Snowden’s own precautions were remarkable. He piled pillows up against the door to stop anyone from eavesdropping from outside in the corridor; the pillows were stacked up in half-columns either side, and across the bottom. When putting passwords into computers, he placed a big red hood over his head and laptop – a sort of giant snood – so the passwords couldn’t be picked up by hidden cameras. He was extremely reluctant to be parted from his laptops.
On the three occasions he left his room, Snowden employed a classic spy trick, updated for his Asian surroundings. He put a glass of water behind the door next to a piece of a tissue paper. The paper had a soy sauce mark with a distinctive pattern. If water fell on the paper it would change the pattern.
Snowden wasn’t suffering from paranoia. He knew what he was up against. During his stay in Kowloon he had been half-expecting a knock on the door at any moment – a raid in which he would be dragged away. He explained: ‘I could be rendered by the CIA. I could have people come after me – or any of their third-party partners. They work closely with a number of nations. Or they could pay off the triads, or any of their agents or assets. We’ve got a CIA station just down the road in the [US] consulate in Hong Kong. I’m sure they are going to be very busy for the next week. That’s a fear I will live under for the rest of my life, however long that happens to be.’
He confided to MacAskill that one of his friends had taken part in a CIA rendition operation in Italy. This was almost certainly the 2003 snatch of Muslim cleric Abu Omar, who was taken in broad daylight in Milan, flown from a local US airbase, and subsequently tortured. In 2009 an Italian judge convicted the CIA’s Milan station chief, Robert Seldon Lady, and 22 other Americans, most CIA operatives, of kidnapping. Lady later admitted: ‘Of course it was an illegal operation. But that’s our job. We’re at war against terrorism.’
Snowden felt extremely vulnerable right up until the first story on the bulk collection of US metadata from the phone company Verizon was published. (Once articles based on his NSA revelations appeared, the search for him heated up, but he felt the publicity would also offer him a measure of protection.) Before publication, there were risks for the journalists too, obviously. What would happen to them if they were caught with secret material?
With Poitras filming, and Snowden sitting on the bed, MacAskill began a formal interview. He had asked for one-and-a-half to two hours. Greenwald’s questions the previous day had been those of a seasoned litigator verbally slapping and bombarding a doubtful witness; the breakthrough moment came when Snowden talked about comics and gaming.
MacAskill, by contrast, was methodical and reporterly, his journalistic style complementing Greenwald’s. He asked Snowden for the basics. Could he produce his passport, social security number, driver’s licence? What was his last address? What was his salary?
Snowden explained that his pay and housing allowance in Hawaii before he joined Booz Allen Hamilton as an infrastructure analyst came to $200,000. (He took a pay cut to join Booz. MacAskill conflated his former and current salary, leading some to wrongly accuse Snowden of exaggerating his income.)
Snowden anticipated he would encounter scepticism. He had brought with him from Kunia a heap of documents. ‘He had a ridiculous amount of identification,’ Greenwald says.
MacAskill asked a series of follow-ups. How had he got involved in intelligence work? What year had he joined the CIA? He told MacAskill of his foreign postings in Switzerland and Japan, and of his most recent assignment in Hawaii. What was his CIA ID? Snowden revealed that too. Most bafflingly, why was he in Hong Kong? Snowden said it had ‘a reputation for freedom in spite of the People’s Republic of China’ and a tradition of free speech. It was ‘really tragic’ that as an American he’d been forced to end up there, he said.
And when did he make the fateful decision to become a whistleblower?
‘You see things that may be disturbing. When you see everything, you realise that some of these things are abusive. The awareness of wrongdoing builds up. There was not one morning when I woke up [and decided this is it]. It was a natural process.’
Snowden said he hadn’t voted for Obama in 2008 but had ‘believed’ in his promises. (He voted for a ‘third party’, instead, he said, a reference to the libertarian Ron Paul.) He had intended to ‘disclose’ what he had found out, but decided to wait and see following Obama’s election. What did happen, he said, was profoundly disillusioning: ‘He continued with the policies of his predecessor.’
All of this made sense. But some of Snowden’s CV was a little odd. Snowden said that he hadn’t been to university, and had instead attended a Maryland community college. This set off alarm bells for MacAskill – how could someone as smart as Snowden achieve such a high-profile job so quickly without a degree? In his career as a spy Snowden appeared to have worked for practically everybody in a remarkably short period of time: the NSA, CIA and the DIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency, either on contract or as a direct hire.
Snowden then mentioned that he had undergone basic training to join the US special forces, only to abandon the plan when he broke his legs. ‘I thought, Christ, this sounds a bit like a fantasist,’ MacAskill admits. ‘The story was [like a] Boy’s Own adventure.’
Yet gradually, MacAskill did become convinced that Snowden’s account of his life was true, despite its unlikely and even picaresque moments. He moved on to a core issue: ‘What you are doing is a crime. You are probably going to jail for the rest of your life. Why are you doing it? Is it really worth it?’
Snowden’s answer was convincing to his questioner: ‘We have seen enough criminality on the part of government. It is hypocritical to make this allegation against me. They have narrowed the public sphere of influence.’ He acknowledged that ‘nothing good’ was likely to happen to him. But said he didn’t regret his decision, or want to live in a world ‘where everything I do and say is recorded’. As he explained: ‘The NSA has built an infrastructure that allows it to intercept almost anything. With this capability, the vast majority of human communications are automatically ingested.’ Federal agencies had hijacked the internet, he said. They had turned it into a machine for spying on whole populations.
MacAskill had met leakers before from his time as a correspondent in Britain’s House of Commons. For the most part these were politicians. Some spilled information for reasons of ambition; others out of vengeance; many had a gripe, felt slighted, or had missed out on promotion. The reason was usually a pretty base one. But Snowden was different. ‘He had a sense of idealism. It was a patriotic act,’ MacAskill says.
Snowden stressed his overriding belief that the internet should be free. On one of his black laptops was an indicator to his stance: a sticker from the Electronic Freedom Forum, a US group that campaigns for internet transparency. It read: ‘I support online rights.’ Another sticker was for the anonymous router Tor, which is used to disguise the origin of internet messages.
As a Washington correspondent, MacAskill understood some of Snowden’s fervour. The Scot had covered Obama’s 2008 election campaign. He recognised that for Snowden and other Americans, the US constitution is speciaclass="underline" it enshrines basic freedoms. Snowden believed that the US government’s stealth attack on it was the equivalent of an attack that occupies land – a terrible and illegitimate invasion. He viewed his own deeds in explicitly patriotic terms. He saw his leak not as an act of betrayal but as a necessary corrective to a spy system that had grown dysfunctional.
‘America is a fundamentally good country,’ he maintained. ‘We have good people with good values. But the structures of power that exist are working to their own ends, to extend their capability at the expense of the freedom of all publics.’