The NSA, not surprisingly, was against publication of any of the slides; the agency’s bad week was morphing into full-blown disaster. Gibson, however, was insistent the Guardian should disclose the dates when Microsoft, Yahoo and other tech giants had apparently signed up to the aggressive PRISM program; it was a key slide. ‘We need to publish this. That’s my bottom line,’ she said, stressing: ‘We’ve taken out anything operational.’
The Obama team had apparently still not entirely grasped that they had lost control irrevocably of a large cache of top-secret NSA material. As Gibson put it, reflecting on the non-existent leverage available to the US authorities: ‘I could not understand what the “or else” in this was.’ The Guardian decided it would publish only three out of the 41 slides, a conservative approach. The White House had been told the story would go live at 6pm. A few minutes earlier, the Washington Post, which had been sitting on some similar material, published its own version of the PRISM story. The immediate suspicion was that someone inside the administration had tipped off the Post. The Post article, however, lacked one crucial element: howling denials from Facebook and others that they were complicit in NSA surveillance.
In mid-afternoon, Gibson, Rusbridger and the others gathered in the large meeting room at the end of the office. The area had been jokingly dubbed the ‘Cronut’. The reference was to GCHQ’s doughnut-shaped headquarters in England, and to the latest SoHo craze for ‘cronuts’, a cross between a croissant and a doughnut. Several young interns had been liquidising cronuts at a nearby desk; they were writing a feature. Cronut was, perhaps, not the funniest pun in the world. But in these febrile times it stuck.
The mood was lightening – two massive stories, Snowden still in play, an engagement process of sorts with the White House. After a succession of long days merging into muggy nights, the working environment resembled an unkempt student dormitory. Cardboard rectangles of grubby pizza boxes littered the tables; there were take-away cups and other detritus. Someone knocked over a cappuccino. This was Rusbridger’s cue. He reached down for the nearest newspaper, began theatrically mopping up the coffee, and declared: ‘We are literally wiping the floor with the New York Times.’
The Snowden revelations were becoming a deluge. On Friday morning the Guardian published an 18-page presidential policy directive, dated October 2012 – the document Snowden had revealed to Poitras. It showed that Obama had ordered officials to draw up a list of potential overseas targets for offensive US cyber-attacks. Like other top-secret programs, the policy had its own acronym – OCEO – or Offensive Cyber Effects Operations. The directive promised ‘unique and unconventional capabilities to advance US national objectives around the world with little or no warning to the adversary or target.’ The potential effects, it boasted, ranged ‘from subtle to severely damaging’.
The story was a double embarrassment for the White House. First, the US had complained persistently about invasive and damaging cyber-attacks from Beijing, directed against American military infrastructure, the Pentagon and other targets. These complaints now looked distinctly hypocritical; the US was doing exactly the same. Second, and more piquantly, Obama was due later that day to meet his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping at a summit in California. Beijing had already hit back at US criticism. Senior officials claimed to have ‘mountains’ of evidence of US cyber-attacks, every bit as serious as the ones allegedly carried out by rampant Chinese hackers.
As the day unfolded it became clear that the leaks had got the president’s attention. The NSA programs helped defend America against terrorist attacks, Obama said. He added that it was impossible to have 100 per cent security and 100 per cent privacy: ‘We have struck the right balance.’
Rusbridger and Gibson watched Obama on the TV monitor: the immensity of what the Guardian had initiated was sinking in. Gibson says: ‘Suddenly he was talking about us. We felt: “Oh shit. There’s no going back.”’
Gibson called Hayden again to warn her that another story was coming down the runway, this time on BOUNDLESS INFORMANT. The top-secret program allows the NSA to map country by country the voluminous amount of information it collects from computer and telephone networks. Using the NSA’s own metadata, the tool gives a portrait of where the agency’s ubiquitous spying activities are concentrated – chiefly, Iran, Pakistan and Jordan. This came from a ‘global heat map’ slide leaked by Snowden. It revealed that in March 2013 the agency collected a staggering 97 billion intelligence data points from computer networks worldwide.
Gibson launched into her legalistic script, inviting the White House to air its latest concerns. ‘I’m just going to say my thing,’ she told Hayden brightly. Hayden replied: ‘Please don’t.’ From the NSC, there was, perhaps, a grudging acceptance that the Guardian had behaved responsibly. The tone was cordial. That evening, Inglis himself rang. The subject was BOUNDLESS INFORMANT. The NSA deputy chief’s response to Gibson was a half-hour lecture on how the internet worked – a patronising tutorial. Still, Gibson notes: ‘They had moved into a place where they were trying to engage with us.’
Like most of the Snowden files, the BOUNDLESS INFORMANT documents were highly specialised, and not easy to parse. The plan had been to publish later on Friday. With journalists gathered round, Rusbridger read the draft story out aloud, line by line.
He stopped several times. ‘I don’t quite get that,’ Millar said.
Very quickly it emerged that more work was needed. In Hong Kong, Greenwald went off to search for more documents that might help. He found several, and the story was then re-written and posted the following morning. Gibson told her non-Snowden staff that they were free to take the weekend off. But practically all journalists came in. They wanted to witness the extraordinary denouement to an extraordinary week.
For Snowden himself now declared his intention to go public. He proposed, he said, to reveal his own identity to the world.
7
THE PLANET’S MOST WANTED MAN
‘If I were a Chinese spy, why wouldn’t I have flown directly into Beijing? I could be living in a palace, petting a phoenix, by now.’
It had been around 3am local time when the Guardian broke the first of Snowden’s NSA stories. Returning to his Hong Kong hotel room early the next morning, the three reporters found the whistleblower ecstatic.
His revelation was there, running on CNN at the top of the news. Snowden turned the sound up on his hotel TV. Wolf Blitzer, CNN’s anchor, was sitting with a panel of three pundits: they were discussing the possible identity of the Guardian’s mysterious source. Who was the leaker? Someone in the White House, perhaps? A disaffected general? A KGB super-mole? It was a moment of some irony. ‘It was funny watching them speculate who might have leaked it when you are sitting beside that person,’ MacAskill said.
The public response surprised even Snowden. Posts on the internet were massively supportive; already a grassroots movement, Restore the Fourth Amendment, was springing up. The rapid publication was good for his relations with the Guardian: it demonstrated to Snowden that the paper was acting in good faith. All along his goal had been to spark a debate; he felt that the Verizon story was achieving that, making a big splash.