Permanent Record

Got called
away for work. I love you.
I signed it with my call-letter nickname, Echo. Then I
went to the airport and bought a ticket in cash for the next flight to Tokyo. In
Tokyo, I bought another ticket in cash, and on May 20 arrived in Hong Kong, the
city where the world first met me.

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26
Hong Kong
The deep psychological appeal of games, which are really just a series of
increasingly difficult challenges, is the belief that they can be won. Nowhere is
this more clear to me than in the case of the Rubik’s Cube, which satisfies a
universal fantasy: that if you just work hard enough and twist yourself through
all of the possibilities, everything in the world that appears scrambled and
incoherent will finally click into position and become perfectly aligned; that
human ingenuity is enough to transform the most broken and chaotic system into
something logical and orderly where every face of three-dimensional space
shines with perfect uniformity.
I’d had a plan—I’d had multiple plans—in which a single mistake would
have meant getting caught, and yet I hadn’t been: I’d made it out of the NSA, I’d
made it out of the country. I had beaten the game. By every standard I could
imagine, the hard part was over. But my imagination hadn’t been good enough,
because the journalists I’d asked to come meet me weren’t showing up. They
kept postponing, giving excuses, apologizing.
I knew that Laura Poitras—to whom I’d already sent a few documents and
the promise of many more—was ready to fly anywhere from New York City at a
moment’s notice, but she wasn’t going to come alone. She was busy trying to get
Glenn Greenwald to commit, trying to get him to buy a new laptop that he
wouldn’t put online. Trying to get him to install encryption programs so we
could better communicate. And there I was, in Hong Kong, watching the clock
tick away the hours, watching the calendar tick off the days, beseeching,
begging: 
please come before the NSA realizes I’ve been gone from work too
long
. It was tough to think about all the lengths I’d gone to only to face the
prospect of being left in Hong Kong high and dry. I tried to work up some
sympathy for these journalists who seemed too busy or too nervous to lock down
their travel plans, but then I’d recall just how little of the material for which I

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was risking everything would actually make it to the public if the police arrived
first. I thought about my family and Lindsay and how foolish it was to have put
my life in the hands of people who didn’t even know my name.
I barricaded myself in my room at the Mira Hotel, which I chose because of
its central location in a crowded shopping and business district. I put the
“Privacy Please—Do Not Disturb” sign on the door handle to keep
housekeeping out. For ten days, I didn’t leave the room for fear of giving a
foreign spy the chance to sneak in and bug the place. With the stakes so high, the
only move I had was to wait. I converted the room into a poor man’s operations
center, the invisible heart of the network of encrypted Internet tunnels from
which I’d send increasingly shrill pleas to the absent emissaries of our free press.
Then I’d stand at the window hoping for a reply, looking out onto the beautiful
park I’d never visit. By the time Laura and Glenn finally arrived, I’d eaten every
item on the room service menu.
That isn’t to say that I just sat around during that week and a half writing
wheedling messages. I also tried to organize the last briefing I’d ever give—
going through the archive, figuring out how best to explain its contents to the
journalists in the surely limited time we’d have together. It was an interesting
problem: how to most cogently express to nontechnical people who were almost
certainly inclined to be skeptical of me the fact that the US government was
surveilling the world and the methods by which it was doing so. I put together
dictionaries of terms of art like “metadata” and “communications bearer.” I put
together glossaries of acronyms and abbreviations: CCE, CSS, DNI, NOFORN. I
made the decision to explain not through technologies, or systems, but through
surveillance programs—in essence, through stories—in an attempt to speak their
language. But I couldn’t decide which stories to give them first, and I kept
shuffling them around, trying to put the worst crimes in the best order.
I had to find a way to help at least Laura and Glenn understand something in
the span of a few days that it had taken me years to puzzle out. Then there was
another thing: I had to help them understand who I was and why I’d decided to
do this.
A
T LONG LAST
, Glenn and Laura showed up in Hong Kong on June 2. When they
came to meet me at the Mira, I think I disappointed them, at least initially. They
even told me as much, or Glenn did: He’d been expecting someone older, some
chain-smoking, tipsy depressive with terminal cancer and a guilty conscience.

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He didn’t understand how a person as young as I was—he kept asking me my
age—not only had access to such sensitive documents, but was also so willing to
throw his life away. For my part, I didn’t know how they could have expected
some graybeard, given my instructions to them about how to meet: Go to a
certain quiet alcove by the hotel restaurant, furnished with an alligator-skin-
looking pleather couch, and wait around for a guy holding a Rubik’s Cube. The
funny thing was that I’d originally been wary of using that bit of tradecraft, but
the cube was the only thing I’d brought with me that was likely to be unique and
identifiable from a distance. It also helped me hide the stress of waiting for what
I feared might be the surprise of handcuffs.
That stress would reach its visible peak just ten or so minutes later, when I’d
brought Laura and Glenn up to my room—#1014, on the tenth floor. Glenn had
barely had the chance to stow his smartphone in my minibar fridge at my request
when Laura started rearranging and adjusting the lights in the room. Then she
unpacked her digital video camera. Though we’d agreed, over encrypted email,
that she could film our encounter, I wasn’t ready for the reality.
Nothing could have prepared me for the moment when she pointed her
camera at me, sprawled out on my unmade bed in a cramped, messy room that I
hadn’t left for the past ten days. I think everybody has had this kind of
experience: the more conscious you are of being recorded, the more self-
conscious you become. Merely the awareness that there is, or might be,
somebody pressing Record on their smartphone and pointing it at you can cause
awkwardness, even if that somebody is a friend. Though today nearly all of my
interactions take place via camera, I’m still not sure which experience I find
more alienating: seeing myself on film or being filmed. I try to avoid the former,
but avoiding the latter is now difficult for everyone.
In a situation that was already high-intensity, I stiffened. The red light of
Laura’s camera, like a sniper’s sight, kept reminding me that at any moment the
door might be smashed in and I’d be dragged off forever. And whenever I wasn’t
having that thought, I kept thinking about how this footage was going to look
when it was played back in court. I realized there were so many things I should
have done, like putting on nicer clothes and shaving. Room-service plates and
trash had accumulated throughout the room. There were noodle containers and
half-eaten burgers, piles of dirty laundry and damp towels on the floor.
It was a surreal dynamic. Not only had I never met any filmmakers before
being filmed by one, I had never met any journalists before serving as their
source. The first time I ever spoke aloud to anyone about the US government’s

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system of mass surveillance, I was speaking to everyone in the world with an
Internet connection. In the end, though, regardless of how rumpled I looked and
stilted I sounded, Laura’s filming was indispensable, because it showed the
world exactly what happened in that hotel room in a way that newsprint never
could. The footage she shot over the course of our days together in Hong Kong
can’t be distorted. Its existence is a tribute not just to her professionalism as a
documentarian but to her foresight.
I spent the week between June 3 and June 9 cloistered in that room with
Glenn and his colleague from the