“You can’t know for sure, but I would say, let the NSA clarify that,” Snowden told me. “Leave it as ‘phones’ until they come out and say, oh, we’re not tracking five billion phones, we’re tracking 286 million.”
Did he mean that seriously? At first I was not sure because he combined the point with a critique of journalistic evenhandedness. “I don’t think you go far enough ideologically,” he said. “You’re not willing to indict them, because mainstream American media, they don’t do that. They don’t indict people. They don’t denounce people for doing things that are clearly wrong.”
“I think there’s a certain role for a sharp advocate,” I replied. “I think you’re getting all you need of that.”
Snowden, who was eating, laughed through his nose at my reference to Greenwald. He had always understood the division of labor between us. But he had a point he wanted to make, a model of the marketplace in public discourse. He said misinformation from people like Mike Hayden, supporters of the intelligence establishment, pushed the terms of debate so far off center that only rhetorical counterforce could set the record straight.
“The trouble is when you can’t reach what’s true in the field, because the person on one side sets one anchor and the person on the other side sets the other anchor. But there’s a line tied between the two anchors. So when Hayden drags it over here, you’re no longer in range of the truth, and you can’t get there with the truth. That’s the trouble.”
“I’m not sure we agree on that,” I said, trying to move on.
He insisted on an answer. I had already discussed this with him in terms of principle. I tried a practical reply. Errors undermined confidence. Readers would stop believing the stories he cared about if I proved myself unreliable.
“I really want to be sure” before I publish, I told him. “If there is one story that I have to take back that is wrong, that changes the game.”
Snowden had once agreed with me about that, he said, but no more. “I thought—I call it colloquially the zero fuckups policy—was right. I am not sure it is true. And here is my thinking on that. A wrong story can still produce public good. It can provoke the truth out of the government.”
“I will leave that to somebody else,” I said.
“It is not an intentional strategy. For people who are like, ‘This is a disaster,’ it still produces more public good than existed before the story was written,” he replied.
* * *
—
Of all the Snowden stories I never published, the most tantalizing was something he wrote himself, not an NSA document with a classified stamp. He offered only the headline. I needed supporting detail before I could publish. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. I knew what the evidence would look like, but I never could nail it down. Two years passed before I understood why.
I have written about the text file called “README_FIRST,” which Snowden composed to accompany the NSA archive when he first conveyed it to Laura Poitras and me on May 21, 2013. In it he introduced himself by name and delivered an antisurveillance manifesto. The story I never wrote was the dramatic climax of that message. Snowden recounted something he had done to prove that the NSA’s surveillance apparatus could be turned against anyone. There were “limited protections” against abuse, he wrote, but “I tell you from experience that these protections can be stripped away in an instant.” This is how he knew:
On the authority of nothing but a self-certification made to a software program, I have wiretapped the internet communications of Congress’ current Gang of Eight and the Supreme Court.
It was a jaw-dropping claim, specific and vivid, damn near perfect as an illustration of his point. He had gone rogue to prove it could be done, he wrote. Even the great and powerful were subject to the NSA’s all-seeing gaze: nine justices and eight ranking members of the House and Senate. Snowden offered this much elaboration and no more:
May they enjoy the attention of the system they authorized. They will not suffer, as this collection will be immediately destroyed upon discovery and I [will be] punished owing to their privilege, but I pray it demonstrates the danger: what has saved them is policy rather than capability, and policies may be revised at any time. If the communications of the most powerful and protected in the world can be so trivially surveilled, what sanctity does your private correspondence enjoy?
That message from Snowden arrived with tens of thousands of documents that I had not been expecting. I had yet to find a news organization to publish me, yet to secure the archive, yet to take my first legal advice. On any other day this claim would have commanded my full attention. On that day it washed over me as part of a tidal wave. The following week, Snowden raised it again while pressuring me to publish the first story. Time was of the essence, he wrote, because “at this point there should be an active investigation into a certain act I disclosed in the ‘README_FIRST’ file.”
As the months passed, I returned periodically to Snowden’s story about the justices and the Gang of Eight. It amazed me that the tale stayed under wraps. Poitras and Greenwald, who could hardly have missed it, may have calculated, as I did, that they did not know enough. When had Snowden tapped those communications? Which accounts, which “selectors,” had he targeted? (Most of the men and women on his list had no public email address.) How could Snowden prove he knew what they said?
Snowden did not want to elaborate and there was always something else to talk about. The mystery tugged at me, even so, because I believed the answers were nearly within my reach. I thought, in fact, that I might have them in hand already. There were boxes full of secrets on my hard drive that I still could not open.
This was a broader point of tension between me and Snowden. He had sent what appeared to be five encrypted containers all at once, but he provided the encryption key for only one of them. One of the containers was bigger than “Pandora,” the one I could unlock. “The only thing you have is what you have plaintext access to,” Snowden told me. “Anything beyond that would probably be deadman linked, time locked, or the like.” He declined to explain further, saying, “discussing those mechanisms weakens them.”
Whatever he meant by the dead man’s switch, Snowden was proud of it. He had told Ellsberg in their chat that “I built a technical system that could ensure things would still be communicated while I was detained, but I would not be able to modify it at all while in prison, which created a number of risks.” The résumé he sent to Booz Allen included this line: “invented an uncensorable method of asset communication that functions in the event of the originator’s death or detainment.”
When I brought up the Gang of Eight story, Snowden alluded to this spooky mechanism. I knew that Poitras and Greenwald had obtained some documents in Hong Kong that I did not possess. I asked Snowden, in a live chat in October 2013, whether those included the intercepts from the Supreme Court and the Gang of Eight.
“I’ve thought a lot about that,” he replied, “but I’m not sure that will come out in the foreseeable future, as it would be used to ‘criminalize’ the disclosures. Maybe after the reform battle, but even then, it’s risky. No one has that at this time. That’s deadman material. It’s not going to be scooped.”
In June 2014, a full year after the first leaks, Snowden brought up the episode on his own initiative. I had asked him for on-the-record comment about another story. “The NSA,” he wrote to me, “has access to the complete, comprehensive records of our private lives going back for five years; the scary part is any high school drop-out can wake up in the morning and decide they’re going to walk out the door with copies of Nancy Pelosi’s emails, and unless they send them to the Washington Post, nobody’s ever going to know.”
I got nowhere asking federal investigators whether Snowden had wiretapped famous people. “We have no evidence of that,” said one official closely involved in the probe, who expressed skepticism. “He could submit tas
king to sensors. He couldn’t directly task sensors. There’s a process where you vet the tasking. That goes through collection managers, who look at it, decide what sensors to task into, and actually implement the tasking. If you had every goober in the system inputting tasking you’d crash the system.”
Snowden said he could and did enter search terms directly, without prior review. One way he might game the system, without arousing suspicion, would be to convert his query to an encoded format such as base64. Instead of risking a raised eyebrow by searching for “Pelosi,” he could obscure his target as “UGVsb3Np.” It would be foolish to claim with certainty that he could not find his way around restrictions, given other breaches he had pulled off. “I don’t see how” he could have done it, the investigator said. “I don’t want to say that’s completely impossible. Systems and people are not perfect.”
The thing was, I knew for sure that Snowden had access to some content collected under PRISM authority, which meant it had to come from sensors inside the United States. He had proved that by giving me a large sample of intercepted emails and online chat messages. For reporting purposes I assumed that he had the proof I needed to tell the story of the Supreme Court and Congress. My job was to shake it loose. In the summer of 2015, my second visit to Moscow, I took the opportunity to press Snowden in person.
“Here’s the thing I want to talk about the most, and I’ve got to figure out a way to persuade you to talk about it,” I told him. “In the early ‘README_FIRST,’ you make a very specific statement of something you did that’s not been published. You said you had tapped the Gang of Eight and the justices. I can’t pretend I don’t have that. And again, it’s one of those things, it leaves you so vulnerable to [critics who would say], ‘Wow, what a crock of shit.’”
Snowden played for time. The NSA’s XKEYSCORE interface allowed an analyst to enter any selector, he said. It followed that anyone could be surveilled. The thing is, I replied, the agency says there are safeguards. And you said you had actually done it.
“It’s a big claim and actually would be—it’s one of the most powerful images you could have,” I told him. “I need more on that.”
“I think we talked about this before, and I said it’s unlikely it will ever come [out], and there are reasons for that,” he replied. “We also talked before about Hong Kong and the fact that things were destroyed. Sometimes I have to signal that things are accessible that will never be accessible, because you’re not the intended audience.”
“So you had the evidence, and you destroyed it in Hong Kong?”
Snowden looked uncomfortable. He slipped into the passive voice. “The breadth of it wasn’t demonstrated in the same way, but the proof of concept was,” he said. “There’s a named individual that’s a member of that group, but that’s all it was.”
“But I mean in the ‘README’ . . . you said the Gang of Eight and the Supreme Court. We’re talking about seventeen people. Did that actually happen?”
“Not all seventeen, no. I hate to disappoint you on that because I know it was a major claim.”
At the time he wrote the message in question, he said, he felt that there was “no way to explain . . . that anyone would believe” how easily any person could become a target. He had to have a concrete example. “I needed you to understand, prior to the evidence, and the other journalists, that this was possible. And it is possible. I had done it. I had seen it. I had seen this for other people as well. If you type in an email, you get whatever’s in the system.”
But wait. What had he actually done in his proof of concept? Slowly an answer took shape. Snowden did not know the private email addresses of the justices of the high court or members of Congress. In order to spy on them, he would have needed those addresses to enter as selectors. Instead, he had found a public email listing for the office of Representative Nancy Pelosi, the California Democrat who then served as House minority leader. Something in the @mail.house.gov domain. He had entered that address into XKEYSCORE. Nothing of special interest came back.
“I overstated it a little bit,” Snowden told me. He had intended to leave some ambiguity when he composed the anecdote. “I’m not sure that I stated it as forcefully as you stated earlier.”
“Pretty direct.”
“But really, if you semantically parse the words, was it a direct claim?”
“I didn’t bring it with me because I don’t bring shit across borders,” I said.
“It was intended . . . to be a little bit lawyerly,” Snowden replied. “But if that was the case, I really do have to apologize. . . . I would feel really badly if it was a direct claim on all of them.”
Had there ever been a secret cache of additional documents? An automated switch to control their release? Yes and no. Snowden had, he now told me, written the dead man code, and “that was the original plan.” He had prepared an archive of additional documents in an encrypted container. He did not share the key with anyone. That container was filled with files that he had not had time to organize. They might be even more sensitive than the others. He devised a system that would “coordinate you, Glenn, and Laura in a secret sharing scheme”—that is, a cryptographic arrangement in which he would split the decryption key and all three of us would have to combine credentials in order to open the dead man archive. “I had second thoughts,” he said. “I wasn’t sure that even if you agreed, it would be the right thing to do” to release that material. In the end, he did not activate the dead man mechanism at all. He destroyed the encryption key for the extra container. “That stuff’s never going to come to light,” he said.
Snowden’s misdirection was an unwelcome discovery. It was not altogether a shock. Evasions and hyperbole were the cost of doing business as a journalist. From experience as an investigative reporter, I had yet to meet a news source who met the platonic ideal. Sometimes they shaded the truth. Sometimes they fooled themselves. They erred. They made assumptions. They offered opinions in the guise of fact or supplemented firsthand knowledge with surmise. Like a cop or intelligence officer, I cross-checked what I heard and learned a lot anyway.
Snowden was almost preternaturally articulate, which made deflection more obvious when it came. I took the passive voice or pedantic precision as a sign to be wary. I priced uncertainty into Snowden’s value as a source, as I generally do, and looked for independent evidence. I did not publish his too-perfect credentials or his too-perfect anecdote. Very few of my stories actually quoted him at all, or were even about him.
All that said, I found Snowden to be more reliable than most of the critics and nameless officials who engaged me on this story. When we spoke of specific events or facts, he generally framed his claims narrowly and explained how he thought he knew. When he did not know, he told me so. He had a subjective point of view, like anyone. He could overestimate his grasp of context. I was prepared to believe that there were times when intelligence sources were right to say he did not know what he was talking about. Broadly speaking, though, when it came to nonsubjective information—particulars that I could verify, in principle—he was dependably careful.
I heard a great many word games from his opponents, who regularly trafficked in bad-faith talking points. Public officials routinely called Snowden a high school dropout, knowing about his GED and advanced certifications. They described him as a low-level technician, when in fact he had the highest-tier privileges as a system administrator and responsibilities beyond his job description. They used secret definitions of commonplace words to deny the truth as ordinary people would understand it. There were straight shooters who spoke for the government, holding silence instead of dissembling when they did not feel free to answer a question, but not as many as I would have liked.
“I was always taught you can’t lie to the press,” said Rick Ledgett, the former NSA deputy director, who never gave me cause to doubt him. “It’s actually illegal to do that” as an intelligence official �
��because you’re putting misinformation in U.S. channels.”
“That’s quaint,” I said. He smiled. He knew my experience differed somewhat.
“I’m kind of naïve that way. Not a political person.”
* * *
—
It was commonplace in national security circles, especially in the first year or two after Snowden announced himself, to brand him a traitor. I am not especially interested in the labeling debate—hero, traitor, whistleblower, criminal—but treason was a silly epithet, flung in the heat of anger. Hardly anyone tried to defend it literally, according to the constitutional test: “Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort.” Government officials from James Clapper on down acknowledged that Snowden did not fit that bill. He had not pledged allegiance to or worked on behalf of another country. He had been no one’s agent but his own. The interests he intended to serve—and intent was legally relevant—were those of the public at large. “I don’t remember seeing evidence either of the Russians having the material or that he was an asset,” James Comey said to me. “I’ve come to the view that he viewed himself as a white knight, that he was going to address abuses that he perceived.”
Snowden came up with a pithy formula. “If I defected, I defected from the government to the public,” he told me. That appropriation of democratic mandate infuriated national security leaders. “[I]n an act of supreme arrogance, he simply chose to violate a public trust without any warrant from the 330 million Americans who gave him that trust,” former defense secretary Ash Carter wrote in his memoir. The “central flaw in his reasoning,” Comey told me, was “that he’s the one who should make the decision to share this outside the U.S. government.”
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