The US authorities now tried to exert pressure in the UK. The British security service MI5 called Nick Hopkins, the paper’s security editor at the Guardian’s London headquarters; the FBI’s people similarly called the paper’s no. 2, the deputy editor Paul Johnson. (Deputy director Joyce began: ‘Hello Paul, are you having a good day? We’ve been talking to Ms Gibson. We don’t feel we’ve been making progress…’) Attempts to reach Rusbridger personally were unsuccessful. The editor-in-chief was still on a plane. He had made it clear this was Gibson’s call.
The federal officials now acted sad rather than angry. But in DC, Ackerman was getting nervous. He was wondering whether guys with guns and wraparound shades might be standing outside his apartment in Dupont Circle, ready to whisk him away and interrogate him in a dark cell. He reasoned: ‘We had got off the phone with three extremely powerful and extremely displeased men, one of whom was the deputy head of the FBI.’
Over in Hong Kong, Snowden and Greenwald were restless; they were sceptical that the Guardian would have the sheer finger-in-your-eye chutzpah to publish. Greenwald signalled that he was ready and willing to self-publish or take the scoop elsewhere if the Guardian hesitated. Time was running out. And Snowden could be uncovered at any minute.
Just after 7pm, Guardian US went ahead and ran the story. It was, by any standards, an extraordinary scoop, but it was to be just the first one of many.
The article, with Greenwald’s byline on it, began: ‘The National Security Agency is currently collecting the telephone records of millions of US customers of Verizon, one of America’s largest telecoms providers, under a top-secret court order issued in April.’
Despite the failure of their conference call, the White House must never have really believed that the Guardian would have the audacity to publish the secret order. A few minutes after the story went live, Hayden sent a note to Ackerman, asking: ‘Are you guys going ahead?’
Being behind the curve in this way was to characterise the White House’s interactions in the days ahead. Senior officials were incredulous at the breakneck speed of publication. The NSA must have been chasing down the leak but was unaware the Guardian didn’t just have one top-secret document, but thousands. Gibson says: ‘We were absolutely moving at speed. We knew we had a really limited window to get stories out before it became a manhunt.’
Snowden had maintained the Verizon revelations would set off a public storm. Gibson and Millar were less persuaded; it was a good story, for sure, but how big would it go? The day’s tasks finished, Ackerman met his wife Mandy for dinner, sat down in a Korean restaurant, and ordered a large, calming beer. He pulled up the newly published Verizon piece on his iPhone. He showed Mandy. ‘Holy shit,’ she exclaimed. Ackerman looked at Twitter: the Guardian revelation was suddenly everywhere. ‘It was rapidly becoming a thunderclap,’ he says. He looked around. Could the two men sitting at the next table be FBI?
The paranoia was understandable. From now on the Guardian found itself the target of intense NSA scrutiny. Suddenly the world felt different. Jitteriness set in. It was unclear on what legal basis the NSA was spying on journalists going about their job and protected by the first amendment. But it was evident that whatever electronic privacy they had once enjoyed had now vanished. At 7.50pm Millar ran out of the office, got on the subway and returned to his home in Brooklyn; his twins were celebrating their fifth birthday, and he wanted to see them before they went to bed. (Millar told his daughter: ‘I didn’t want to miss you on your birthday, darling.’ She replied: ‘You’ve already missed my birthday, Daddy.’)
Millar headed off back to work a mere 20 minutes later, to discover that diggers had mysteriously arrived at 536 Broadway. They were tearing up the pavement immediately in front of the Guardian’s office, a strange activity for a Wednesday evening. With smooth efficiency, they replaced it. More diggers arrived outside Gibson’s home in Brooklyn. Construction crews also began very loud work outside the Guardian’s Washington bureau. Soon, every member of the Snowden team was able to recount similar unusual moments – ‘taxi drivers’ who didn’t know the way and forgot to ask for money, ‘window cleaners’ who lingered and re-lingered next to the editor’s office.
In the coming days the Guardian’s laptops repeatedly stopped working. Gibson was especially unlucky. Her mere presence had a disastrous effect on technology. Often her encrypted chats with Greenwald and others would collapse, raising fears of possible hacking. She stuck a Post-it note on one compromised machine. It read: ‘Middlemanned! Do not use.’ Having glimpsed Snowden’s documents, it was clear the NSA could ‘middleman’ practically anything, in other words insert itself in the middle of a conversation between two parties and siphon off private data. All the players involved in the Snowden story went from being encryption novices to encryption mavens. ‘Very quickly, we had to get better at spycraft,’ Gibson says.
That evening, the bleary-eyed journalists began pulling into shape the next exclusive on PRISM. At midnight Rusbridger and Borger walked in; on the plane over, Rusbridger had been mugging up on US law and the Espionage Act. The following morning on the subway to Spring Street station, the nearest to the New York office, the pair had overshot their stop. They ran up the stairs, and dived into a train heading in the opposite direction. ‘That will shake them off,’ Rusbridger joked. The mood was jubilant as Rusbridger read through the draft of the next story, about PRISM.
That story, too, was remarkable. The NSA was claiming it had secret direct access to the systems of Google, Facebook, Apple and other US internet giants. Under the program, previously undisclosed, analysts were able to collect email content, search histories, live chats and file transfers. The Guardian had a 41-slide PowerPoint presentation, classified as top secret and not to be shown to foreign allies. It was apparently used to train analysts. The document claimed ‘collection directly from the servers’ of major US service providers. Silicon Valley would vehemently deny this.
As the team reassembled the next morning there were still difficult editorial decisions to make. How many of the slides, if any, should the Guardian publish? Several gave details of previously undisclosed intelligence operations abroad. There was no public interest in betraying them. It was also important – legally, and in the interests of fairness – to approach the US tech companies for reaction. Dominic Rushe, the Guardian’s US business reporter, was assigned the task. And then there was the White House. PRISM was an even bigger secret than Verizon. How much warning should the White House get ahead of publication?
Gibson picked up the phone for another difficult conversation. On the other end of the line was Bob Litt and the director of national intelligence’s press spokesman Shawn Turner; other security agencies were patched in. Gibson explained this was another opportunity for the White House to raise specific national security concerns. She was asked, in tones of friendly banter: ‘Could you send us a copy of your story and we’ll take a look at it for you?’ It was maybe worth a shot. Gibson replied: ‘We’re not going to do that.’
There were issues with many of the slides. The problem was that the White House’s and the Guardian’s slide-decks didn’t quite match up; the colours were different. At one point Gibson said: ‘I’m really sorry. It’s just inherently comedic when you say the words purple box.’ From the Guardian side laughter, from the White House bemusement. It was another moment of cross-cultural confusion.