How America Lost Its Secrets

by Edward Jay Epstein

  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 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 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 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.

  CHAPTER 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 put her. But because they were exchanging private text mess
ages 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 ground-floor 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. “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 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 feature-length 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 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 admi
nistrative 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 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.”