in military prison, awaiting a court-martial for the biggest security breach in American history.
Meanwhile, it was an unsettling moment to receive a mystery box from someone who might fancy himself a latterday Manning. The Obama administration was zealously pursuing reporters who received classified information. The day before, news broke that the US Department of Justice had secretly seized records for more than twenty phone lines used by Associated Press journalists during a leak investigation. AP president and CEO Gary Pruitt wrote a protest letter to Attorney General Eric Holder, calling the move a “massive and unprecedented intrusion” into the news-gathering process.
Days later, the Washington Post revealed federal investigators had also seized personal email and phone records for Fox News Washington correspondent James Rosen, in connection with another leak probe. In one affidavit, an FBI agent referred to the journalist as “an aider, abettor and/or co-conspirator” — words that still give me the chills.
I called Dale to let him know the elk antlers had arrived, then tucked the box into a messenger bag and headed into Manhattan. When I arrived at Dale’s apartment, I thrust the box into his hand.
“Check this out!” I gestured at the return address. “Your friend sure has a puckish sense of humor.”
Dale looked it over. He was perplexed. I wondered what he knew — and what he didn’t — about the package, but I’d promised not to ask questions. We let the matter rest and went out to dinner.
Your worst enemy, he reflected, was your own nervous system. At any moment the tension inside you was liable to translate itself into some visible symptom.
— George Orwell, 1984, quoted in Laura’s Berlin journal
Laura’s journal, various dates:
I am battling with my nervous system. It doesn’t let me rest or sleep. Eye twitches, clenched throat, and now literally waiting to be raided …
I can hear the sound of my blood moving through my veins. Jesus, what the fuck is happening?
Jake says my friends will be targets and that I can’t protect them … [he] said I needed to follow absolutely strict security. That I am a target they would do anything to compromise.
Dale
The rest of May wasn’t measured in minutes, hours, or even days — rather, it was marked by steadily increasing levels of anxiety. The calendar says it was two weeks, but for me it was a single, excruciating unit of time. And if this was how I felt, what was Laura dealing with?
Laura arrived back in the United States on May 15. It was late at night, but she came straight to my apartment from the airport to get the box. Instead of opening it, she booked a hotel room using my computer (to avoid surveillance), then sped off in a taxi around two in the morning. For the next few days, she communicated with her source — who remained anonymous — from the hotel. The box contained data and instructions, and there was a growing sense that it involved something momentous. The source, Laura said, was treating the matter “a bit like a puzzle.” There were multiple layers protecting the data, little of which she had seen.
As she absorbed all this, Laura tried to imagine what came next. How would it all go down? “I was thinking I was going to meet a source who then would be potentially arrested after. That was my read on what was going to unfold,” she recalled later. “It was kind of going through my brain, like, ‘Am I going to be renting a car?’ All my scenarios were in the United States. Most were someplace in Maryland. I thought I might be taking a train to Baltimore.”
To lessen the tension, we turned to gallows humor. One night, Laura and I met up for drinks and dinner with a friend and longtime collaborator of hers, the cinematographer Kirsten Johnson.
“When you get sent to Guantánamo, Dale and I will take turns using your steam shower,” Kirsten said, alluding to Laura’s renovation. We then brainstormed methods of communicating by clanging on bars if we all ended up imprisoned together. Things grew more ridiculous as the night wore on. “Thanks for making me laugh so hard,” Laura wrote to both of us the next day. It was the last time I’d laugh for a while.
Soon after that, Laura insisted I begin communicating with her in a more secure manner. She gave me a USB flash drive loaded with The Amnesic Incognito Live System (Tails), a secure operating system bundled with a suite of privacy and encryption tools that funnels all of its users’ internet traffic through the anonymous Tor network. Tails doesn’t store any new data, making it practically impervious to malware. Whenever a session ends, any information it generated gets wiped away, leaving no digital traces. (Intriguingly, we’d learn later from leaked documents that the NSA considered Tails a “major” threat to intelligence gathering — a tool whose use could inflict a “loss/lack of insight to [the] majority of target communications.”)
All I had to do was plug in the USB drive that Laura gave me, turn on my computer, and wait for the connection to be routed through proxy servers. There was a tiny yellow onion in the upper-right-hand corner of the screen — a homage to Tor’s original name, The Onion Router — and when that icon turned green, it was safe to communicate.
I kept the flash drive, along with a sticky note listing both of our Jabber addresses, in a secret place.
For the next two weeks, Laura and I were in constant contact. The source, who remained nameless, finally revealed the location to meet: Hong Kong. This raised the stakes considerably, and we spent much time speculating: was the source affiliated with the CIA or the NSA? He or she seemed to span agencies, Laura said. But that was just a suspicion on her part.
I was feeling in over my head. I’m more of a narrative or cultural journalist. I had been in my share of hairy situations when covering conflict overseas and even here in the United States. This, however, was a new dimension. I feigned steadiness when offering Laura advice, but my stomach was constantly churning.
In the early hours of May 21, when Tails refused to work on my computer, Laura fell back on email. At 4:49 a.m., she wrote: “Can you get in a taxi? I really need to talk.”
I ran downstairs and flagged a cab; as the vehicle sped down Broadway, I peered out the rear window to make sure I wasn’t being followed. When I arrived at her hotel room, Laura didn’t speak. She pointed to my phone: the battery came out and the device went in the fridge. Then, eyes wide, she pointed to a file on the computer screen. It was NSA data — part of an extensive trove of documents. “It looks like the US government’s covert intelligence ‘black budget,’” she said.
When we reminisced about that day years later, it still shook her. “I remember seeing the black budget. It was the first document I opened,” Laura recalled, starting to stammer. “Fuck! This is the kind of stuff—” She drew a deep breath and trailed off.
The black budget mapped out $52.6 billion in spending on top-secret projects for fiscal year 2013. Among other plans, it outlined what officials called “offensive cyber operations”: an aggressive push by the NSA and CIA to hack foreign networks for the purpose of stealing information or committing sabotage.
After Laura showed
