All my scenarios were in the United States. Most were someplace in Maryland. I thought I might be taking a train to Baltimore.”
To lessen the tension, we turned to gallows humor. One night, Laura and I met up for drinks and dinner with a friend and longtime collaborator of hers, the cinematographer Kirsten Johnson.
“When you get sent to Guantánamo, Dale and I will take turns using your steam shower,” Kirsten said, alluding to Laura’s renovation. We then brainstormed methods of communicating by clanging on bars if we all ended up imprisoned together. Things grew more ridiculous as the night wore on. “Thanks for making me laugh so hard,” Laura wrote to both of us the next day. It was the last time I’d laugh for a while.
Soon after that, Laura insisted I begin communicating with her in a more secure manner. She gave me a USB flash drive loaded with The Amnesic Incognito Live System (Tails), a secure operating system bundled with a suite of privacy and encryption tools that funnels all of its users’ internet traffic through the anonymous Tor network. Tails doesn’t store any new data, making it practically impervious to malware. Whenever a session ends, any information it generated gets wiped away, leaving no digital traces. (Intriguingly, we’d learn later from leaked documents that the NSA considered Tails a “major” threat to intelligence gathering — a tool whose use could inflict a “loss/lack of insight to [the] majority of target communications.”)
All I had to do was plug in the USB drive that Laura gave me, turn on my computer, and wait for the connection to be routed through proxy servers. There was a tiny yellow onion in the upper-right-hand corner of the screen — a homage to Tor’s original name, The Onion Router — and when that icon turned green, it was safe to communicate.
I kept the flash drive, along with a sticky note listing both of our Jabber addresses, in a secret place.
For the next two weeks, Laura and I were in constant contact. The source, who remained nameless, finally revealed the location to meet: Hong Kong. This raised the stakes considerably, and we spent much time speculating: was the source affiliated with the CIA or the NSA? He or she seemed to span agencies, Laura said. But that was just a suspicion on her part.
I was feeling in over my head. I’m more of a narrative or cultural journalist. I had been in my share of hairy situations when covering conflict overseas and even here in the United States. This, however, was a new dimension. I feigned steadiness when offering Laura advice, but my stomach was constantly churning.
In the early hours of May 21, when Tails refused to work on my computer, Laura fell back on email. At 4:49 a.m., she wrote: “Can you get in a taxi? I really need to talk.”
I ran downstairs and flagged a cab; as the vehicle sped down Broadway, I peered out the rear window to make sure I wasn’t being followed. When I arrived at her hotel room, Laura didn’t speak. She pointed to my phone: the battery came out and the device went in the fridge. Then, eyes wide, she pointed to a file on the computer screen. It was NSA data — part of an extensive trove of documents. “It looks like the US government’s covert intelligence ‘black budget,’” she said.
When we reminisced about that day years later, it still shook her. “I remember seeing the black budget. It was the first document I opened,” Laura recalled, starting to stammer. “Fuck! This is the kind of stuff—” She drew a deep breath and trailed off.
The black budget mapped out $52.6 billion in spending on top-secret projects for fiscal year 2013. Among other plans, it outlined what officials called “offensive cyber operations”: an aggressive push by the NSA and CIA to hack foreign networks for the purpose of stealing information or committing sabotage.
After Laura showed me that document, she called up a letter stored in a file called README_FIRST. It was literary, even poetic — the words of a civic-minded person who’d clearly thought long and hard before deciding to make a startling sacrifice. This is, in part, what the source had written:
Many will malign me for failing to engage in national relativism, to look away from [our] society’s problems toward distant, external evils for which we hold neither authority nor responsibility, but citizenship carries with it a duty to first police one’s government before seeking to correct others. Here, now, at home, we suffer a government that only grudgingly allows limited oversight, and refuses accountability when crimes are committed …
I understand that I will be made to suffer for my actions, and that the return of this information to the public marks my end. I will be satisfied if the federation of secret law, unequal pardon, and irresistible executive powers that rule the world that I love are revealed for even an instant. If you seek to help, join the open source community and fight to keep the spirit of the press alive and the internet free. I have been to the darkest corners of government, and what they fear is light.
The letter was signed “Edward Joseph Snowden.” Along with the name appeared his social security number, CIA alias, and agency ID number.
Apart from learning Snowden’s identity, Laura also knew she was more vulnerable than ever. Snowden had warned her about what he called a “single point of failure.” If the federal government could stop the archive’s release, he said, they would take whatever steps necessary to do so. That had a bad sound to it, I thought, as I pondered the stunning scope of the story and the dangers it posed to Laura in particular. To mitigate the risk, she made copies of what had come in the box and put them into the hands of other people she trusted.
Distributing leaked documents widely to avoid a single point of failure is not a new strategy. Daniel Ellsberg did the same with the Pentagon Papers. “For a year and a half my greatest fear had been that the FBI would swoop down and collect all my copies of the papers,” Ellsberg wrote in his 2002 book, Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers. A problem in that pre-digital age was sheer volume. He photocopied the documents furiously, filling boxes with duplicates. Then he had to find a place to safeguard them.
“One box went to my brother in New York,” Ellsberg wrote. “Others went to friends’ attics or basements in the area; almost none of them was told what was in the box, just that they were papers I needed stored.”
Snowden, Laura said, had made it clear that he was no ordinary bureaucrat. Indeed, he insisted that this leak was bigger than the Pentagon Papers. Nothing in my career had prepared me for this moment, and, quite understandably, Laura was also feeling overwhelmed.
“I’m not a journalist!” she joked during a particularly stressful exchange.
“Yes, you are!” I replied.
“I’m just a chef!” she countered, referring to her previous career.
Laura asked me to be one of the keepers of the material. My profile as a journalist and a professor at an Ivy League school, she felt, would afford some protection. “Would you do that?”
“Sure.”
She warned of the possibility of grave risk. She wanted to be certain I understood the danger, that I knew I could say no.
“This is what we do,” I responded. “It’s why we’re journalists.”
She muttered something about that being one of the reasons why she liked me. We embraced.
Laura still had misgivings about making the trip. What if she got detained again by the TSA? She ran through the scenario with Kirsten, who recalls feeling conflicted: the details seemed sketchy, yes, and they made her worry for Laura. But she also remembers thinking, “This is smart. It has an internal logic.”
“One of the interesting things Laura and I do is we create a mirror for each other,” she explained. “We’re both risk-takers. Sometimes, she imagines the worst-case scenario, and I imagine the best-case scenario. But when we’re with each other, we see things that we might not see if we were on our own. I have nowhere near her investigative capacity, but I really do think I am perceptive, psychologically.”
Kirsten explained that