A few days later, his correspondent emailed again.
He asked: ‘Have you done it?’
Greenwald replied that he hadn’t. The journalist asked for more time. Several more days passed.
Another email arrived. It persisted: ‘Have you done it?’
Frustrated, Greenwald’s unknown correspondent now tried a different strategy. He made a private YouTube tutorial showing step by step how to download the correct encryption software – a ‘how to’ guide for dummies. This video had little in common with the Khan Academy: its author remained anonymous, an off-screen presence. It merely contained a set of instructions. ‘I saw a computer screen and graphics. I didn’t see any hands. He was very cautious,’ Greenwald says.
The freelance journalist watched. But – stretched by other demands – didn’t quite get round to following its strictures. He forgot about it. ‘I wanted to do it. I work a lot with hacker types,’ Greenwald says. But ultimately: ‘He didn’t do enough to get himself up my priority list.’
Five months later, during their encounter in Hong Kong, Greenwald realised his would-be source back in late 2012 had been none other than Edward Snowden. Snowden was among Greenwald’s community of readers. Liking Greenwald’s world view, his brio and his uncompromising approach to government, Snowden had reached out to him, but unsuccessfully. ‘Snowden told me: “I can’t believe you didn’t do it. It was like: ‘Hey, idiot!’ ”’
Snowden in Hawaii was thousands of miles away from Brazil. There was little prospect of a physical meeting. Online contact was essential. Yet Greenwald had been too distracted even to follow Snowden’s simple encryption guide. The whistleblower’s frustration must have been considerable. Greenwald says: ‘He must have been thinking: “I’m just about to take this enormous fucking risk, to throw my life away, get killed, do the biggest security leak ever, and he [Greenwald] can’t even be bothered to get an encryption code.”’
As a consequence of this PGP debacle, several weeks passed uselessly. Snowden seemed to have no safe route through to Greenwald. The columnist carried on unaware, penning polemics in his remote mountain home. Marauding jungle monkeys would often invade, picking fights with the dogs, sometimes pelting them with branches, or retreating into dense thickets of bamboo. At other times Greenwald rolled around with his animals; he says this is a welcome distraction from politics and the remorseless stream of Twitter.
At the end of January 2013, Snowden tried a different way to get to him. He sent an email to Laura Poitras. He was hoping to open an anonymous channel to the documentary film-maker, who was Greenwald’s friend and a close collaborator. Poitras was another leading critic of the US security state – and one of its more prominent victims.
For nearly a decade, Poitras had been working on a trilogy of feature-length films about America in the years following 9/11. The first, My Country, My Country (2006), was an acclaimed portrait of Iraq in the aftermath of US invasion, told through the story of a Sunni Iraqi doctor who stood as a candidate in the 2005 post-Saddam election. The film was intimate, moving, compelling and brave – a luminous piece of work, nominated in 2007 for an Academy Award.
Poitras’s next film, The Oath (2010), was shot in Yemen and Guantanamo Bay. It features two Yemenis swept up in President Bush’s war on terror. One, Salim Hamdan, was accused of being Osama bin Laden’s driver and detained in Guantanamo; the other, Hamdan’s brother-in-law, was a former bin Laden bodyguard. Through them, Poitras created a powerful and human-scale critique of the dark Bush–Cheney years.
The response from US officials was astounding. For six years, between 2006 and 2012, agents from the Department of Homeland Security detained Poitras each time she entered the US. This happened around 40 times, she says. On each occasion, the agents would interrogate her, confiscate laptops and mobile phones, and demand to know whom she had met. They would seize her camera and notebooks. Sometimes she was held for three or four hours. Nothing incriminating was ever discovered.
Once, in 2011, when she was stopped at John F Kennedy international airport in New York, she refused to answer questions about her work, citing the first amendment. The border agent told her: ‘If you don’t answer our questions, we’ll find our answers on your electronics.’
In response to this harassment, Poitras adopted new strategies. She became an expert in encryption. She learned how to protect her source material and sensitive information. She understood why, given the NSA’s pervasive spying capabilities, this was sometimes very important. She no longer travelled with electronic gear. Sensibly, Poitras decided to edit her next film from outside America. She moved temporarily to the German capital, Berlin.
In 2012, Poitras was working on the concluding part of the trilogy. Its theme this time was America, and the alarming rise of domestic surveillance. One of her interviewees was William Binney, an NSA whistleblower. Binney was a mathematician who had spent nearly 40 years at the agency, and helped automate its foreign eavesdropping. He left in 2001 and blew the whistle on domestic spying.
That summer Poitras made an ‘op-doc’ for the New York Times website: a short film that was part of her work-in-progress. In the accompanying Times article, Poitras described what it was like being an NSA ‘target’.
From afar, Snowden observed Poitras’s harsh treatment. He knew who she was and what she had been through. Asked later by the Times journalist Peter Maass why he had approached Greenwald and Poitras, rather than his own paper, Snowden replied: ‘After 9/11, many of the most important news outlets in America abdicated their role as a check to power – the journalistic responsibility to challenge the excesses of government – for fear of being seen as unpatriotic and punished in the market during a period of heightened nationalism. From a business perspective, this was the obvious strategy, but what benefited the institutions, ended up costing the public dearly. The major outlets are still only beginning to recover from this cold period.’
He continued: ‘Laura and Glenn are among the few who reported fearlessly on controversial topics throughout this period, even in the face of withering personal criticism, and resulted in Laura specifically becoming targeted… She had demonstrated the courage, personal experience and skill needed to handle what is probably the most dangerous assignment any journalist can be given – reporting on the secret misdeeds of the most powerful government in the world – making her an obvious choice.’
In Berlin, Poitras brooded over the email that now came in from Snowden: ‘I am a senior member of the intelligence community. This won’t be a waste of your time…’ (The claim was something of an exaggeration. Not in terms of Snowden’s access to secret material but job title – he was a relatively junior infrastructure analyst.) Snowden asked for her encryption key. She gave it. She took other steps to assure Snowden, then still an anonymous source, that she understood how to communicate securely. ‘I felt pretty intrigued pretty quickly,’ she says. ‘At that point my thought was either it’s legit or it’s entrapment. There were two sides of my brain. One was holy shit, it feels kind of legit.’
Poitras wrote: ‘I don’t know if you are legit, crazy or trying to entrap me.’
Snowden replied: ‘I’m not going to ask you anything. I’m just going to tell you things.’