Baron, sobered, gave up his playful prodding. We would each have to make this decision for ourselves. He would not fault us if we stayed home. He would back us with every resource if we flew. That night in New York, in my living room, I poured Poitras a bourbon and walked her through the conversation with Simon. “Do you mean to say we can’t go talk to a source about U.S. surveillance abuses because Chinese surveillance might be listening in?” she asked. “Do you realize how fucked up that is?”
I could not dispute the irony, but I decided to push back the trip. Lawyers aside, there were reasons enough to wait. I could not finish reporting or compose a story without the documents. I did not intend to carry them to the backyard of the Chinese Ministry of State Security. Snowden might be good enough to keep the archive safe in that hostile digital environment, but I could not. (He had taught exactly that skill set in counterintelligence school.) Nor did I want to lead U.S. authorities to Snowden’s door. By now I had been asking questions for days. If the government had caught wind of the story, it could be watching my travel bookings and credit cards. I did not think Snowden had fully considered that risk.
These were genuine concerns. They were on my mind. But there is no denying that Simon’s warning shook me. I had four kids in school, four tuitions to pay, and nobody sold insurance for something like this. Jay Kennedy, the paper’s general counsel, had given me contacts for a high-powered lawyer in Hong Kong. I passed them to Poitras with instructions to send invoices to the Post. She was still under contract. If she went to see Snowden, the paper would have her back. That night she decided, reluctantly, to cancel her flight.
“This all makes me feel ill,” she wrote the next day.
“I thought I was pretty good at gaming out contingencies, but I never thought of this one,” I replied.
Poitras was still recovering from an unrelated exchange with Snowden. Three days earlier, she had told him she needed time to think before getting on a plane. Snowden thought she feared questioning at the Hong Kong border, coming or going. He proposed a cover story. Poitras began to wonder exactly what kind of liaison this stranger had in mind.
“Implying an affair with me is an easy and believably incriminating way to justify the surreptitious travel and time alone with someone,” Snowden told her. Security screeners liked to believe that they had seen through a traveler’s secrets, he wrote. If suspicion fell upon her, Poitras could “make them feel like they’ve unraveled the mystery” with a suitcase full of sex toys and lingerie. Under questioning she could hint at an assignation with a stranger she met online. She need not spell out the mortifying details. Her luggage would tell the story. The camera was for bed play, the video files encrypted for privacy. Snowden laid out the scenario colorfully.
“It is creepy, right?” Poitras wrote to me. “Now I have little interest. Perhaps I’ll feel differently in a day.” The misunderstanding cleared up quickly enough. Snowden had no lecherous intent. His advice came straight from the playbook of clandestine travel. Cover for presence. Cover for action. An embarrassing story, even as fiction, but all the better camouflage for that.
We hated the replies we sent to Snowden on May 26. We had lawyered up and it showed. “You were clear with me and I want to be equally clear with you,” I wrote. “There are a number of unwarranted assumptions in your email. My intentions and objectives are purely journalistic, and I will not tie them or time them to any other goal.” I was working hard and intended to publish, but “I cannot give you the bottom line you want.”
Poitras wrote to him separately.
There have been several developments since Monday (e.g., your decision to leave the country, your choice of location, possible intentions re asylum), that have come as a surprise and make [it] necessary to be clear. As B explained, our intentions and objectives are journalistic. I believe you know my interest and commitment to this subject. B’s work on the topic speaks for itself. I cannot travel to interview you in person. However, I do have questions if you are still willing to answer them.
Snowden responded with bafflement and alarm. “The response in the last few days from you and BRASSBANNER has me extremely concerned about what appears to be a sudden change of heart,” he told Poitras. “You’ve both gone from supportive to inexplicably terrifying. . . . I can’t even know if my true name and the source document have already been turned over [to U.S. authorities] at this point. Jesus. I don’t know what they said to you, but I did not go to these lengths to hurt my country or my people.”
To me, the same day, he wrote that he was “working hard to do what is right in an extremely difficult situation.” He was not trying to call the editorial shots. “I confide in you as the lead journalist working on a story of public interest, not to tie you to my raft.” He closed with a plea: “Please confirm your intention to include the cryptographic signature with the source document. You now know [failure to do so] will directly jeopardize my safety.”
It was excruciating. Snowden had taken a leap, counting on us for a parachute we had not agreed to supply. “What a nightmare,” Poitras wrote to me. We would certainly not turn him in, as he seemed to fear. Nor would we share our copy of the PRISM file with U.S. authorities. (I never do that. Governments and big companies often place invisible markers on sensitive documents in order to trace their provenance if they leak.) That was all the reassurance I could offer. “Please understand that the only commitment I have made is to pursue this story vigorously and to protect the identity of a confidential journalistic source. I continue to respect both of those commitments. I did not commit and could not responsibly have committed to publishing a document and cryptographic key that I had never seen.”
For a young man in free fall, Snowden responded with remarkable grace. He noted dryly that “your communications appear to be rather more reviewed than they were previously.” He could no longer treat the Post story as exclusive. “I regret that we weren’t able to keep this project unilateral for longer than we had, but so it is. Best of luck to you in your reporting—may you know the truth.”
* * *
—
That day, May 27, Snowden had his first conversation with Glenn Greenwald. When I mentioned this sequence in a story two weeks later, Greenwald did not like it. “Bart Gellman’s claims about Snowden’s interactions with me—when, how and why—are all false,” he wrote in the first of a series of angry posts on Twitter. “Laura Poitras and I have been working with him since February, long before anyone spoke to Bart Gellman.” He elaborated in his book No Place to Hide. My arrival on the scene had marked an unwelcome “new turn” near the end of May, when Poitras handed me a scoop that I “had not worked to obtain.” Rather than report the story aggressively, the Post and I assembled lawyers and invited the White House to cut the balls off our story.
These were checkable assertions, and he had to know by the time he wrote his book that they were not true. Greenwald had not worked with Snowden or Poitras since February. He had not “set up the encryption software and [begun] speaking directly with Snowden in late March or early April,” as he told the Huffington Post. He had not even heard of the source or his story until Poitras told him in person on April 19, nearly three months after she and I first met to discuss them. (Even then, Greenwald was unaware that Verax was the Cincinnatus who had reached out unsuccessfully to him before.) Poitras found Greenwald eager but “clueless on the security-technical side of things,” still unable to use the encrypted channels required to take part. Another five weeks passed before Verax connected with Greenwald at the end of May. Poitras, who decided in the end to make the Hong Kong trip, invited Greenwald to join her. She handed him the Pandora archive as they prepared to board their June 1 flight. I will not belabor the timeline, which is sketched in an endnote, but every event in this book thus far, up to moment when Snowden said he could not “keep this project unilateral,” preceded Greenwald’s first glimpse of the documents and his first exchange with
a source whose name he still did not know.
Obviously Greenwald played a leading role in the surveillance disclosures, regardless of when it began. He made grander claims: that he had owned this story from the start, and that no one in the mainstream media had the nerve to take it on. He compared his “audacious journalism” about the NSA to the “timid, risk-averse government obeisance” of the Post and its mainstream peers. This parable of a man among journalistic mice became his calling card.
I could have agreed with a more nuanced critique of establishment journalism. Sometimes our stories lacked skepticism, deferred too much to authority, or resorted to false equivalence when we had the means to sift competing accounts. But good newspapers, and there were still some left, drove themselves hard “to pursue the truth and to tell it unflinchingly,” as Marty Baron said when he accepted an award for just that. On their better days, mainstream journalists delivered the great public good of holding power to account.
Greenwald held that traditional news media, the whole class of us, were trembling servants of the men and women in power. He thought up a lot of synonyms for that. What I saw at the Post in real life, as the NSA story unfolded, was a newsroom that threw itself fully into the breach. The reporters and editors and graphic designers I worked alongside did some of the finest journalism that I have seen up close. It is a simple matter of fact that the Post did not trim one clause of one story for fear of displeasing authorities.
In the early morning hours of June 11, two days after his opening salvos, Greenwald extended an olive branch. “Hey Bart—I really regret that we got dragged into a public spat over trivial at [sic] really doesn’t matter,” he wrote. “I’ll take the blame for getting lured into that.” Twelve hours later, as I walked to a sandwich shop on Whitehall Street, my mobile phone showed an incoming call from New York Times legal correspondent Charlie Savage. Greenwald had just told him, he said, that I lied in my behind-the-scenes account of Snowden and the PRISM document. Snowden had never insisted that I publish every slide, Greenwald said. All he asked was that I post his digital signature online. Greenwald knew this, he told Savage, because he had read our correspondence.
It was loud on the street. Did I hear that right? The privacy crusader was reading my mail and leaking it? Greenwald could not actually have read all my communications with Snowden. Even Poitras had not seen the whole pile, and Snowden did not keep copies. Greenwald’s assertion did not even make sense. The signature would not match the document unless I published both exactly as Snowden sent them. You might want to ask an expert, I told Savage. He dropped the story.
That afternoon I replied to Greenwald’s note. “Charlie Savage tells me today that you said you’ve read all my communications with the source and he never insisted on publication of the PRISM document in its entirety,” I wrote. “Really?”
“I never said I read all of your communications,” Greenwald wrote back. “How could I know that what I saw was all? I said that I [saw] what I understood to be all of your Q-and-A on PRISM and that, to my knowledge, there was never any demand of publication of all slides. I also said that he never made any demand like that to us. That, obviously, doesn’t mean that he didn’t make that demand to you at some point.”
I drafted several entertaining responses. I deleted them.
Just walk away.
“Peace,” I responded. “We all have plenty of important work to do.”
Many months after the NSA stories launched, reporters were still approaching me with disparaging remarks from Greenwald. I declined to comment. The Post gave me a big platform. Scrutiny rightfully came with that. I wanted no part of a sideshow. Greenwald’s contributions spoke for themselves. He broke big stories, amplified his source’s voice, and framed important questions on state power. He wrote a lot of things that I admired and a lot that I did not. Our differences served the public better, I thought, than a march in lockstep.
* * *
—
On June 5, 2013, as I prepared to publish the PRISM story, I sent an email from my new Washington Post account to Ben Rhodes, President Obama’s deputy national security adviser for strategic communications. I had an exceptionally sensitive story, I told him. He would want to know about it right away. Details were better left for a more private channel. How should we proceed?
I had been out of daily journalism for years. Rhodes did not know me, and there was no way to guess whether he would take my note seriously. I asked my old friend Anne Kornblut, who had covered the Obama White House, to reinforce the message. Then I opened a second back channel with an email, as opaque as the first, to Michael V. Hayden, the former CIA and NSA director. It had been years since I used his personal email account. He would understand what that meant.
I had known the retired general for a long time. Back in 1990, when he had three fewer stars, he ran a Pentagon think tank for the secretary of the Air Force. I was the greenest of the green among military correspondents. I walked into his office one day, on the brink of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, and asked him to explain how the Air Force goes to war. Assume I don’t know the difference between an F-16 and an M-16, I told him. Many hours of conversation followed. Hayden was one of the most impressive talkers I had ever met, lucid and charming and full of down-home sports metaphors. He had a way of making small concessions that shored up his credibility on bigger and less verifiable points. Over the years, as his career took off, Hayden and I spoke from time to time when I learned something secret. He would hear me out and tell me what he could, letting me know when he thought I had a fact wrong or risked causing harms that I might not foresee. Our relationship became strained after 2008, when I came to believe he had misled me about warrantless surveillance. In my Cheney book, I described him as deceptive in his public remarks about the program. Whatever our differences, I figured he would pass word on my behalf to someone who would listen.
Shawn Turner, communications chief for the director of national intelligence, was the first to call. I read him the title, date, author, and classification markings of the PRISM presentation and told him I planned to publish a story about it soon. “I assume your people will not want to discuss it on the phone,” I said. “I suggest you get hold of a copy and let me know how they want to handle it.”
* * *
—
That evening, June 5, the Guardian surprised me with its first story from the Snowden archive. The FBI, on behalf of the NSA, was collecting the call records of Verizon, the nation’s largest telephone carrier. Each day Verizon handed over a CD with an updated listing of every telephone call made by every customer. All of them. Local, interstate, international calls—it did not matter. Nationality made no difference either. The listings included American and foreign callers alike.
Records of this kind are known to information scientists as “metadata,” akin to the addressee and return address on a sealed envelope. The words spoken on a call, like the ones inside an envelope, are regarded as “content.” U.S. law gives less weight to the privacy of metadata, but that information conveys a lot more than laypeople (or judges) tend to assume. If the government knows who talks to whom, and when, and for how long, it has the means to build an immensely revealing dossier. There are many stories to be told in a list of every interaction with a friend, lover, coworker, business rival, clergyman, doctor, medical lab, or suicide hotline. With court-mandated access to something like one trillion call records a year, the NSA possessed the raw material for a comprehensive map of the nation’s social, business, political, and religious networks. The government collected the unique hardware identifiers of mobile phones and “comprehensive communications routing information” that could be used to approximate a caller’s whereabouts. When the program became public, officials said the NSA did not actually store the location data.
What it actually did with the records was important, but policies could change. That is what Snowden meant when he spoke of “turnk
ey tyranny,” of systems so powerful that they were too dangerous to entrust to any government’s hands. Constitutional limits, in any case, were not only about the way government made use of the fruits of a search and seizure. The collection alone had a big impact on privacy. We did not, as a nation, allow police to turn out everyone’s pockets in a theater where a wallet went missing, regardless of what they did with the evidence.
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