The Snowden Files: The Inside Story of the World's Most Wanted Man (12 page)

And when did he make the fateful decision to become a whistleblower?

‘You see things that may be disturbing. When you see everything, you realise that some of these things are abusive. The awareness of wrongdoing builds up. There was not one morning when I woke up [and decided this is it]. It was a natural process.’

Snowden said he hadn’t voted for Obama in 2008 but had ‘believed’ in his promises. (He voted for a ‘third party’, instead, he said, a reference to the libertarian Ron Paul.) He had intended to ‘disclose’ what he had found out, but decided to wait and see following Obama’s election. What did happen, he said, was profoundly
disillusioning: ‘He continued with the policies of his predecessor.’

All of this made sense. But some of Snowden’s CV was a little odd. Snowden said that he hadn’t been to university, and had instead attended a Maryland community college. This set off alarm bells for MacAskill – how could someone as smart as Snowden achieve such a high-profile job so quickly without a degree? In his career as a spy Snowden appeared to have worked for practically everybody in a remarkably short period of time: the NSA, CIA and the DIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency, either on contract or as a direct hire.

Snowden then mentioned that he had undergone basic training to join the US special forces, only to abandon the plan when he broke his legs. ‘I thought, Christ, this sounds a bit like a fantasist,’ MacAskill admits. ‘The story was [like a]
Boy
’s
Own
adventure.’

Yet gradually, MacAskill did become convinced that Snowden’s account of his life was true, despite its unlikely and even picaresque moments. He moved on to a core issue: ‘What you are doing is a crime. You are probably going to jail for the rest of your life. Why are you doing it? Is it really worth it?’

Snowden’s answer was convincing to his questioner: ‘We have seen enough criminality on the part of government. It is hypocritical to make this allegation against me. They have narrowed the public sphere of influence.’ He acknowledged that ‘nothing good’ was likely to happen to him. But said he didn’t regret his decision, or want to live in a world ‘where everything I do and
say is recorded’. As he explained: ‘The NSA has built an infrastructure that allows it to intercept almost anything. With this capability, the vast majority of human communications are automatically ingested.’ Federal agencies had hijacked the internet, he said. They had turned it into a machine for spying on whole populations.

MacAskill had met leakers before from his time as a correspondent in Britain’s House of Commons. For the most part these were politicians. Some spilled information for reasons of ambition; others out of vengeance; many had a gripe, felt slighted, or had missed out on promotion. The reason was usually a pretty base one. But Snowden was different. ‘He had a sense of idealism. It was a patriotic act,’ MacAskill says.

Snowden stressed his overriding belief that the internet should be free. On one of his black laptops was an indicator to his stance: a sticker from the Electronic Freedom Forum, a US group that campaigns for internet transparency. It read: ‘I support online rights.’ Another sticker was for the anonymous router Tor, which is used to disguise the origin of internet messages.

As a Washington correspondent, MacAskill understood some of Snowden’s fervour. The Scot had covered Obama’s 2008 election campaign. He recognised that for Snowden and other Americans, the US constitution is special: it enshrines basic freedoms. Snowden believed that the US government’s stealth attack on it was the equivalent of an attack that occupies land – a terrible and illegitimate invasion. He viewed his own deeds in explicitly patriotic terms. He saw his leak not as an act of
betrayal but as a necessary corrective to a spy system that had grown dysfunctional.

‘America is a fundamentally good country,’ he maintained. ‘We have good people with good values. But the structures of power that exist are working to their own ends, to extend their capability at the expense of the freedom of all publics.’

Critics would subsequently accuse Snowden of narcissism, claiming it was a desire for attention that had made him spill the NSA’s beans. MacAskill formed another impression, of a diffident individual far more at home in front of his laptop than in the limelight. ‘He was personable and courteous. His instinct is to be friendly. He is really shy,’ he says. ‘A lot of people are suggesting he was after celebrity status. He isn’t.’ When MacAskill took a few snaps of Snowden he was visibly uncomfortable. Snowden was in fact happiest when talking about the technical details of surveillance. ‘He has got a real nerdy side to him. He’s comfortable with computers. That’s his world.’

Greenwald and MacAskill were internet bumpkins who knew little about how the web actually worked (although Poitras’s technical skills were formidable). The two men struggled to make sense of many of the PRISM slides. Snowden talked them through the complex diagrams. He explained acronyms, pathways, interception techniques. He wasn’t patronising but patient and articulate, MacAskill says, in his element among double-barrelled NSA program codenames. To outsiders they were gobbledygook, an impenetrable alphabet spaghetti.

Because he was British, MacAskill asked, almost as an afterthought, whether there was a UK role in this mass data collection. It didn’t seem likely to him. Most Britons’ benign mental image of GCHQ was of boffins in tweed jackets, puffing on pipes, cracking wartime Nazi codes and playing chess.

MacAskill knew that GCHQ had a long-standing intelligence-sharing relationship with the US, but he was taken aback by Snowden’s vehement response. Snowden said: ‘GCHQ is worse than the NSA. It’s even more intrusive.’

It was another piece of sensational information.

Each time MacAskill and Greenwald went to visit Snowden they expected him to have gone, to have been arrested, press-ganged and taken to a dark modern gulag.

The following day, Wednesday 5 June, Snowden was still in place at the Mira Hotel. That was the good news. No one had grabbed him. The bad news was that the NSA and the police had been to see his girlfriend back at their home in Hawaii. Snowden’s absence from work had been noted, an automatic procedure when NSA staff do not turn up. Snowden was calm, as usual, but outraged at the treatment of Lindsay Mills. He thought the police were badgering and intimidating her.

He had so far said little about his personal life; his focus was the story and what it said about the US surveillance state. His mother, Wendy, worked as a clerk at the district court back in Baltimore. Since he had vanished on 20 May, she had been trying to contact him. She realised something had gone wrong.

Now he agonised: ‘My family does not know what is happening. My primary fear is that they will come after my family, my friends, my partner. Anyone I have a relationship with.’ He admitted: ‘That keeps me up at night.’

The NSA’s unwelcome house call was hardly surprising. And as he was now on their radar, the chances of Snowden’s Hong Kong hideout soon being busted seemed much higher. He had, after all, exfiltrated many thousands of the agency’s most secret documents. MacAskill felt sympathy towards Snowden. Here was a young man in trouble. His future seemed bleak. Snowden was almost the same age as MacAskill’s children. ‘I would not like one of my kids to be in that predicament,’ he says.

But the CIA hadn’t found him yet. This was one of the more baffling aspects of the Snowden affair: why did the US authorities not close in on him earlier? Once they had spotted his absence, they might have pulled flight records showing he had fled to Hong Kong. There he was comparatively easy to trace. Snowden had checked into the £200-a-night Mira Hotel under his own name. He was even paying the bill with his personal credit card, now practically maxed out, and another source of worry for him: Snowden feared his pursuers might block it.

One explanation is that the US was reluctant to act in communist China. Another is that the US authorities were less omnipotent than they appeared. This view – bureaucratic ineptness rather than a Sino–US impasse – seems the more likely explanation in the light of the
White House’s subsequent bungled attempts to extradite Snowden from Hong Kong.

The experience of flying half way across the world, meeting Snowden, and then working on a set of extraordinary stories created a close bond between three journalists who were quite ill-assorted: a disputatious gay American, an intense Oscar-nominated film-maker and a Brit professional reporter and mountaineer who said ‘Aye’ rather than ‘Yes’, just like Scottie from
Star Trek
. It was a camaraderie born out of something thrilling and uncertain. All three felt they were involved in a joint endeavour of high public importance, with a large degree of risk. MacAskill had climbed the Matterhorn, Mont Blanc and the Jungfrau. His calmness now stood him in good stead.

Poitras’s earlier antipathy to MacAskill vanished. She grew fond of him. ‘Ewen meshed into the team so seamlessly and perfectly and instantly,’ Greenwald says. Rusbridger dubbed the triple working partnership ‘a lovefest’.

That evening, Greenwald rapidly drafted a story about Verizon. Snowden’s classified documents showed that the NSA was secretly collecting all the records from this major US telecoms company. The trio intended this story to be only the first in a series of seismic disclosures. But they feared that time was not on their side. MacAskill and Greenwald discussed the text until late. They sat in Greenwald’s room in the W Hotel, overlooking the harbour and the hills of the Chinese mainland. The view took in skyscrapers on Hong Kong Island and
the bridge towards the airport – a crowded, twinkling cityscape.

Greenwald would work on his laptop, then pass it to MacAskill. MacAskill would type on his computer and hand Greenwald his articles on a memory stick; the sticks flowed back and forth. Nothing went on email. The journalists lost track of the hours. MacAskill went to bed for a while. When he got up, Greenwald was still working. Snowden told the
New York Times
’s Peter Maass, ‘I was particularly impressed by Glenn’s ability to operate without sleep for days at a time.’ (In fact, Greenwald would crash out in the afternoons.)

They sent their final version of the story over to Janine Gibson in New York. Its appearance would certainly start an unprecedented and unpredictable uproar.

But the question now was whether the
Guardian
was actually prepared to publish it.

For over a decade, 33-year-old Spencer Ackerman had been covering the US national security beat. He had been building contacts, schmoozing senators and tracking the post 9/11 policies of the Bush and Obama administrations. This could be frustrating. True, in 2005 the
New York Times
had revealed the existence of an aspect of President Bush’s warrantless surveillance program, codenamed STELLAR WIND. But this leak was highly unusual, a ray of light chinking out from an otherwise impenetrable secret world. (The
Times
had sat on the story for a year. It had eventually published, but only after its hand was forced when
Times
reporter James Risen planned to write about it in a book.)

A rambunctious character, prone to performing push-ups during moments of high stress, Ackerman came from New York. He was nearby in New Jersey at college – aged 21 – when the planes crashed into the Twin Towers. ‘It was the big story,’ he says, explaining
his interest in national security. Working first for
The New Republic
, and then for
WIRED
magazine, and its national security blog ‘Danger Room’, he had devoted much of his energies to probing the NSA’s surveillance programs. There were clues. But few facts. And the NSA was silent about its work, as remote as an order of mute Carthusian monks.

In 2011, Ackerman got a call from the office of Ron Wyden, the Oregon Democrat and a leading critic of government surveillance. Speaking obliquely during an interview in the senator’s office – he couldn’t disclose classified information, after all – Wyden said he was deeply concerned about the Patriot Act, which Congress was about to reauthorise. More specifically, the senator said the executive branch had come up with a legal interpretation drastically at odds with what the act actually
said
. Conveniently, the government had classified its own interpretation. So nobody could challenge it. But, Wyden hinted, the White House was using casuistic means to conceal the scale of its data-gathering programs.

What was going on? In a post for
WIRED
, Ackerman speculated that the government was hoovering up massive amounts of information on private citizens. But the NSA flatly rejected suggestions it spied on Americans. In 2012, General Alexander made an unlikely appearance at a Las Vegas hacker convention. It was the first time the US’s top spy boss had visited the DefCon event. Swapping his crisply ironed general’s uniform for a crumpled T-shirt and down-with-the-kidz jeans, Alexander took incongruously to the stage. He assured his audience that
the agency ‘absolutely’ didn’t keep ‘files’ or ‘dossiers’ on ‘millions or hundreds of millions’ of Americans.

Was this a barefaced lie? Or a semantic evasion in which ‘files’ meant something different from, say, bulk collection of telephone records? For Ackerman, and other national security journalists, these were tantalising pieces of a large puzzle. The post-9/11 Patriot Act gave the edges. But the overall design remained unclear. Officials might well be using a mixture of secret courts, obfuscation and classification to fend off legitimate requests for information. But there was no proof. And since hardly anyone ever leaked from the NSA, there seemed little prospect the true extent of government surveillance would be revealed any time soon.

In late May, Ackerman, a prolific tweeter, quit his job at
WIRED
. An opportunity came up with a new operation, to become US national security editor at the
Guardian
. The job would be based at the paper’s DC office in Farragut Square, a mere three blocks away from the White House. US editor Janine Gibson asked Ackerman to come first to New York. She told him she would like him to spend a week undergoing ‘orientation’. It wasn’t entirely clear what ‘orientation’ meant. Nonetheless, keen to impress and brimming with ideas, Ackerman travelled to NYC to report for duty.