And even if I was already reconciled to the dangers of my decision, I wasn’t yet adjusted to the role. After all, who was I to put this information in front of the American public? Who’d elected me the president of secrets?
The information I intended to disclose about my country’s secret regime of mass surveillance was so explosive, and yet so technical, that I was as scared of being doubted as I was of being misunderstood. That was why my first decision, after resolving to go public, was to go public with documentation. The way to reveal a secret program might have been merely to describe its existence, but the way to reveal programmatic secrecy was to describe its workings. This required documents, the agency’s actual files—as many as necessary to expose the scope of the abuse though I knew that disclosing even one PDF would be enough to earn me prison.
The threat of government retribution against any entity or platform to which I made the disclosure led me to briefly consider self-publishing. That would’ve been the most convenient and safest method: just collecting the documents that best communicated my concerns and posting them online, as they were, then circulating a link. Ultimately, one of my reasons for not pursuing this course had to do with authentication. Scores of people post “classified secrets” to the Internet every day—many of them about time-travel technologies and aliens. I didn’t want my own revelations, which were fairly incredible already, to get lumped in with the outlandish and lost among the crazy.
It was clear to me then, from the earliest stage of the process, that I required, and that the public deserved, some person or institution to vouch for the veracity of the documents. I also wanted a partner to vet the potential hazards posed by the revelation of classified information, and to help explain that information by putting it in technological and legal context. I trusted myself to present the problems with surveillance, and even to analyze them, but I’d have to trust others to solve them. Regardless of how wary of institutions I might have been by this point, I was far warier of trying to act like one myself. Cooperating with some type of media organization would defend me against the worst accusations of rogue activity, and correct for whatever biases I had, whether they were conscious or unconscious, personal or professional. I didn’t want any political opinion of mine to prejudice anything with regard to the presentation, or reception, of the disclosures. After all, in a country in which everyone was being surveilled, no issue was less partisan than surveillance.
In retrospect, I have to credit at least some of my desire to find ideological filters to Lindsay’s improving influence. Lindsay had spent years patiently instilling in me the lesson that my interests and concerns weren’t always hers, and certainly weren’t always the world’s, and that just because I shared my knowledge didn’t mean that anyone had to share my opinion. Not everybody who was opposed to invasions of privacy might be ready to adopt 256-bit encryption standards or drop off the Internet entirely. An illegal act that disturbed one person as a violation of the Constitution might upset another person as a violation of their privacy, or of that of their spouse or children. Lindsay was my key to unlocking this truth—that diverse motives and approaches can only improve the chances of achieving common goals. She, without even knowing it, gave me the confidence to conquer my qualms and reach out to other people.
But which people? Who? It might be hard to remember, or even to imagine, but at the time when I first considered coming forward, the whistleblower’s forum of choice was WikiLeaks. Back then, it operated in many respects like a traditional publisher, albeit one that was radically skeptical of state power. WikiLeaks regularly joined up with leading international publications like the Guardian, the New York Times, Der Spiegel, Le Monde, and El País to publish the documents provided by its sources. The work that these partner news organizations accomplished over the course of 2010 and 2011 suggested to me that WikiLeaks was most valuable as a go-between that connected sources with journalists, and as a firewall that preserved sources’ anonymity.
WikiLeaks’ practices changed following its publication of disclosures by US Army private Chelsea Manning—huge caches of US military field logs pertaining to the Iraq and Afghan wars, information about detainees at Guantanamo Bay, along with US diplomatic cables. Due to the governmental backlash and media controversy surrounding the site’s redaction of the Manning materials, WikiLeaks decided to change course and publish future leaks as they received them: pristine and unredacted. This switch to a policy of total transparency meant that publishing with WikiLeaks would not meet my needs. Effectually, it would have been the same for me as self-publishing, a route I’d already rejected as insufficient. I knew that the story the NSA documents told about a global system of mass surveillance deployed in the deepest secrecy was a difficult one to understand—a story so tangled and technical that I was increasingly convinced it could not be presented all at once in a “document dump,” but only by the patient and careful work of journalists, undertaken, in the best scenario I could conceive of, with the support of multiple independent press institutions.
Though I felt some relief once I’d resolved to disclose directly to journalists, I still had some lingering reservations. Most of them involved my country’s most prestigious publications—particularly America’s newspaper of record, the New York Times. Whenever I thought about contacting the Times, I found myself hesitating. While the paper had shown some willingness to displease the US government with its WikiLeaks reporting, I couldn’t stop reminding myself of its earlier conduct involving an important article on the government’s warrantless wiretapping program by Eric Lichtblau and James Risen.
Those two journalists, by combining information from Justice Department whistleblowers with their own reporting, had managed to uncover one aspect of STELLARWIND—the NSA’s original-recipe post-9/11 surveillance initiative—and had produced a fully written, edited, and fact-checked article about it, ready to go to press by mid-2004. It was at this point that the paper’s editor in chief, Bill Keller, ran the article past the government, as part of a courtesy process whose typical purpose is for a publication’s editorial staff to have a chance to assess the government’s arguments as to why the publication of certain information might endanger national security. In this case, as in most cases, the government refused to provide a specific reason, but implied that one existed and that it was classified, too. The Bush administration told Keller and the paper’s publisher, Arthur Sulzberger, without providing any evidence, that the Times would be emboldening America’s enemies and enabling terror if it went public with the information that the government was wiretapping American citizens without a warrant. Unfortunately, the paper allowed itself to be convinced and spiked the article. Lichtblau and Risen’s reporting finally ran, but over a year later, in December 2005, and only after Risen pressured the paper by announcing that the material was included in a book of his that was about to be released. Had that article run when it was originally written, it might well have changed the course of the 2004 election.