“I’m his legal adviser,” Sarah answered.
The man asked me, “So you are not coming to Russia to be in Russia?”
“No.”
“And so may I ask where you are trying to go? What is your final destination?”
I said, “Quito, Ecuador, via Caracas, via Havana,” even though I knew that he already knew the answer. He certainly had a copy of our itinerary, since Sarah and I had traveled from Hong Kong on Aeroflot, the Russian flagship airline.
Up until this point, he and I had been reading from the same intelligence script, but now the conversation swerved. “You haven’t heard?” he said. He stood and looked at me like he was delivering the news of a death in the family. “I am afraid to inform you that your passport is invalid.”
I was so surprised, I just stammered. “I’m sorry, but I—I don’t believe that.”
The man leaned over the table and said, “No, it is true. Believe me. It is the decision of your minister, John Kerry. Your passport has been canceled by your government, and the air services have been instructed not to allow you to travel.”
I was sure it was a trick, but I wasn’t quite sure to what purpose. “Give us a minute,” I said, but even before I could ask, Sarah had snatched her laptop out of her bag and was getting onto the airport Wi-Fi.
“Of course, you will check,” the man said, and he turned to his colleagues and chatted amiably to them in Russian, as if he had all the time in the world.
It was reported on every site Sarah looked at. After the news had broken that I’d left Hong Kong, the US State Department announced that it had canceled my passport. It had revoked my travel document while I was still in midair.
“It’s true,” said Sarah, with a shake of her head. I was incredulous: My own government had trapped me in Russia.
“So what will you do?” the man asked, and he walked around to our side of the table.
Before I could take the Ecuadorean safe-conduct pass out of my pocket, Sarah said, “I’m so sorry, but I’m going to have to advise Mr. Snowden not to answer any more questions.”
The man pointed at me, and said, “You will come.”
He gestured for me to follow him to the far end of the conference room, where there was a window. I went and stood next to him and looked. About three or four floors below was street level and the largest media scrum I’ve ever seen, scads of reporters wielding cameras and mics.
I went back to my chair but didn’t sit down again.
The man turned from the window to face me and said, “Life for a person in your situation can be very difficult without friends who can help.” He let the words linger.
Here it comes, I thought—the direct solicitation.
He said, “If there is some information, perhaps, some small thing you could share with us?”
“We’ll be okay on our own,” I said. Sarah stood up next to me.
The man sighed. He turned to mumble in Russian, and his comrades rose and filed out. “I hope you will not regret your decision,” he said to me. Then he gave a slight bow and made his own exit, just as a pair of officials from the airport administration entered.
I demanded to be allowed to go to the gate for the flight to Havana, but they ignored me. I finally reached into my pocket and brandished the Ecuadorean safe-conduct pass, but they ignored that, too.
All told, we were trapped in the airport for a biblical forty days and forty nights. Over the course of those days, I applied to a total of twenty-seven countries for political asylum. Not a single one of them was willing to stand up to American pressure, with some countries refusing outright and others declaring that they were unable to even consider my request until I arrived in their territory—a feat that was impossible. Ultimately, the only head of state that proved sympathetic to my cause was Burger King, who never denied me a Whopper (hold the tomato and onion).
Soon, my presence in the airport became a global spectacle. Eventually the Russians found it a nuisance. The Russian government must have decided that it would be better off without me and the media swarm clogging up the country’s major airport. On August 1, it granted me temporary asylum. Sarah and I were allowed to leave Sheremetyevo, but eventually only one of us would be heading home. Our time together served to bind us as friends for life. I will always be grateful for the weeks she spent by my side, for her integrity and her fortitude.
TWENTY-SIX
From the Diaries of Lindsay Mills
As far away from home as I was, my thoughts were consumed with Lindsay. I’ve been wary of telling her story—the story of what happened to her once I was gone: the FBI interrogations, the surveillance, the press attention, the online harassment, the confusion and pain, the anger and sadness. Finally, I realized that only Lindsay herself should be the person to recount that period. No one else has the experience, but more than that, no one else has the right. Luckily, Lindsay has long kept a diary, using it to record her life and draft her art. She has graciously agreed to let me include a few pages, which can be accessed via the QR code or URL below. In the entries, all names have been changed (except those of family), some typos fixed, and a few redactions made. Otherwise, this is how it was, from the moment that I left Hawaii.
TWENTY-SEVEN
Love and Exile
If at any point during your journey through this book you paused for a moment over a term you wanted to clarify or investigate further and typed it into a search engine—and if that term happened to be in some way suspicious—then congrats: You’re in the system, a victim of your own curiosity.
But even if you didn’t search for anything online, it wouldn’t take much for an interested government to find out that you’ve been reading this book. At the very least, it wouldn’t take much to find out that you have it, whether you bought a hard copy online or purchased it at a brick-and-mortar store with a credit card.
All you wanted to do was read. But that was more than enough. By creating a world-spanning system that tracked identifiers like your email, your phone, and the IP address of your computer across every available channel of electronic communications, the American Intelligence Community gave itself the power to record and store forever the data of your life.
And that was only the beginning. Because once America’s spy agencies had proven to themselves that it was possible to passively collect all of your communications, they started actively tampering with them, too. By poisoning the messages that were headed your way with snippets of attack code, they developed the ability to gain possession of more than just your words. Now they were capable of winning total control of your whole device, including its camera and microphone. Which means that if you’re reading this now—this sentence—on any sort of modern machine, like a smartphone or tablet, they can follow along and read you. They can tell how quickly or slowly you turn the pages and whether you read the chapters consecutively or skip around. But what they really want is the data that lets them positively identify you.
This is the result of two decades of unchecked innovation. No matter the place, no matter the time, and no matter what you do, your life has now become an open book.
If mass surveillance was, by definition, a constant presence in daily life, then I wanted the dangers it posed, and the damage it had already done, to be a constant presence, too. Through my disclosures to the press, I wanted to make this system known, its existence a fact that my country, and the world, could not ignore. In the years since 2013, awareness has grown. But in this social media age, we have always to remind ourselves: Awareness alone is not enough.