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Guardian
, Ewen MacAskill, who joined us a
bit later that first day. We talked and talked, going through the NSA’s programs,
while Laura hovered and filmed. In contrast to the frenetic days, the nights were
empty and desolate. Glenn and Ewen would retreat to their own hotel, the nearby
W, to write up their findings into articles. Laura would disappear to edit her
footage and do her own reporting with Bart Gellman of the
Washington Post
,
who never made it to Hong Kong but worked remotely with the documents he
received from her.
I’d sleep, or try to—or else I’d put on the TV, find an English-language
channel like the BBC or CNN, and watch the international reaction. On June 5,
the
Guardian
broke Glenn’s first story, the FISA court order that authorized the
NSA to collect information from the American telecom Verizon about every
phone call it handled. On June 6, it ran Glenn’s PRISM story, pretty much
simultaneously with a similar account in the
Washington Post
by Laura and Bart.
I knew, and I think we all knew, that the more pieces came out the more likely it
was that I’d be identified, particularly because my office had begun emailing me
asking for status updates and I wasn’t answering. But though Glenn and Ewen
and Laura were unfailingly sympathetic to my ticking time-bomb situation, they
never let their desire to serve the truth be tempered by that knowledge. And
following their example, neither did I.
Journalism, like documentary film, can only reveal so much. It’s interesting
to think about what a medium is forced to omit, both by convention and
technology. In Glenn’s prose, especially in the
Guardian
, you got a laser-focused
statement of fact, stripped of the dogged passion that defines his personality.
Ewen’s prose more fully reflected his character: sincere, gracious, patient, and
fair. Meanwhile, Laura, who saw all but was rarely seen, had an omniscient
reserve and a sardonic wit—half master spy, half master artist.
As the revelations ran wall to wall on every TV channel and website, it
became clear that the US government had thrown the whole of its machinery
into identifying the source. It was also clear that when they did, they would use
the face they found—my face—to evade accountability: instead of addressing
the revelations, they’d impugn the credibility and motives of “the leaker.” Given
the stakes, I had to seize the initiative before it was too late. If I didn’t explain
my actions and intentions, the government would, in a way that would swing the
focus away from its misdeeds.
The only hope I had of fighting back was to come forward first and identify
myself. I’d give the media just enough personal detail to satisfy their mounting
curiosity, with a clear statement that what mattered wasn’t me, but rather the
subversion of American democracy. Then I’d vanish just as quickly as I’d
appeared. That, at least, was the plan.
Ewen and I decided that he’d write a story about my IC career and Laura
suggested filming a video statement to appear alongside it in the
Guardian
. In it,
I’d claim direct and sole responsibility as the source behind the reporting on
global mass surveillance. But even though Laura had been filming all week (a lot
of that footage would make it into her feature documentary,
Citizenfour
), we just
didn’t have the time for her to go through everything she’d shot in search of
snippets of me speaking coherently and making eye contact. What she proposed,
instead, was my first recorded statement, which she started filming right there
and then—the one that begins, “Uh, my name is Ed Snowden. I’m, ah, twenty-
nine years old.”
Hello, world.
W
HILE
I’
VE NEVER
once regretted tugging aside the curtain and revealing my
identity, I do wish I had done it with better diction and a better plan in mind for
what was next. In truth, I had no plan at all. I hadn’t given much thought to
answering the question of what to do once the game was over, mainly because a
winning conclusion was always so unlikely. All I’d cared about was getting the
facts out into the world: I figured that by putting the documents into the public
record, I was essentially putting myself at the public’s mercy. No exit strategy
could be the only exit strategy, because any next step I might have premeditated
taking would have run the risk of undermining the disclosures.
If I’d made preexisting arrangements to fly to a specific country and seek
asylum, for example, I would’ve been called a foreign agent of that country.
Meanwhile, if I returned to my own country, the best I could hope for was to be
arrested upon landing and charged under the Espionage Act. That would’ve
entitled me to a show trial deprived of any meaningful defense, a sham in which
all discussion of the most important facts would be forbidden.
The major impediment to justice was a major flaw in the law, a purposeful
flaw created by the government. Someone in my position would not even be
allowed to argue in court that the disclosures I made to journalists were civically
beneficial. Even now, years after the fact, I would not be allowed to argue that
the reporting based on my disclosures had caused Congress to change certain
laws regarding surveillance, or convinced the courts to strike down a certain
mass surveillance program as illegal, or influenced the attorney general and the
president of the United States to admit that the debate over mass surveillance
was a crucial one for the public to have, one that would ultimately strengthen the
country. All these claims would be deemed not just irrelevant but inadmissible in
the kind of proceedings that I would face were I to head home. The only thing
my government would have to prove in court is that I disclosed classified
information to journalists, a fact that is not in dispute. This is why anyone who
says I have to come back to the States for trial is essentially saying I have to
come back to the States for sentencing, and the sentence would, now as then,
surely be a cruel one. The penalty for disclosing top secret documents, whether
to foreign spies or domestic journalists, is up to ten years per document.
From the moment that Laura’s video of me was posted on the
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