No Place to Hide Read online

  That first day and every day since, Snowden’s resolution and calm contemplation of what might happen to him have been profoundly surprising and affecting. I have never seen him display an iota of regret or fear or anxiety. He explained unblinkingly that he had made his choice, understood the possible consequences, and was prepared to accept them.

  Snowden seemed to derive a sense of strength from having made this decision. He exuded an extraordinary equanimity when talking about what the US government might do to him. The sight of this twenty-nine-year-old young man responding this way to the threat of decades, or life, in a super-max prison—a prospect that, by design, would scare almost anyone into paralysis—was deeply inspiring. And his courage was contagious: Laura and I vowed to each other repeatedly and to Snowden that every action we would take and every decision we would make from that point forward would honor his choice. I felt a duty to report the story in the spirit that had animated Snowden’s original act: fearlessness rooted in the conviction of doing what one believes is right, and a refusal to be intimidated or deterred by baseless threats from malevolent officials eager to conceal their own actions.

  After five hours of questioning, I was convinced beyond any doubt that all of Snowden’s claims were authentic and his motives were considered and genuine. Before we left him, he returned to the point he had already raised many times: he insisted on identifying himself as the source for the documents, and doing so publicly in the first article we published. “Anyone who does something this significant has the obligation to explain to the public why he did it and what he hopes to achieve,” he said. He also did not want to heighten the climate of fear the US government had fostered by hiding.

  Besides, Snowden was sure that the NSA and FBI would quickly pinpoint the source of the leaks once our stories started appearing. He had not taken all possible steps to cover his tracks because he did not want his colleagues to be subjected to investigations or false accusations. He insisted that, using the skills he had acquired and given the incredibly lax NSA systems, he could have covered his tracks had he chosen to do so, even downloading as many top secret documents as he had done. But he had chosen instead to leave at least some electronic footprints to be discovered, which meant that remaining hidden was no longer an option.

  Although I did not want to help the government learn the identity of my source by revealing him, Snowden convinced me that discovery of his identity was inevitable. More important, he was determined to define himself in the eyes of the public rather than allow the government to define him.

  Snowden’s only fear about outing himself was that he would distract from the substance of his revelations. “I know the media personalizes everything, and the government will want to make me the story, to attack the messenger,” he said. His plan was to identify himself early on, and then disappear from view to allow the focus to remain fixed on the NSA and its spying activities. “Once I identify and explain myself,” he said, “I won’t do any media. I don’t want to be the story.”

  I argued that rather than revealing Snowden’s identity in the first article, we should wait for one week so that we could report the initial set of stories without that distraction. Our idea was simple: to churn out one huge story after the next, every day, a journalistic version of shock and awe, beginning as soon as possible and culminating with unveiling our source. At the end of our meeting that first day, we were all in agreement; we had a plan.

  * * *

  For the remainder of my time in Hong Kong, I met and spoke with Snowden every day at length. I never slept more than two hours in any night, and even that was possible only with the use of sleeping aids. The rest of my time was spent writing articles based on Snowden’s documents and, once they started publishing, doing interviews to discuss them.

  Snowden left it up to Laura and me to decide which stories should be reported, in what sequence, and how they would be presented. But on the first day, Snowden—as he did on many occasions both before and since—stressed how urgent it was that we vet all the material carefully. “I selected these documents based on what’s in the public interest,” he told us, “but I’m relying on you to use your journalistic judgment to only publish those documents that the public should see and that can be revealed without harm to any innocent people.” If for no other reason, Snowden knew that our ability to generate a real public debate depended on not allowing the US government any valid claims that we had endangered lives through publishing the documents.

  He also stressed that it was vital to publish the documents journalistically—meaning working with the media and writing articles that provided the context for the materials, rather than just publishing them in bulk. That approach, he believed, would provide more legal protection, and, more important, would allow the public to process the revelations in a more orderly and rational way. “If I wanted the documents just put on the Internet en masse, I could have done that myself,” he said. “I want you to make sure these stories are done, one by one, so that people can understand what they should know.” We all agreed that this framework would govern how we reported.

  On several occasions, Snowden explained that he had wanted Laura and me to be involved in the stories from the start because he knew we would report them aggressively and not be susceptible to government threats. He frequently referred to the New York Times and other major media outlets that had held up big stories at the government’s request. But while he wanted aggressive reporting, he also wanted meticulous journalists to take as long as necessary to ensure that the facts of the story were unassailable and that all of the articles had been thoroughly vetted. “Some of the documents I’m giving you are not for publication, but for your own understanding of how this system works so you can report the right way,” he said.

  After my first full day in Hong Kong, I left Snowden’s hotel room, returned to my own, and stayed up all night to write four articles, hoping the Guardian would start publishing them immediately. There was some urgency: we needed Snowden to review with us as many documents as we could before he became, one way or another, unavailable to speak further.

  There was another source of urgency, too. In the cab on the way to JFK Airport, Laura had told me that she had spoken with several large media outlets and reporters about Snowden’s documents.

  Included among them was Barton Gellman, the two-time Pulitzer Prize winner who had been on the staff at the Washington Post and now worked with the paper on a freelance basis. Laura had difficulty convincing people to travel with her to Hong Kong, but Gellman, who had long had an interest in surveillance issues, was very interested in the story.

  On Laura’s recommendation, Snowden had agreed to have “some documents” given to Gellman, with the intention that he and the Post, along with Laura, would report on certain specific revelations.

  I respected Gellman but not the Washington Post, which, to me, is the belly of the Beltway media beast, embodying all the worst attributes of US political media: excessive closeness to the government, reverence for the institutions of the national security state, routine exclusion of dissenting voices. The paper’s own media critic, Howard Kurtz, had documented in 2004 how the paper had systematically amplified pro-war voices in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq while downplaying or excluding opposition. The Post’s news coverage, concluded Kurtz, had been “strikingly one-sided” in favor of the invasion. The Post editorial page in my opinion remained one of the most vociferous and mindless cheerleaders for US militarism, secrecy, and surveillance.

  The Post had been handed a major scoop that it had not worked to obtain and which the source—Snowden—had not selected (but had consented to on Laura’s recommendation). Indeed, my first encrypted chat with Snowden arose out of his anger over the Post’s fear-driven approach.

  One of my few criticisms of WikiLeaks over the years had been that they, too, had at times similarly handed major scoops to the very establishment media organizations that do the most to protect the government, thereby en
hancing their stature and importance. Exclusive scoops on top secret documents uniquely elevate a publication’s status and empower the journalist who breaks the news. It makes much more sense to give such scoops to independent journalists and media organizations, thereby amplifying their voices, raising their profile, and maximizing their impact.

  Worse, I knew that the Post would dutifully abide by the unwritten protective rules that govern how the establishment media report on official secrets. According to these rules, which allow the government to control disclosures and minimize, even neuter, their impact, editors first go to officials and advise them what they intend to publish. National security officials then tell the editors all the ways in which national security will supposedly be damaged by the disclosures. A protracted negotiation takes place over what will and will not be published. At best, substantial delay results. Often, patently newsworthy information is suppressed. This is most likely what led the Post, when reporting the existence of CIA black sites in 2005, to conceal the identities of those countries in which prisons were based, thus allowing the lawless CIA torture sites to continue.

  This same process caused the New York Times to conceal the existence of the NSA’s warrantless eavesdropping program for more than a year after its reporters, James Risen and Eric Lichtblau, were ready to report it in mid-2004. President Bush had summoned the paper’s publisher, Arthur Sulzberger, and its editor in chief, Bill Keller, to the Oval Office to insist, ludicrously, that they would be helping terrorists if they revealed that the NSA was spying on Americans without the warrants required by law. The New York Times obeyed these dictates and blocked publication of the article for fifteen months—until the end of 2005, after Bush had been reelected (thereby allowing him to stand for reelection while concealing from the public that he was eavesdropping on Americans without warrants). Even then, the Times eventually ran the NSA story only because a frustrated Risen was about to publish the revelations in his book and the paper did not want to be scooped by its own reporter.

  Then there’s the tone that establishment media outlets use to discuss government wrongdoing. The culture of US journalism mandates that reporters avoid any clear or declarative statements and incorporate government assertions into their reporting, treating them with respect no matter how frivolous they are. They use what the Post’s own media columnist, Erik Wemple, derides as middle-of-the-road-ese: never saying anything definitive but instead vesting with equal credence the government’s defenses and the actual facts, all of which has the effect of diluting revelations to a muddled, incoherent, often inconsequential mess. Above all else, they invariably give great weight to official claims, even when those claims are patently false or deceitful.

  It was that fear-driven, obsequious journalism that led the Times, the Post, and many other outlets to refuse to use the word “torture” in their reporting on Bush interrogation techniques, even though they freely used that word to describe the exact same tactics when used by other governments around the world. It was also what produced the debacle of media outlets laundering baseless government claims about Saddam and Iraq to sell the American public on a war built of false pretenses that the US media amplified rather than investigated.

  Yet another unwritten rule designed to protect the government is that media outlets publish only a few such secret documents, and then stop. They would report on an archive like Snowden’s so as to limit its impact—publish a handful of stories, revel in the accolades of a “big scoop,” collect prizes, and then walk away, ensuring that nothing had really changed. Snowden, Laura, and I agreed that real reporting on the NSA documents meant that we had to publish aggressively, one story after the next, and not stop until all of the issues in the public interest had been covered, no matter the anger they caused or the threats they provoked.

  Snowden had been clear from our first conversation about his rationale for distrusting the establishment media with his story, repeatedly referring to the New York Times’s concealment of NSA eavesdropping. He had come to believe that the paper’s concealment of that information may very well have changed the outcome of the 2004 election. “Hiding that story changed history,” he said.

  He was determined to expose the extremity of NSA spying revealed by the documents, so as to enable an enduring public debate with real consequences, rather than achieve a one-off scoop that would accomplish nothing beyond accolades for the reporters. That would take fearless disclosures, expressed scorn for flimsy government excuses and fearmongering, steadfast defense of the rightness of Snowden’s actions, and unambiguous condemnation of the NSA—exactly what the Post would bar its reporters from doing when talking about the government. I knew that anything the Post did would dilute the impact of the disclosures. That they had received a stack of Snowden’s documents seemed completely counter to everything I thought we were trying to achieve.

  As usual, Laura had cogent reasons for her desire to draw in the Post. To begin with, she thought it would be beneficial to involve official Washington in the revelations to make it harder to attack or even criminalize them. If Washington’s favorite newspaper were to report on the leaks, it would be more difficult for the government to demonize those involved.

  Moreover, as Laura fairly pointed out, neither she nor Snowden had been able to communicate with me for quite some time due to my lack of encryption, and she had thus been the one to bear the initial burden of having thousands of top secret NSA documents furnished to her by our source. She had felt a need to find someone she could trust with this secret material and to work with an institution that would offer her some protection. She also did not want to travel to Hong Kong alone. Since she couldn’t speak with me at first, and since the source felt that someone else should help report the PRISM story, she concluded that it made sense to turn to Gellman.

  I understood but never agreed with Laura’s rationale for talking to the Post. The idea that we needed official Washington involved in the story was, to me, exactly the kind of excessively risk-averse, unwritten-rule-abiding approach I wanted to avoid. We were journalists every bit as much as anyone at the Post, and giving them documents so that we would be protected was, in my view, bolstering the very premises we should be seeking to subvert. Although Gellman ended up doing some superb and important reporting with the materials, Snowden, during our initial conversations, began to regret the Post’s involvement, even though he had been the one who had ultimately decided to accept Laura’s recommendation to include them.

  Snowden was upset by what he perceived to be the Post’s foot-dragging, by the recklessness of involving so many people to talk in unsecured ways about what he had done, and especially by the fear demonstrated by endlessly convening with alarmist lawyers. Snowden was especially angry that Gellman, at the behest of Post lawyers and editors, had ultimately declined to travel to Hong Kong to meet him and go over the documents.

  At least as both Snowden and Laura conveyed it, the Post’s lawyers had told Gellman he shouldn’t travel to Hong Kong; they also advised Laura not to go there and rescinded their offer to pay her travel expenses. This was based on an absurd, fear-driven theory; that any discussions about top secret information conducted in China, itself a pervasive surveillance state, might be overheard by the Chinese government. That, in turn, could be viewed by the US government as the Post recklessly passing secrets to the Chinese, which could result in criminal liability for the Post and for Gellman under espionage laws.

  Snowden, in his stoic and understated way, was livid. He had unraveled his life and put everything in jeopardy in order to get this story out. He had almost no protection, yet here was this huge media operation with all sorts of legal and institutional support that would not take the trivial risk of sending a reporter to Hong Kong to meet with him. “I’m ready to hand them this huge story at great personal risk,” he said, “and they won’t even get on a plane.” It was exactly the type of timid, risk-averse government obeisance by our “adversarial press corps” that I had spent years conde
mning.

  The act of giving some of the documents to the Post was done, though, and there was nothing he or I could do to reverse it. But that second night in Hong Kong, after I met with Snowden, I resolved that it would not be the Washington Post, with its muddled, pro-government voice, its fear, and its middle-of-the-road-ese, that would shape how the NSA and Snowden would forever be understood. Whoever broke this story first would play the predominant role in how it was discussed and framed, and I was determined that this would be the Guardian and me. For this story to have the effect it should, the unwritten rules of establishment journalism—designed to soften the impact of revelations and protect the government—had to be broken, not obeyed. The Post would do the latter: I would not.

  So, once in my hotel room, I finished work on the four separate stories. The first was about the secret order from the FISA court compelling Verizon, one of America’s largest telephone companies, to turn over to the NSA all the telephone records of all Americans. The second covered the history of the Bush warrantless eavesdropping program, based on a top secret 2009 internal report from the NSA’s inspector general; another detailed the BOUNDLESS INFORMANT program that I had read about on the plane; and the last story laid out the PRISM program, which I had first learned about at home in Brazil. It was this story, above all, that compelled my urgency: this was the document the Post was working to report.

  To move quickly, we needed the Guardian on board to publish right away. As evening approached in Hong Kong—early morning in New York—I waited impatiently until the Guardian editors were just waking up in New York and kept checking every five minutes to see if Janine Gibson had signed on to Google chat, our normal way of communicating. As soon as I saw that she had, I immediately sent her a message: “We have to talk.”