No Place to Hide Page 10

  Janine agreed and two hours later sent me the new draft of the PRISM story. The headline read:

  NSA Prism Program Taps In to User Data of Apple, Google and Others

  • Top-secret Prism program claims direct access to servers of firms including Google, Apple and Facebook

  • Companies deny any knowledge of program in operation since 2007

  After quoting the NSA documents describing PRISM, the article noted: “Although the presentation claims the program is run with the assistance of the companies, all those who responded to a Guardian request for comment on Thursday denied knowledge of any such program.” The article looked great to me, and Janine pledged that it would run within half an hour.

  As I waited impatiently for the minutes to go by, I heard the chime indicating the arrival of a chat message. I was hoping for confirmation from Janine, letting me know that the PRISM article was up. The message was from Janine, but not what I expected.

  “The Post just published their PRISM story,” she said.

  What? Why, I wanted to know, had the Post suddenly changed its publishing schedule to rush their article into publication three days ahead of their plan?

  Laura shortly learned from Barton Gellman that the Post had got wind of our intentions after US officials had been contacted by the Guardian about the PRISM program that morning. One of those officials, knowing that the Post was working on a similar story, had passed on the news of our article on PRISM. The Post had then rapidly sped up their schedule to avoid being scooped.

  Now I loathed the deliberation even more: a US official had exploited this prepublication procedure, supposedly designed to protect national security, to ensure that his favored newspaper would run the story first.

  Once I had absorbed the information, I noticed the explosion on Twitter about the Post’s PRISM article. But when I went to read it, I saw something missing: the inconsistency between the NSA version and the Internet companies’ statements.

  Headlined “U.S., British Intelligence Mining Data from Nine U.S. Internet Companies in Broad Secret Program,” and with Gellman and Laura’s byline, the piece stated that “the National Security Agency and the FBI are tapping directly into the central servers of nine leading U.S. Internet companies, extracting audio and video chats, photographs, e-mails, documents, and connection logs that enable analysts to track foreign targets.” Most significantly, it alleged that the nine companies “participate knowingly in PRISM operations.”

  Our own PRISM article was published ten minutes later, with its rather different focus and more cautious tone, prominently touting the Internet companies’ vehement denials.

  Once again, the reaction was explosive. Moreover, it was international. Unlike telephone carriers such as Verizon, which are generally based in one country, Internet giants are global. Billions of people all over the world—in countries on every continent—use Facebook, Gmail, Skype, and Yahoo! as a primary means of communication. To learn that these companies had entered into secret arrangements with the NSA to provide access to their customers’ communications was globally shocking.

  And now people began speculating that the earlier Verizon story was not a onetime event: the two articles signaled a serious NSA leak.

  The PRISM story’s publication marked the last day for many months when I was able to read, let alone respond to, all the emails I received. Scanning my in-box, I saw the names of almost every major media outlet in the world wanting an interview: the worldwide debate Snowden had wanted to trigger was well under way—after only two days of stories. I thought about the massive trove of documents still to come, what this would mean for my life, the impact it would have on the world, and how the US government would respond once it realized what it faced.

  In a repeat of the previous day, I spent the early hours of Hong Kong’s morning doing prime-time TV shows in the United States. The pattern that I followed my entire time in Hong Kong was thus set: working on stories throughout the night with the Guardian, doing interviews by day with the media, and then joining Laura and Snowden in his hotel room.

  I frequently took cabs around Hong Kong at 3:00 or 4:00 a.m., going to television studios, always with Snowden’s “operational security” instructions in mind: never to part with my computer or the thumb drives full of documents to prevent tampering or theft. I traveled the desolate streets of Hong Kong with my heavy backpack permanently attached to my shoulders, no matter where or what the hour. I fought paranoia every step of the way and often found myself looking over my shoulder, grabbing my bag just a bit more tightly each time someone approached.

  When I was done with the bevy of TV interviews, I would head back to Snowden’s room, where Laura, Snowden, and I—sometimes joined by MacAskill—continued our work, interrupting our progress only to glance at the TV. We were amazed at the positive reaction, how substantive the media’s engagement with the revelations appeared to be, and how angry most commentators were: not at those who brought the transparency but at the extraordinary level of state surveillance we had exposed.

  I now felt able to implement one of our intended strategies, responding defiantly and scornfully toward the government’s tactic of invoking 9/11 as the justification for this spying. I began denouncing Washington’s tired and predictable accusations—that we had endangered national security, that we were aiding terrorism, that we had committed a crime by revealing national secrets.

  I felt emboldened to argue that these were the transparent, manipulative strategies of government officials who had been caught doing things that embarrassed them and damaged their reputations. Such attacks would not deter our reporting: we would publish many more stories from the documents, regardless of fearmongering and threats, carrying out our duty as journalists. I wanted to be clear: the usual intimidation and demonization were futile. Despite this defiant posture, most of the media, in those first days, were supportive of our work.

  This surprised me because, especially since 9/11 (though before that as well), the US media in general had been jingoistic and intensely loyal to the government and thus hostile, sometimes viciously so, to anyone who exposed its secrets.

  When WikiLeaks began publishing classified documents related to the Iraq and Afghanistan wars and especially diplomatic cables, calls for the prosecution of WikiLeaks were led by American journalists themselves, which was in itself astounding behavior. The very institution ostensibly devoted to bringing transparency to the actions of the powerful not only denounced but attempted to criminalize one of the most significant acts of transparency in many years. What WikiLeaks did—receiving classified information from a source within the government and then revealing it to the world—is essentially what media organizations do all the time.

  I had expected the American media to direct its hostility toward me, especially as we continued to publish documents and the unprecedented scope of the leak began to be clear. And as a harsh critic of the journalist establishment and many of its leading members, I was, I reasoned, a natural magnet for such hostility. I had few allies in the traditional media. Most were people whose work I had attacked publicly, frequently, and unsparingly. I expected them to turn on me at the first opportunity, but that first week of media appearances was a virtual lovefest, and not just when I was on.

  On Thursday, day five in Hong Kong, I went to Snowden’s hotel room and he immediately said he had news that was “a bit alarming.” An Internet-connected security device at the home he shared with his longtime girlfriend in Hawaii had detected that two people from the NSA—a human resources person and an NSA “police officer”—had come to their house searching for him.

  Snowden was almost certain this meant that the NSA had identified him as the likely source of the leaks, but I was skeptical. “If they thought you did this, they’d send hordes of FBI agents with a search warrant and probably SWAT teams, not a single NSA officer and a human resources person.” I figured this was just an automatic and routine inquiry, triggered when an NSA employee goes abs
ent for a few weeks without explanation. But Snowden suggested that perhaps they were being purposely low-key to avoid drawing media attention or setting off an effort to suppress evidence.

  Whatever the news meant, it underscored the need to quickly prepare our article and video unveiling Snowden as the source of the disclosures. We were determined that the world would first hear about Snowden, his actions and his motives, from Snowden himself, not through a demonization campaign spread by the US government while he was in hiding or in custody and unable to speak for himself.

  Our plan was to publish two more articles, one on Friday, the next day, and one after that, on Saturday. Then on Sunday, we would release a long piece on Snowden, accompanied by a videotaped interview, and a printed Q and A with him that Ewen would conduct.

  Laura had spent the prior forty-eight hours editing the footage from my first interview with Snowden, but she said it was too detailed, lengthy, and fragmented to use. She wanted to film a new interview right away, one that was more concise and focused, and wrote a list of twenty or so specific questions for me to ask him. I added several of my own as Laura set up her camera and directed us where to sit.

  “Um, my name is Ed Snowden,” the now-famous film begins. “I’m twenty-nine years old. I work for Booz Allen Hamilton as an infrastructure analyst for NSA in Hawaii.”

  Snowden went on to provide crisp, stoic, rational responses to each question: Why had he decided to disclose these documents? Why was this important enough for him to sacrifice his freedom? What were the most significant revelations? Was there anything criminal or illegal shown in these documents? What did he expect would happen to him?

  As he gave examples of illegal and invasive surveillance, he became animated and passionate. But only when I asked him whether he expected repercussions did he show distress, fearing that the government would target his family and girlfriend for retaliation. He would avoid contact with them to reduce the risk, he said, but he knew he could not fully protect them. “That’s the one thing that keeps me up at night, what will happen to them,” he said as his eyes welled up, the first and only time I saw that happen.

  As Laura worked on editing the video, Ewen and I finalized our next two stories. The third article, published that same day, disclosed a top secret presidential directive signed by President Obama in November 2012 ordering the Pentagon and related agencies to prepare for a series of aggressive offensive cyber operations around the world. “Senior national security and intelligence officials,” the first paragraph explained, have been asked “to draw up a list of potential overseas targets for US cyber-attacks, a top secret presidential directive obtained by the Guardian reveals.”

  The fourth article, which ran as planned on Saturday, was about BOUNDLESS INFORMANT, the NSA’s data-tracking program, and it described the reports showing that the NSA was collecting, analyzing, and storing billions of telephone calls and emails sent across the American telecommunications infrastructure. It also raised the question of whether NSA officials had lied to Congress when they had refused to answer senators about the number of domestic communications intercepted, claiming that they did not keep such records and could not assemble such data.

  After the “BOUNDLESS INFORMANT” article was published, Laura and I planned to meet at Snowden’s hotel. But before leaving my room, out of nowhere, as I sat on my hotel bed, I remembered Cincinnatus, my anonymous email correspondent from six months earlier, who had bombarded me with requests to install PGP so that he could provide me with important information. Amid the excitement of everything that was happening, I thought that perhaps he, too, had an important story to give me. Unable to remember his email name, I finally located one of his old messages by searching for keywords.

  “Hey: good news,” I wrote to him. “I know it took me a while, but I’m finally using PGP email. So I’m ready to talk any time if you’re still interested.” I hit “send.”

  Soon after I arrived at his room, Snowden said, with more than a small trace of mockery, “By the way, that Cincinnatus you just emailed, that’s me.”

  It took me a few moments to process this and regain my composure. That person, many months earlier, who desperately tried to get me to use email encryption … was Snowden. My first contact with him hadn’t been in May, just a month earlier, but many months ago. Before contacting Laura about the leaks, before contacting anyone, he had tried to reach me.

  Now, with each passing day, the hours and hours the three of us spent together created a tighter bond. The awkwardness and tension of our initial meeting had quickly transformed into a relationship of collaboration, trust, and common purpose. We knew that we had together embarked on one of the most significant events of our lives.

  But with the “BOUNDLESS INFORMANT” article now behind us, the relatively lighter mood we had managed to keep up over the prior few days turned to palpable anxiety: we were less than twenty-four hours away from revealing Snowden’s identity, which we knew would change everything, for him most of all. The three of us had lived through a short but exceptionally intense and gratifying experience. One of us, Snowden, was soon to be removed from the group, likely to go to prison for a long time—a fact that had depressingly lurked in the air from the outset, dampening the atmosphere, at least for me. Only Snowden had seemed unbothered by this. Now, a giddy gallows humor crept into our dealings.

  “I call the bottom bunk at Gitmo,” Snowden joked as he contemplated our prospects. As we talked about future articles, he would say things like, “That’s going into the indictment. The only question is whether it’s going into yours or mine.” Mostly he remained inconceivably calm. Even now, with the clock winding down on his freedom, Snowden still went to bed at ten thirty, as he had every night during my time in Hong Kong. While I could barely catch more than two hours of restless sleep at a time, he kept consistent hours. “Well, I’m going to hit the hay,” he would announce casually each night before retiring for seven and a half hours of sound sleep, appearing completely refreshed the next day.

  When we asked him about his ability to sleep so well under the circumstances, Snowden said that he felt profoundly at peace with what he had done and so the nights were easy. “I figure I have very few days left with a comfortable pillow,” he joked, “so I might as well enjoy them.”

  * * *

  On Sunday afternoon Hong Kong time, Ewen and I put the final touches on our article introducing Snowden to the world while Laura finished editing the video. I talked to Janine, who signed in to chat as morning began in New York, about the particular importance of handling this news with care and my sense of personal obligation to Snowden to do justice to his choices. I had come to trust my Guardian colleagues more and more, both editorially and for their bravery. But in this case I wanted to vet every edit, large and small, to the piece that would reveal Snowden to the world.

  Later that afternoon in Hong Kong, Laura came to my hotel room to show her video to Ewen and me. The three of us watched it in silence. Laura’s work was brilliant—the video was spare and the editing superb—but mostly the power lay in hearing Snowden speak for himself. He cogently conveyed the conviction, passion, and force of commitment that had driven him to act. His boldness in coming forward to claim what he had done and take responsibility for his actions, his refusal to hide and be hunted, would, I knew, inspire millions.

  What I wanted more than anything was for the world to see Snowden’s fearlessness. The US government had worked very hard over the past decade to demonstrate unlimited power. It had started wars, tortured and imprisoned people without charges, drone-bombed targets in extrajudicial killings. And the messengers were not immune: whistle-blowers had been abused and prosecuted, journalists had been threatened with jail. Through a carefully cultivated display of intimidation to anyone who contemplated a meaningful challenge, the government had striven to show people around the world that its power was constrained by neither law nor ethics, neither morality nor the Constitution: look what we can do and will do t
o those who impede our agenda.

  Snowden had defied the intimidation as directly as possible. Courage is contagious. I knew that he could rouse so many people to do the same.

  At 2:00 p.m. Eastern time on Sunday, June 9, the Guardian published the story that revealed Snowden to the world: “Edward Snowden: The Whistleblower Behind the NSA Surveillance Revelations.” The top of the article featured Laura’s twelve-minute video; the first line read, “The individual responsible for one of the most significant leaks in US political history is Edward Snowden, a 29-year-old former technical assistant for the CIA and current employee of the defence contractor Booz Allen Hamilton.” The article told Snowden’s story, conveyed his motives, and proclaimed that “Snowden will go down in history as one of America’s most consequential whistleblowers, alongside Daniel Ellsberg and Bradley Manning.” We quoted from Snowden’s early note to Laura and me: “I understand that I will be made to suffer for my actions … but I will be satisfied if the federation of secret law, unequal pardon and irresistible executive powers that rule the world that I love are revealed even for an instant.”

  The reaction to the article and the video was more intense than anything I had experienced as a writer. Ellsberg himself, writing the following day in the Guardian, proclaimed that “there has not been in American history a more important leak than Edward Snowden’s release of NSA material—and that definitely includes the Pentagon Papers 40 years ago.”

  Several hundred thousand people posted the link to their Facebook accounts in the first several days alone. Almost three million people watched the interview on YouTube. Many more saw it at the Guardian online. The overwhelming response was shock and inspiration at Snowden’s courage.

  Laura, Snowden, and I followed the reaction to his exposure together, while I also debated with two Guardian media strategists over which Monday morning TV interviews I should agree to do. We settled on Morning Joe on MSNBC, followed by NBC’s Today show—the two earliest shows, which would shape the coverage of Snowden throughout the day.