MacAskill wondered if the leaker was going to be smug, thrilled or proprietary to find himself at the centre of world events. Remarkably, he was totally impassive; he listened to CNN intently. He seemed to understand the enormity of what had happened. From this moment there was no way back. If he flew home to Hawaii now, arrest and incarceration would follow. Snowden’s life was never going to be the same again.
So what next specifically? The most likely scenario for him, as Snowden sketched it, was that the Chinese police would arrest him in Hong Kong. There would be a legal tussle. Possibly for a few months. Maybe even a year. At the end of this he would be sent back to the US. And then… well, decades and decades in jail.
Snowden had turned over an enormous quantity of material on portable drives. This included not only the NSA’s internal files, but also British material emanating from GCHQ and apparently trustingly handed over by the Brits to their US colleagues.
‘How many British documents are on these?’ MacAskill asked.
Snowden said, ‘About 50,000 to 60,000.’
He had given months of thought to his planned dealings with the media. He was fastidious. He wanted a series of strict conditions for handling secret material. He was insistent that NSA/GCHQ documents disclosing spying should go to the respective subjects of surveillance. He felt Hong Kong media should have information relating to spying on Hong Kong, the Brazilian material to Brazilian media and so on. He was categorical on this point. If, on the other hand, the material fell into the hands of third-party adversaries such as the Russians or the Chinese, this would lay him open to the damaging charge that he was little more than a defector or foreign agent – which he wasn’t.
Snowden was alert to the possibility that foreign intelligence services would seek his files, and was determined to prevent this. As a spy, one of his jobs had been to defend American secrets from Chinese attack. He knew the capabilities of America’s foes. Snowden made clear repeatedly that he didn’t want to damage US intelligence operations abroad.
‘I had access to full rosters of anybody working at the NSA. The entire intelligence community and undercover assets around the world. The locations of every station we have, all of their missions… If I just wanted to damage the US I could have shut down the surveillance system in an afternoon. That was never my intention,’ he said.
He put it in even more vivid terms, when subsequently accused of ‘treachery’: ‘Ask yourself: 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.’
During the days of debriefing in Hong Kong, Snowden said citizens in countries that recognised whistleblowing and public-interest reporting had a right to know what was going on. He wanted the Guardian and other media partners to filter out anything that was operational and might damage legitimate intelligence activities. These were his conditions. All agreed.
Technical precautions were taken. The files were on memory cards. They were strongly encrypted with multiple passwords. No one person knew all the passwords to access a file.
The US freelance journalists approached by Snowden now had in their possession a large treasure trove of classified material. The WikiLeaks disclosures, published by the Guardian in London in 2010, were of US diplomatic cables and war-logs from Afghanistan and Iraq leaked by the US private Chelsea Manning. A few – just 6 per cent – were classified at the relatively modest level of ‘secret’. The Snowden files were in a different league. They were ‘top secret’ and above. There had once been a melodramatic defection of Cambridge-educated spies to Soviet Moscow – Burgess, Maclean and Philby. But there had never been a mass documentary leak at this vertiginous altitude before.
Snowden generally wore just a casual T-shirt in his room, but on Thursday 6 June, Greenwald organised a switch. Snowden put on a grey, ironed shirt. He moved from his regular perch on the hotel bed to a chair: behind him a mirror was positioned. It made the room seem less tiny and cramped.
Snowden was about to record his first public interview. It would be the moment when he would introduce himself to the world and would confess – or, rather, proudly own up – to being the source behind the NSA leaks. He told Greenwald: ‘I have no intention of hiding who I am, because I know I have done nothing wrong.’
It was a bold and counterintuitive move, and one that Snowden had contemplated for a long time. His reasons impressed his journalist partners as sound. First, he told MacAskill, he had seen close up the disastrous impact on colleagues of leak inquiries pursuing anonymous sources. He had witnessed the ‘terrible consequences for people under suspicion’. He said he didn’t want to put his colleagues through such an ordeal.
Second, he was aware of the NSA’s ferocious technical capacities; it was only a matter of time before they tracked him down. His plan all along had been that after the first few stories, he would make himself known. This didn’t mean, however, that Snowden wished to emulate Chelsea Manning, whose arrest in 2010 and harsh jail treatment he had followed closely. Snowden said: ‘Manning was a classic whistleblower. He was inspired by the public good.’ As a result, Manning was due to face a court martial in Fort Meade, next door to the NSA’s headquarters – one that was shortly to sentence the young soldier to 35 years in prison.
Snowden intimated that Manning had proved the point that it was impossible for a whistleblower to get a fair trial in the US. A long spell in jail would also stymie the public debate Snowden wanted.
Poitras had been filming Snowden from the first encounter; her camera had had a freezing effect on their early interactions, but now Snowden agreed to talk directly into her lens. He was, as he put it, a ‘virgin source’. Snowden had previously shunned all contact with reporters and the media. He had even avoided showing his face in his girlfriend’s blog. But he was also acutely aware of how much was at stake. What was ultimately important, Snowden accepted, was the public’s verdict. In this context, an interview would help shape perceptions.
Greenwald sat opposite Snowden. He asked the questions. As a lawyer and experienced broadcaster, Greenwald was comfortable with televised interviews. But Snowden’s own on-screen manner would be an unknown quantity.
Snowden, however, gave a remarkable performance for a media newbie, with fluent answers and a cogent account of what had motivated him to take such a radical step. Most importantly, he appeared eminently sane.
Asked why he had decided to become a whistleblower, Snowden said he had struggled inside the system, before finally concluding he had no alternative but to go outside it: ‘When you’re in positions of privileged access like a systems administrator for these sort of intelligence community agencies, you’re exposed to a lot more information on a broader scale than the average employee.’
What he seen had ‘disturbed’ him deeply. ‘Even if you’re not doing anything wrong you’re being watched and recorded,’ he told the Guardian. ‘The storage capability of these systems increases every year consistently by orders of magnitude to where it’s getting to the point… you don’t have to have done anything wrong. You simply have to eventually fall under suspicion from somebody, even by a wrong call. And then they can use this system to go back in time and scrutinise every decision you’ve ever made, every friend you’ve ever discussed something with. And attack you on that basis to sort of derive suspicion from an innocent life and paint anyone in the context of a wrongdoer.’
He added, by way of explaining his own decision to blow the whistle, with all the foreseeable consequences for the rest of his life: ‘You realise that that’s the world you helped create and it’s gonna get worse with the next generation and the next generation who extend the capabilities of this sort of architecture of oppression.’