Everything about that kid, everything about his father, reminded me of my own father, whom I met for dinner one evening during my stint at Fort Meade. I hadn’t seen him in a while, but there in the midst of dinner, over bites of Caesar salad and a pink lemonade, I had the thought: I’ll never see my family again. I knew that if I told him what I was about to do, he would’ve called the cops. Or else he would’ve called me crazy and had me committed to a mental hospital. He would’ve done anything he thought he had to do to prevent me from making the gravest of mistakes.
I could only hope that his hurt would in time be healed by pride.
Back in Hawaii between March and May 2013, a sense of finality hung over nearly every experience for me. It was far less painful to think that this was the last time I’d ever stop at the curry place in Mililani or drop by the art-gallery hacker space in Honolulu or just sit on the roof of my car and scan the nighttime sky for falling stars than to think that I only had another month left with Lindsay.
The preparations I was making were those of a man about to die. I emptied my bank accounts, putting cash into an old steel ammo box for Lindsay to find so that the government couldn’t seize it. I went around the house doing oft-procrastinated chores, like fixing windows and changing light bulbs. I erased and encrypted my old computers. I was putting my affairs in order to try to make everything easier for Lindsay, or just for my conscience.
And yet there were moments when it seemed that the plan I’d developed was collapsing. It was difficult to get the journalists to commit to a meeting, mostly because I couldn’t tell them who they were meeting with, or even, for a while at least, where and when it was happening. I had to reckon with the prospect of them never showing up, or of them showing up but then dropping out. Ultimately, I decided that if either of those happened, I’d just abandon the plan and return to work and to Lindsay as if everything were normal, to wait for my next chance.
During my Wi-Fi scavenger hunt drives I’d been researching various countries, trying to find a location for my meeting with the journalists. It felt like I was picking out my prison, or rather my grave. All of the Five Eyes countries were obviously off-limits. In fact, all of Europe was out, as were Africa and Latin America, because for various political reasons, I knew I wouldn’t be safe from the American government’s wrath if I got caught there. Russia was out because it was Russia, and China was China: Both were totally out of bounds. Due to the US government’s contentious relationship with both countries, I knew that I’d be painted as a traitor if I settled in either country.
The process of elimination left me with Hong Kong. In geopolitical terms, it was the closest I could get to no-man’s-land, but with a vibrant media and protest culture, not to mention largely unfiltered internet. In a situation with no promise of safety, it was enough to have the guarantee of time. Chances were that things weren’t going to end well for me, anyway: The best I could hope for was getting the disclosures out before I was caught.
The last morning I woke up with Lindsay—she was leaving on a camping trip to Kauai with friends—I told her how sorry I was for how busy I’d been and that I was going to miss her. And that she was the best person I’d ever met in my life. She smiled, pecked me on the cheek, and then got up to pack.
The moment she was out the door, I started crying, for the first time in years.
At least I had the benefit of knowing what was coming. Lindsay would return from her camping trip to find me gone, ostensibly on a work assignment, and my mother basically waiting on our doorstep. I’d invited my mother to visit, in a move so uncharacteristic that she must have expected another type of surprise—like an announcement that Lindsay and I were engaged. I felt horrible about the false pretenses, but I kept telling myself I was justified. My mother would take care of Lindsay, and Lindsay would take care of her. Each would need the other’s strength to weather the coming storm.
The day after Lindsay left, I took an emergency medical leave of absence from work, citing epilepsy, and packed scant luggage and four laptops: secure communications, normal communications, a decoy, and an “air gap” (a computer that had never gone and would never go online). I left my smartphone on the kitchen counter alongside a notepad on which I scribbled in pen Got called away for work. I love you. 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.
TWENTY-FOUR
Hong Kong
The deep 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. It satisfies a 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.
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. I was begging: Please come before the NSA realizes I’ve been gone from work too long. It was tough to face the prospect of being left in Hong Kong high and dry. 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 sent increasingly shrill pleas to my contacts. 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 messages. I also tried to organize the last briefing I’d ever give—going through the archive, figuring out the most effective way to explain its contents to the journalists in the surely limited time we’d have together. It was an interesting problem: how best to express to nontechnical people who were inclined to be skeptical of me that the US government was surveilling the world and the methods by which it was doing so. I put together dictionaries of terms like metadata. I put together glossaries of acronyms and abbreviations.