long and hard before deciding to make a startling sacrifice. This is, in part, what the source had written:
Many will malign me for failing to engage in national relativism, to look away from [our] society’s problems toward distant, external evils for which we hold neither authority nor responsibility, but citizenship carries with it a duty to first police one’s government before seeking to correct others. Here, now, at home, we suffer a government that only grudgingly allows limited oversight, and refuses accountability when crimes are committed …
I understand that I will be made to suffer for my actions, and that the return of this information to the public marks my end. I will be satisfied if the federation of secret law, unequal pardon, and irresistible executive powers that rule the world that I love are revealed for even an instant. If you seek to help, join the open source community and fight to keep the spirit of the press alive and the internet free. I have been to the darkest corners of government, and what they fear is light.
The letter was signed “Edward Joseph Snowden.” Along with the name appeared his social security number, CIA alias, and agency ID number.
Apart from learning Snowden’s identity, Laura also knew she was more vulnerable than ever. Snowden had warned her about what he called a “single point of failure.” If the federal government could stop the archive’s release, he said, they would take whatever steps necessary to do so. That had a bad sound to it, I thought, as I pondered the stunning scope of the story and the dangers it posed to Laura in particular. To mitigate the risk, she made copies of what had come in the box and put them into the hands of other people she trusted.
Distributing leaked documents widely to avoid a single point of failure is not a new strategy. Daniel Ellsberg did the same with the Pentagon Papers. “For a year and a half my greatest fear had been that the FBI would swoop down and collect all my copies of the papers,” Ellsberg wrote in his 2002 book, Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers. A problem in that pre-digital age was sheer volume. He photocopied the documents furiously, filling boxes with duplicates. Then he had to find a place to safeguard them.
“One box went to my brother in New York,” Ellsberg wrote. “Others went to friends’ attics or basements in the area; almost none of them was told what was in the box, just that they were papers I needed stored.”
Snowden, Laura said, had made it clear that he was no ordinary bureaucrat. Indeed, he insisted that this leak was bigger than the Pentagon Papers. Nothing in my career had prepared me for this moment, and, quite understandably, Laura was also feeling overwhelmed.
“I’m not a journalist!” she joked during a particularly stressful exchange.
“Yes, you are!” I replied.
“I’m just a chef!” she countered, referring to her previous career.
Laura asked me to be one of the keepers of the material. My profile as a journalist and a professor at an Ivy League school, she felt, would afford some protection. “Would you do that?”
“Sure.”
She warned of the possibility of grave risk. She wanted to be certain I understood the danger, that I knew I could say no.
“This is what we do,” I responded. “It’s why we’re journalists.”
She muttered something about that being one of the reasons why she liked me. We embraced.
Laura still had misgivings about making the trip. What if she got detained again by the TSA? She ran through the scenario with Kirsten, who recalls feeling conflicted: the details seemed sketchy, yes, and they made her worry for Laura. But she also remembers thinking, “This is smart. It has an internal logic.”
“One of the interesting things Laura and I do is we create a mirror for each other,” she explained. “We’re both risk-takers. Sometimes, she imagines the worst-case scenario, and I imagine the best-case scenario. But when we’re with each other, we see things that we might not see if we were on our own. I have nowhere near her investigative capacity, but I really do think I am perceptive, psychologically.”
Kirsten explained that she would have volunteered to take the trip with Laura, but two years earlier, she’d given birth to twins.
“I was ripped apart that I couldn’t go,” she said. “It was very clear to me that I had made a choice to be a parent and that I had an obligation, and it was immutable.”
So Laura forged on. Now she faced her next challenge: convincing a journalist to join her on a trip to Hong Kong to meet a total stranger. The most likely candidate was Greenwald. They’d already met face-to-face in April when Greenwald was visiting New York and staying at a Marriott in Yonkers. Laura had them switch tables at the hotel restaurant twice, until she was satisfied they wouldn’t be overheard, and had him take his cellphone back to his room. When Greenwald returned, she showed him a pair of emails she’d received from her source. She’d asked him to work on the story with her, and he’d agreed.
But now Greenwald was back home in Rio. That meant Laura had a trove of classified files on her hands — and no way to safely tell him about its contents.
“The problem was that he still didn’t have encryption and would not travel without more information, which I would not provide without an encrypted channel to communicate on,” Laura recalled. The situation was maddening.
Laura tried to help Greenwald set up encryption. In early May, she had Micah Lee, a technologist at the Freedom of the Press Foundation, send him a Tails USB drive with instructions via FedEx. But the package was held up in customs for ten days.
“I was desperate,” she recalled. Going to get classified files in Hong Kong alone, without the support of another journalist or the legal protection of a major media outlet — that spelled trouble. “It would have pretty much guaranteed I would probably never be able to come back to the United States, if not be arrested,” she said.
After all, she added, “I’m a lone wolf documentary filmmaker already on the terrorist watch list, with the biggest national security leak in history. This is not a good combination.”
Laura planned to film Snowden at this critical juncture, as he prepared to upend his life in the name of civil liberties. And Snowden was ready to take the hit. “My personal desire is that you paint the target directly on my back,” he wrote to her. “No one, not even my most trusted confidant, is aware of my intentions and it would not be fair for them to fall under suspicion for my actions. You may be the only one who can prevent that and that is by immediately nailing me to the cross rather than trying to protect me as a source.”
But it would all be for naught if the story wasn’t disseminated effectively. Laura knew the material Snowden wanted to leak — documents revealing widespread abuse of power — would hit hardest as a series of written news reports. “It wasn’t just a film,” she explained. “It was a print story.”
For the sake of safety and credibility, the print version would have to go through a large media organization, one with strong editorial and legal teams and a history of publishing ground-shaking investigative journalism.
Approaching the New York Times, however, was out of the question. Snowden didn’t have confidence that the newspaper would have the guts to break the story. In an earlier message to Laura, he’d written, “I don’t trust that the NYT will divulge the source document and company names until someone else does it first. Their reporters are fine, but their editors aren’t what they used to be,
