No Place to Hide Read online

  Indeed, from the start I decided I would let him take the lead. If he wanted me to know why he was in Hong Kong, he would tell me. And if he wanted me to know what documents he had and planned to provide me, he would tell me that, too. This passive posture was difficult for me. As a former litigator and current journalist, I’m accustomed to aggressive questioning when I want answers, and I had hundreds of things I wanted to ask.

  But I assumed his situation was delicate. Whatever else was true, I knew that this person had resolved to carry out what the US government would consider a very serious crime. It was clear from how concerned he was with secure communications that discretion was vital. And, I reasoned,—since I had so little information about whom I was talking to, about his thinking, his motives and fears—that caution and restraint on my part were imperative. I did not want to scare him off, so I forced myself to let the information come to me rather than trying to grab it.

  “Of course I’ll come to Hong Kong,” I said, still having no idea why he was there, of all places, or why he wanted me to go there.

  We spoke online that day for two hours. His first concern was what was happening with some of the NSA documents that, with his consent, Poitras had talked about to a Washington Post reporter, Barton Gellman. The documents pertained to one specific story about a program called PRISM, which allowed the NSA to collect private communications from the world’s largest Internet companies, including Facebook, Google, Yahoo!, and Skype.

  Rather than report the story quickly and aggressively, the Washington Post had assembled a large team of lawyers who were making all kinds of demands and issuing all sorts of dire warnings. To the source, this signaled that the Post, handed what he believed was an unprecedented journalistic opportunity, was being driven by fear rather than conviction and determination. He was also livid that the Post had involved so many people, afraid that these discussions might jeopardize his security.

  “I don’t like how this is developing,” he told me. “I had wanted someone else to do this one story abut PRISM so you could focus on the broader archive, especially the mass domestic spying, but now I really want you to be the one to report this. I’ve been reading you a long time,” he said, “and I know you’ll be aggressive and fearless in how you do this.”

  “I’m ready and eager,” I told him. “Let’s decide now what I need to do.”

  “The first order of business is for you to get to Hong Kong,” he said. He returned to that again and again: come to Hong Kong immediately.

  The other significant topic we discussed in that first online conversation was his goal. I knew from the emails Laura had shown me that he felt compelled to tell the world about the massive spying apparatus the US government was secretly building. But what did he hope to achieve?

  “I want to spark a worldwide debate about privacy, Internet freedom, and the dangers of state surveillance,” he said. “I’m not afraid of what will happen to me. I’ve accepted that my life will likely be over from my doing this. I’m at peace with that. I know it’s the right thing to do.”

  He then said something startling: “I want to identify myself as the person behind these disclosures. I believe I have an obligation to explain why I’m doing this and what I hope to achieve.” He told me he had written a document that he wanted to post on the Internet when he outed himself as the source, a pro-privacy, anti-surveillance manifesto for people around the world to sign, showing that there was global support for protecting privacy.

  Despite the near-certain costs of outing himself—a lengthy prison term if not worse—he was, the source said again and again, “at peace” with those consequences. “I only have one fear in doing all of this,” he said, which is “that people will see these documents and shrug, that they’ll say, ‘we assumed this was happening and don’t care.’ The only thing I’m worried about is that I’ll do all this to my life for nothing.”

  “I seriously doubt that will happen,” I assured him, but I wasn’t convinced I really believed that. I knew from my years of writing about NSA abuses that it can be hard to generate serious concern about secret state surveillance: invasion of privacy and abuse of power can be viewed as abstractions, ones that are difficult to get people to care about viscerally. What’s more, the issue of surveillance is invariably complex, making it even harder to engage the public in a widespread way.

  But this felt different. The media pays attention when top secret documents are leaked. And the fact that the warning was coming from someone on the inside of the national security apparatus—rather than an American Civil Liberties Union lawyer or a civil liberties advocate—surely meant that it would have added weight.

  That night, I talked to David about going to Hong Kong. I was still reluctant to drop all of my work to fly to the other side of the world to meet someone I knew nothing about, not even his name, particularly since I had no real evidence that he was who he said he was. It could be a complete waste of time—or entrapment or some other weird plot.

  “You should tell him that you want to see a few documents first to know that he’s serious and that this is worth it for you,” David suggested.

  As usual, I took his advice. When I signed on to OTR the next morning, I said I was planning to leave for Hong Kong within days but first wanted to see some documents so that I understood the types of disclosures he was prepared to make.

  To do that, he told me again to install various programs. I then spent a couple of days online as the source walked me through, step by step, how to install and use each program, including, finally, PGP encryption. Knowing that I was a beginner, he exhibited great patience, literally on the level of “Click the blue button, now press OK, now go to the next screen.”

  I kept apologizing for my lack of proficiency, for having to take hours of his time to teach me the most basic aspects of secure communication. “No worries,” he said, “most of this makes little sense. And I have a lot of free time right now.”

  Once the programs were all in place, I received a file containing roughly twenty-five documents: “Just a very small taste: the tip of the tip of the iceberg,” he tantalizingly explained.

  I un-zipped the file, saw the list of documents, and randomly clicked on one of them. At the top of the page in red letters, a code appeared: “TOP SECRET//COMINT/NOFORN/.”

  This meant the document had been legally designated top secret, pertained to communications intelligence (COMINT), and was not for distribution to foreign nationals, including international organizations or coalition partners (NOFORN). There it was with incontrovertible clarity: a highly confidential communication from the NSA, one of the most secretive agencies in the world’s most powerful government. Nothing of this significance had ever been leaked from the NSA, not in all the six-decade history of the agency. I now had a couple dozen such items in my possession. And the person I had spent hours chatting with over the last two days had many, many more to give me.

  That first document was a training manual for NSA officials to teach analysts about new surveillance capabilities. It discussed in broad terms the type of information the analysts could query (email addresses, IP [Internet protocol] locator data, telephone numbers) and the type of data they would receive in response (email content, telephone “meta-data,” chat logs). Basically, I was eavesdropping on NSA officials as they instructed their analysts on how to listen in on their targets.

  My heart was racing. I had to stop reading and walk around my house a few times to take in what I had just seen and calm myself enough to focus on reading the files. I went back to my laptop and randomly clicked on the next document, a top secret PowerPoint presentation, entitled “PRISM/US-984XN Overview.” Each page bore the logos of nine of the largest Internet companies, including Google, Facebook, Skype, and Yahoo!.

  The first slides laid out a program under which the NSA had what it called “collection directly from the servers of these U.S. Service Providers: Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, Paltalk, AOL, Skype, YouTube, Apple.�
� A graph displayed the dates on which each of these companies had joined the program.

  Again I became so excited, I had to stop reading.

  The source also said he was sending me a large file that I would be unable to access until the time was right. I decided to set aside that cryptic though significant statement for the moment, in line with my approach of letting him decide when I got information but also because I was so excited by what I had in front of me.

  From the first glimpse I’d had of just these few documents, I knew two things: I needed to get to Hong Kong right away, and I would have to have substantial institutional support to do this reporting. This meant involving the Guardian, the newspaper and online news website that I had joined as a daily columnist only nine months earlier. Now I was about to bring them in to what I knew already would be a major explosive story.

  Using Skype, I called Janine Gibson, the British editor in chief of the US edition of the Guardian. My agreement with the Guardian was that I had full editorial independence, which meant that nobody could edit or even review my articles before they ran. I wrote my pieces, and then published them directly to the Internet myself. The only exceptions to this arrangement were that I would alert them if my writing could have legal consequences for the newspaper or posed an unusual journalistic quandary. That had happened very few times in the previous nine months, only once or twice, which meant that I had had very little interaction with the Guardian editors.

  Obviously, if any story warranted a heads-up, it was this one. Also, I knew I would need the paper’s resources and support.

  “Janine, I have a huge story,” I plunged in. “I have a source who has access to what seems to be a large amount of top secret documents from the NSA. He’s given me a few already, and they’re shocking. But he says he has many, many more. For some reason, he’s in Hong Kong, I have no idea why yet, and he wants me to go there to meet him and get the rest. What he’s given me, what I just looked at, show some pretty shocking—”

  Gibson interrupted. “How are you calling me?”

  “By Skype.”

  “I don’t think we should talk about this on the phone, and definitely not by Skype,” she wisely said, and she proposed that I get on a plane to New York immediately so that we could discuss the story in person.

  My plan, which I told Laura, was to fly to New York, show the documents to the Guardian, get them excited about the story, and then have them send me to Hong Kong to see the source. Laura agreed to meet me in New York, and then we intended to travel together to Hong Kong.

  The next day, I flew from Rio to JFK on the overnight flight, and by 9:00 a.m. the following day, Friday, May 31, I had checked in to my Manhattan hotel and then met Laura. The first thing we did was go to a store to buy a laptop that would serve as my “air gapped machine,” a computer that never connected to the Internet. It is much more difficult to subject an Internet-free computer to surveillance. To monitor an air gapped computer, an intelligence service such as the NSA would have to engage in far more difficult methods, such as obtaining physical access to the computer and placing a surveillance device on the hard drive. Keeping the computer close at all times helps prevent that type of invasion. I would use this new laptop to work with materials that I didn’t want monitored, like secret NSA documents, without fear of detection.

  I shoved my new computer into my backpack and walked the five Manhattan blocks with Laura to the Guardian’s Soho office.

  Gibson was waiting for us when we arrived. She and I went directly into her office, where we were joined by Stuart Millar, Gibson’s deputy. Laura sat outside. Gibson didn’t know Laura, and I wanted us to be able to talk freely. I had no idea how the Guardian editors would react to what I had. I hadn’t worked with them before, certainly not on anything remotely approaching this level of gravity and importance.

  After I pulled up the source’s files on my laptop, Gibson and Millar sat together at a table and read the documents, periodically muttering “wow” and “holy shit” and similar exclamations. I sat on a sofa and watched them read, observing the shock registering on their faces when the reality of what I possessed began to sink in. Each time they finished with one document, I popped up to show them the next one. Their amazement only intensified.

  In addition to the two dozen or so NSA documents the source had sent, he had included the manifesto he intended to post, calling for signatures as a show of solidarity with the pro-privacy, anti-surveillance cause. The manifesto was dramatic and severe, but that was to be expected, given the dramatic and severe choices he had made, choices that would upend his life forever. It made sense to me that someone who had witnessed the shadowy construction of a ubiquitous system of state surveillance, with no oversight or checks, would be gravely alarmed by what he had seen and the dangers it posed. Of course his tone was extreme; he had been so alarmed that he had made an extraordinary decision to do something brave and far-reaching. I understood the reason for his tone, although I worried about how Gibson and Millar would react to reading the manifesto. I didn’t want them to think we were dealing with someone unstable, particularly since, having spent many hours talking to him, I knew that he was exceptionally rational and deliberative.

  My fear was quickly validated. “This is going to sound crazy to some people,” Gibson pronounced.

  “Some people and pro-NSA media types will say it’s a bit Ted Kaczynski-ish,” I agreed. “But ultimately, the documents are what matters, not him or his motives for giving them to us. And besides, anyone who does something this extreme is going to have extreme thoughts. That’s inevitable.”

  Along with that manifesto, Snowden had written a missive to the journalists to whom he gave his archive of documents. It sought to explain his purpose and goals and predicted how he would likely be demonized:

  My sole motive is to inform the public as to that which is done in their name and that which is done against them. The U.S. government, in conspiracy with client states, chiefest among them the Five Eyes—the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand—have inflicted upon the world a system of secret, pervasive surveillance from which there is no refuge. They protect their domestic systems from the oversight of citizenry through classification and lies, and shield themselves from outrage in the event of leaks by overemphasizing limited protections they choose to grant the governed.…

  The enclosed documents are real and original, and are offered to provide an understanding of how the global, passive surveillance system works so that protections against it may be developed. On the day of this writing, all new communications records that can be ingested and catalogued by this system are intended to be held for [] years, and new “Massive Data Repositories” (or euphemistically “Mission” Data Repositories) are being built and deployed worldwide, with the largest at the new data center in Utah. While I pray that public awareness and debate will lead to reform, bear in mind that the policies of men change in time, and even the Constitution is subverted when the appetites of power demand it. In words from history: Let us speak no more of faith in man, but bind him down from mischief by the chains of cryptography.

  I instantly recognized the last sentence as a play on a Thomas Jefferson quote from 1798 that I often cited in my writing: “In questions of power, then, let no more be heard of confidence in man, but bind him down from mischief by the chains of the Constitution.”

  After reviewing all of the documents, including Snowden’s missive, Gibson and Millar were persuaded. “Basically,” Gibson concluded within two hours of my arrival that morning, “you need to go to Hong Kong as soon as possible, like tomorrow, right?”

  The Guardian was on board. My mission in New York had been accomplished. Now I knew that Gibson was committed to pursuing the story aggressively, at least for the moment. That afternoon, Laura and I worked with the Guardian’s travel person to get to Hong Kong as quickly as possible. The best option was a sixteen-hour non-stop flight on Cathay Pacific that left from JFK the next morning. But
just as we began to celebrate our imminent meeting with the source, we ran into a complication.

  At the end of the day, Gibson declared that she wanted to involve a longtime Guardian reporter, Ewen MacAskill, who had been at the paper for twenty years. “He’s a great journalist,” she said. Given the magnitude of what I was embarking on, I knew that I’d need other Guardian reporters on the story and had no objection in theory. “I’d like Ewen to go with you to Hong Kong,” she added.

  I didn’t know MacAskill. More important, neither did the source, and as far as he knew, only Laura and I were coming to Hong Kong. And Laura, who plans everything meticulously, was also bound to be furious at this sudden change in our plans.

  I was right. “No way. Absolutely not,” she responded. “We can’t just add some new person at the last minute. And I don’t know him at all. Who has vetted him?”

  I tried to explain what I thought was Gibson’s motive. I didn’t really know or trust the Guardian yet, not when it came to such a huge story, and I assumed they felt the same way about me. Given how much the Guardian had at stake, I reasoned that they likely wanted someone they knew very well—a longtime company man—to tell them what was going on with the source and to assure them that this story was something they should do. Besides, Gibson would need the full support and approval of the Guardian editors in London, who knew me even less well than she did. She probably wanted to bring in someone who could make London feel safe, and Ewen fit that bill perfectly.

  “I don’t care,” Laura said. “Traveling with some third person, some stranger, could attract surveillance or scare the source.” As a compromise, Laura suggested that they send Ewen after a few days, once we had established contact with the source in Hong Kong and built trust. “You have all the leverage. Tell them they can’t send Ewen until we’re ready.”