director of national intelligence, had
stated before Congress just two months earlier that the NSA did not
collect phone data in America. This warrant would allow The Guardian,
in the best tradition of gotcha journalism, to catch Clapper in an
apparent lie.
Continuing his string pulling, Snowden instructed Poitras not to
show the FISA warrant to Greenwald until they were safely aboard
a plane to Hong Kong. That would prevent Greenwald from releasing
the story previously. He also sent Poitras an entire encrypted
file of NSA documents, saying it would “include my true name and
details for the record, though it will be your decision as to whether
or how to declare my involvement.” He did not send her the key to
decipher the file, saying, “The key will follow when everything else
is done.” He further told her that he preferred that her new film
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focus on him as the sole perpetrator of the leak so that no one else at
the NSA would be suspected.
Poitras and Gellman were not the only journalists involved in
the news event. Poitras also asked Appelbaum to help her interview
Snowden about the NSA’s operations. She later said that she needed
someone with technical expertise in government surveillance to test
the bona fides of Citizen Four. She believed that Appelbaum, who
had participated in her anti- NSA presentations in 2012, qualified for
the position.
Snowden previously had contact with Appelbaum. Appelbaum
had communicated with Snowden under his Oahu CryptoParty alias
about an obscure piece of software just a few weeks after Snowden
had met with Runa Sandvik in Hawaii in December 2012. Appelbaum,
in fact, had worked with Sandvik as a core developer of Tor
software. Snowden allowed Appelbaum to put detailed questions to
him concerning the secret operations of the NSA before he met with
Poitras and Greenwald in Hong Kong. Indeed, Poitras joined him
in asking Snowden via encrypted e- mails such questions as “What
are some of the big surveillance programs that are active today
and how do international partners aid the NSA?” “Does the NSA
partner with other nations, like Israel?” and “Do private companies
help the NSA?” Snowden answered all the questions to the satisfaction
of Appelbaum and Poitras. (The interview was published on
July 8, 2013, with Snowden’s approval on the website of Der Spiegel,
the German weekly, which had also published the WikiLeaks
documents.)
As the days ticked away while Snowden was waiting for Greenwald
in Hong Kong, Greenwald was awaiting a green light to go
there from Janine Gibson, the editor of the Guardian website, who
was based in New York. Under Gibson’s leadership, The Guardian’s
website had effectively “gone into the business of publishing government
secrets,” as the Guardian columnist Michael Wolff pointed
out. Most of the documents had been supplied by Bradley Manning
via WikiLeaks. Few if any of these previous documents The
Guardian published were highly classified, and none were SCI top
secret documents. The NSA documents Greenwald had received
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from Citizen Four were another matter. They contained the sort of
SCI communications intelligence data that no major newspaper had
ever published before. Their disclosure might result in journalists’
being imprisoned, because both British law and U.S. law criminalized
the disclosure by anyone of communications intelligence. As a
lawyer, Greenwald recognized this danger. On the other hand, the
NSA documents were far more explosive than the WikiLeaks material
and promised an even greater spike in circulation. So Greenwald
assumed that Gibson would be willing to authorize their publication
and provide the expenses for his trip to Hong Kong.
He flew from Rio to New York on May 30 to meet in person
with Gibson, who had concerns about publishing what were purported
to be top secret documents that came from an anonymous
source. She was certainly not willing to go along with Citizen Four’s
demand that The Guardian publish his personal manifesto alongside
the documents. Aside from its shrill and alarming tone, it sounded,
as she told Greenwald, “a bit Ted Kaczynski- ish,” referring to the
mathematician known as the Unabomber who had maimed or killed
twenty- six people with anonymous mail bombs between 1978 and
1995. Kaczynski had also demanded that newspapers publish his
personal manifesto. Gibson explained to Greenwald, “It is going to
sound crazy to some people.” Her concern was that it would detract
from the credibility of the rest of the story. Snowden had also written
to Greenwald to explain his position. “Even the Constitution is
subverted when the appetites of power demand it,” Snowden said.
Paraphrasing President Thomas Jefferson, he continued, “Let us
speak no more of faith in man, but bind him down from mischief by
the chains of cryptography.” Snowden, showing his cultlike faith in
encryption, substituted “cryptography” for Jefferson’s word “constitution.”
Gibson was unmoved. The stolen NSA documents were
another matter. They were an enormous scoop that could have a
greater impact than the WikiLeaks scoop.
Gibson authorized Greenwald’s trip to Hong Kong on the condition
that he take with him a Guardian staffer in whom she had
confidence, the Scottish- born Ewen MacAskill, a sixty- one- year- old
veteran journalist who had been the Washington bureau chief for
The Guardian. His assignment was to evaluate the bona fides of the
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anonymous source in Hong Kong for Gibson. Greenwald accepted
her terms. Poitras, who would be accompanying them, would be
paying her own way.
In case The Guardian failed to publish the story, Snowden had a
contingency plan in place. While Greenwald was negotiating with
Gibson, Snowden arranged for Micah Lee, Poitras’s associate at the
Freedom of the Press Foundation, to build a personal website for
him. Writing to Lee from Hong Kong, first under his alias Anon108
and later under his real name, Snowden said that he planned to post
his “anti- surveillance manifesto.” He would also use it to post “a
global petition against surveillance.” Snowden had Lee name the site
“SupportOnlineRights.com.” According to Lee, the website would
be built with a “dead man’s switch,” which would automatically
trigger the release of NSA documents if Snowden was arrested. It
was not clear whether Lee was doing this work as a freelancer or in
his capacity as the chief technology officer for the Freedom of the
Press Foundation. The website Lee built for Snowden proved unnecessary
when Poitras e- mailed him on June 1 that The Guardian had
approved the trip and she and Greenwald were booked on a Cathay
Pacific flight to Hong Kong. They would arrive the next day.
In his preparation to go public in Hong Kong, Snowden showed
himself fully capable of orchestrating what would become a major
news story. He not only picked the journalists who would break
it but also instructed each of them as to the timing, sequence, and
content of their initial disclosures. In the security of his unknown
residence in Hong Kong, he also worked to carefully separate the
purloined NSA documents into two very different caches. “I carefully
evaluated every single document I disclosed,” Snowden
explained to the Guardian journalists in early June. The documents
in this first cache were selected to serve what he termed the “public
interest.” In the hands of journalists, these selected documents,
and the story he fashioned to accompany them, would burnish his
image in the public consciousness as a whistle- blower. He did not
turn over the second cache, telling Greenwald, “There are all sorts
of documents that would have made a big impact that I didn’t turn
over.”
By the time he received the message from Poitras, Snowden had
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finished his preparations for the journalists. With selected documents
copied on a thumb drive, he moved from the residence where
he had been staying for ten days to a venue for meeting the reporters.
The place he chose, as noted earlier, was the Mira hotel in the
Kowloon district of Hong Kong, where he checked in under his own
name. He e- mailed Poitras his name and the address of the hotel;
there was no longer any reason to hide his true identity.
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c h a p t e r 10
Whistle- blower
They elected me. The overseers . . . The [American] system failed
comprehensively, and each level of oversight, each level of responsibility
that should have addressed this, abdicated their responsibility.
— edward snowden, Moscow, 2013
While snowden in Hong Kong was attempting to reel in
the journalists, Lindsay Mills returned to Honolulu from
her “island- hopping” trip to find their house partially flooded and
Snowden nowhere to be found. In a brief note Snowden left her, he
said he was away on a business trip and indicated that, at least temporarily,
their eight- year relationship was on hold.
“I feel alone, lost, overwhelmed, and desperate for a reprieve from
the bipolar nature of my current situation,” she wrote in her journal
on June 2 (which would be June 3 across the international timeline
in Hong Kong). “I’ve nearly lost my mind, family, and house over
the past few weeks.” She also noted in her online journal, “Oh and
I physically lost my memory [SIM] card with nearly all my adventure
photos,” as well as other personal data. The loss would make it
difficult to reconstruct her past activities with Snowden.
In Hong Kong, if Snowden were following Lindsay’s online journal,
he would have read that his girlfriend had returned home, lost
her data, and needed a “reprieve” from the situation in which he had
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put her. But because they were exchanging private text messages
by then, he would not have needed to consult her public journal.
Snowden was certainly aware that he would soon be the object of a
manhunt that could involve those with whom he was acquainted. He
instructed Poitras to mask their e- mail communications in cyberspace
“so we don’t have a clue or record of your true name in your
file communication chain.” Such precautions were necessary, he
explained to her, because “every trick in the book is likely to be used
in looking into this.” The journalists arrived the evening of June 2.
The Mira hotel can be entered by guests both through a groundfloor
lobby with a restaurant and a smaller third- floor lobby that
connects to the Mira shopping mall. The instructions that Snowden
sent Poitras on her arrival were an exercise in control: “On timing,
regarding meeting up in Hong Kong, the first rendezvous attempt
will be at 10 a.m. local time. We will meet in the hallway outside
of the restaurant in the Mira Hotel. I will be working on a Rubik’s
cube so that you can identify me. Approach me and ask if I know the
hours of the restaurant. I’ll respond by stating that I’m not sure and
suggest you try the lounge instead. I’ll offer to show you where it is,
and at that point we’re good. You simply need to follow naturally.”
According to Greenwald’s account, Snowden changed the plan to the
upper lobby. “We were to go to the third floor,” Greenwald writes.
“We were to wait on a couch near a ‘giant alligator,’ ” which Poitras
said was a room decoration. (A hotel executive told me that the hotel
knew of no plastic alligator on the third floor but possibly it had
been temporarily parked there by a hotel guest.) They were then
to give the recognition signal. Although these instructions provided
the atmospherics of “an international spy thriller,” as Greenwald
described them, Snowden hardly needed any spy tradecraft to recognize
Greenwald and Poitras because there were many photographs
of them on the Internet.
In any case, they gave the recognition signal, twice, in the designated
place, and a young man walked over to them holding
a Rubik’s Cube. Greenwald noted, “The first thing I saw was the
unsolved Rubik’s Cube, twirling in the man’s left hand.” The man
said, “Hello,” and introduced himself as “Ed Snowden.”
Greenwald was particularly surprised by Snowden’s boyish looks.
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“The initial impression was one of extreme confusion,” Greenwald
wrote in his book. “I was expecting to meet somebody in his sixties
or seventies, someone very senior in the agency, because I knew
almost nothing about him prior to our arrival in Hong Kong.” His
initial confusion was understandable. Snowden, it will be recalled,
had falsely identified himself to them in an e- mail as a senior member
of the intelligence community.
Snowden led Greenwald and Poitras to the nearby elevator, and
they went through various corridors of the hotel to his room on
the tenth floor. It was mainly occupied by a king- sized bed, but it
also featured a sleek writing desk in the corner, two chairs, and a
modernistic lamp. The bathroom was behind a glass partition, which
could be closed off by a black louver blind. There was also a small
refrigerator in which Snowden asked them to stow their cell phones.
Snowden, as we know, had already told Poitras that he wanted
her to make a documentary of the meeting. She therefore wasted
no time in mounting her camera on a tripod. “Minutes after meeting,
I set up the camera,” she said. Snowden told her, “When you
are involved in an action which is likely to get you indicted, you
typically don’t have a camera rolling in the room.” Nevertheless,
he allowed her to film his actions for the next eight days. One possible
reason is that he had no intention of standing trial. In any case,
as Poitras found out, Snowden was anything but camera shy. Over
the next week, she would shoot over twenty hours of Snowden’s
activities in that small room. It was essentially a one- man show, a
presentation of him, by himself, for the appreciation of a global public.
Poitras knew virtually nothing about her subject until ten minutes
before she began filming him. She had not even googled him,
because she was concerned that her Internet search might alert the
NSA and law enforcement authorities. In an over- the- top waiver of
his own privacy, he allowed her to film him washing in the bathroom,
preening his hair in the mirror, napping on his bed, getting
dressed, and packing his bag. He even permitted her to film a private
computer exchange between him and Mills (who was in Honolulu).
That day Mills informed Snowden that two government investigators
had come to their home in Hawaii, asking her about Snowden’s
whereabouts. When he had failed to show up for work on June 3 it
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evidently set off alarm bells at Booz Allen and the NSA. Snowden
expressed anger to the journalists in the room at the NSA’s intrusions
on the privacy of his girlfriend.
Snowden also performed his security procedures on camera,
including stuffing bed pillows under the door to block any eavesdroppers
and throwing a red blanket over his head, which he called
jokingly his “magical cloak of power.” He explained to Greenwald
that he donned his “cloak” when he turned on his laptop to prevent
any hidden cameras in the room from spotting his password. He also
checked the hotel phone for bugs. It was not without irony that he
went through these security rituals to protect his data as he allowed
Poitras to film NSA data on his computer screen. Because he planned
to use these journalists as his outlets to go public in a few days, the
security measures he performed while on camera would only serve
a temporary purpose.
The centerpiece of the planned video would take the form of an
interview with Greenwald. Snowden himself provided the talking
points. The filming would eventually provide Poitras with a featurelength
documentary, Citizenfour, which would be commercially
released in October 2014 and win an Academy Award for her.
The next day, Ewen MacAskill, whom Poitras had not wanted
Greenwald to bring to the initial meeting, joined Poitras and Greenwald
in Snowden’s room. Snowden insisted that MacAskill also go
through the ritual of stowing his cell phone in the minibar refrigerator.
Not without irony, Snowden’s own phone can be seen on his bed
recharging. Although MacAskill was sent by Gibson to the event to
verify the source’s bona fides, he had apparently hardly been briefed.
The questioning went as follows:
macaskill: Sorry, I don’t know anything about you.
snowden: OK, I work for—
macaskill: Sorry, I don’t know even your name.
snowden: Oh, sorry, my name is Edward Snowden. I go by Ed.
MacAskill went on to ask him to enumerate the various positions
he held during his career in intelligence. Snowden was not entirely
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truthful in describing himself. He said that he had been a senior
adviser to the CIA, when he had been just a telecommunications support
officer. He also said he had been a senior adviser at the Defense
Intelligence Agency, even though, according to that intelligence
service, he was never employed there. (He did speak at an interagency
counterintelligence course the DIA had sponsored.) He said
he had a $200,000- a- year salary from Booz Allen when, according
to Booz Allen, it was $133,000. It is understandable that he wanted
to impress these Guardian journalists in light of his young age and
boyish appearance, even to the extent of meretriciously claiming
in the video that he had been personally given the “authority” at
the NSA to intercept President Obama’s private communications,
which, according to an NSA spokeswoman, was not true. No NSA
employee, and certainly no civilian contract worker, was given the
authority to spy on the president of the United States, she insisted.
Such career enhancements reinforced the fact that Snowden altered
reality when it suited his purpose with journalists.
Snowden had greatly exaggerated or misrepresented the positions
he held with the CIA and the DIA, but no effort was made by
the team of journalists to verify the information. Instead, MacAskill
wrote to Janine Gibson in New York, “The Guinness is good.” It was
a prearranged code by which MacAskill certified Snowden’s credibility
for The Guardian. Gibson told Greenwald to proceed with the
story. Snowden had already provided Poitras and Greenwald with
thumb drives on which he had loaded the documents he wanted
them to use.
Greenwald wrote his first story about NSA transgressions based
almost entirely on the FISA warrant involving Verizon’s cooperation
that Snowden had copied from the administrative file. Before
the story could be published, however, the Guardian policy required
relevant American government officials be given the opportunity to
respond. Gibson made the requisite call to the White House national
security spokesperson, Caitlin Hayden, who arranged a conference
call with the FBI’s deputy director, Sean Joyce, the NSA’s deputy
director, Chris Inglis, and Robert Litt, the legal officer for the Office of
the Director of National Intelligence. After duly taking into account
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the response of these three officials, which included the admonition
by Litt that “no serious news organization would publish this,” Gibson
gave the green light to publish the story.
The story broke on June 6. “NSA Collecting Phone Records of
Millions of Verizon Customers Daily,” proclaimed the Guardian
headline. Under Greenwald’s byline, it said, “Exclusive: Top secret
court order requiring Verizon to hand over all call data shows scale
of domestic surveillance under Obama.” Along with it was the FISA
order. The PRISM story broke hours later in The Washington Post.
Written by Gellman and Poitras, it claimed that the NSA and the
FBI were tapping directly into the central servers of nine leading
U.S. Internet companies, which were knowingly participating in the
operation. The latter allegation turned out to be not entirely true,
because some of the Internet companies cited in the story denied
that they had knowingly participated. The back- to- back publication
of these two stories by The Guardian and the Post, however, provided
the explosive “shock,” at least in the global media, that Snowden had
predicted.
Snowden’s identity had not been revealed in either the Guardian
or the Post story on June 6. Snowden, however, insisted on outing
himself. He explained to Greenwald that he needed to “define himself”
before the U.S. government “demonized” him as a spy. That
self- definition would be accomplished by a twelve- minute video
titled “Whistleblower.” Poitras extracted much of the material for
the video from the twenty or so hours she had shot. In the filmed
interview, Snowden voiced many of the same statements he had
made in his manifesto, so he no longer needed to post that on the
Internet. When he insisted on the immediate airing of the video,
Greenwald told him that by going public in this way, he was saying
“fuck you” to the American government. Snowden replied, “I want
to identify myself as the person behind these disclosures.”
On June 9, the video was posted on the Guardian website with the
Freedom of the Press Foundation getting an on- screen credit. “My
name is Ed Snowden,” the extraordinary disclosure began. He then
described how the NSA was watching U.S. citizens. Even though the
NSA press spokesperson subsequently disputed some of his more
dramatic claims, such as his assertion that he had the authority at
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the NSA “to wiretap anyone, even the president,” the press largely
accepted his claims as established facts. As for American surveillance,
he declared, “I don’t want to live in a society that does those sorts of
things.”
The Guardian story accompanying the video carried the headline
“Edward Snowden: The Whistleblower Behind the NSA Surveillance
Revelations.” Overnight, Snowden became a global celebrity
and, to much of the world, a hero.
The next morning he packed his belongings into a backpack and
moved, without notifying the front desk, to another room Poitras
had rented at the Mira. Complicated schemes, especially when they
involve transferring state secrets to unauthorized parties in a foreign
country, do not necessarily go as planned. That was true of
Snowden’s escape plan. Snowden had no plan to stay put and face
the music. On the morning of June 10, though, there was apparently
a problem. Robert Tibbo and Jonathan Man, the lawyers who, along
with Albert Ho, had been retained for Snowden by an unidentified
party, received an emergency phone call early in the morning telling
them to help Snowden move to a safe location. Although Tibbo
would not identify the person who had called, the message had been
relayed to Man and him through Ho’s office. When Tibbo called
Snowden offering to help him move, Snowden told him, “I can make
myself unrecognizable.”
Tibbo and Man immediately proceeded to the mall adjacent to
the Mira hotel, where they met Snowden. After he signed a document