It wasn’t that they put it on me as an individual—that I’m uniquely qualified [or] an angel descending from the heavens—as that they put it on someone, somewhere.
—EDWARD SNOWDEN, Moscow, 2013
DOWNLOADING NSA documents was not Snowden’s only rogue activity while working at the NSA for Dell in 2012. Three weeks after the CryptoParty, Snowden began anonymously contacting a high-profile journalist. He used the same alias, Cincinnatus, that he used with Sandvik and to advertise the Oahu CryptoParty. The journalist to whom he wrote on December 1, 2012, was Glenn Greenwald, the previously mentioned Rio-based columnist for The Guardian.
Greenwald had not always been an activist journalist. He had been a litigation lawyer at the elite New York firm of Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz. He was also an entrepreneur, owning part of Master Notions, a company that, among other things, had a 50 percent financial interest in the pornographic website HJ (an acronym that originally stood for “Hairy Jock”). All did not go well with this enterprise. In 2004, Greenwald became involved in an acrimonious lawsuit with his other associates in HJ. As a result, he had a number of open legal judgments filed against him, including an $85,000 lien by the IRS.
After resigning from his law firm in 2005, he moved to Rio de Janeiro and began a new career as a blogger for the Internet magazine Salon. He wrote fierce, and often brilliant, polemics against U.S. government surveillance and other perceived intrusions on personal privacy. The extent of his bitter antagonism toward the activities of the “surveillance state,” as he called it, was reflected in the title of his 2006 book, How Would a Patriot Act? Defending American Values from a President Run Amok. His position on surveillance was unrelenting, even when it came to the president. “By ordering illegal eavesdropping, the president had committed crimes and should be held accountable for them,” Greenwald wrote. When Barack Obama became president in 2009, Greenwald also attacked him for breaking the law by “ordering illegal eavesdropping.” Because of his opposition to Obama, he contributed money to the libertarian campaign of Ron Paul, the same candidate to whom Snowden gave money.
In August 2012, he had transferred his provocative blog, which had amassed a following of nearly one million readers (including Snowden), from Salon to The Guardian. The British newspaper shared his powerful anti-surveillance position, having first published the WikiLeaks documents that had been illicitly leaked by Manning and published by Assange in 2010.
Greenwald was an activist as well as a journalist. He joined the board of directors of the Freedom of the Press Foundation (eventually Runa Sandvik would join too). It had been set up expressly to funnel money to both Assange’s WikiLeaks site and the defense fund for Manning after he was arrested. Such a financial intermediary was necessary because American credit card companies were blocking money transfers to these two causes in 2012. This “blockade” was taking its toll on WikiLeaks. According to Assange, “WikiLeaks had been cut off from more than 90 percent of its finances.” The Freedom of the Press Foundation came to its rescue. John Perry Barlow, one of the songwriters for the Grateful Dead, was one of its chief financial backers. “The first serious info war is now engaged,” Barlow declared. “The field of battle is WikiLeaks.” He served with Greenwald and Poitras on its board.
Snowden was an avid reader of Greenwald’s screeds against the government. If he were to assume the role of a modern-day Prometheus, delivering forbidden NSA secrets to the public, Greenwald would be a logical candidate to break the story. Snowden could safely assume that Greenwald would be sympathetic to exposing NSA surveillance from his many blogs, tweets, and YouTube comments on the subject. For example, on November 13, 2012, just eighteen days before Snowden contacted him, Greenwald had written a blog for The Guardian asserting that the United States was “a surveillance state run amok.” In it, echoing very closely what Snowden said at his CryptoParty, Greenwald wrote, “Any remnants of internet anonymity have been all but obliterated between the state and technology companies.” Citing a story in The Washington Post, he continued, “Every day, collection systems at the National Security Agency intercept and store 1.7 billion e-mails, phone calls and other types of communications.”
As a result, Greenwald called for action in that blog posting, writing, “The US operates a sprawling, unaccountable Surveillance State that, in violent breach of the core guarantees of the Fourth Amendment, monitors and records virtually everything even the most law-abiding citizens do.” That same week, Snowden invited Runa Sandvik to co-host his CryptoParty.
One problem for Snowden in reaching out to Greenwald was Greenwald’s lack of any encryption for his e-mails. Communicating with a journalist like Greenwald who famously attacked the very organization for which Snowden worked was itself a risky undertaking, especially if he wanted to pass classified NSA documents to him. If his e-mails were intercepted by the NSA in Brazil (where Greenwald lived) and where the NSA was not restricted by U.S. law, he could lose his job or even be arrested. As Cincinnatus, he told Greenwald that he needed to immediately encrypt his computer. To make his point, he cited Greenwald’s November 12, 2012, blog. In it, Greenwald noted that General David Petraeus, then the CIA director, had been caught in a sex scandal because his personal e-mails had been intercepted. Snowden wrote to Greenwald that Petraeus would not have been exposed if he had used encryption. Snowden sent Greenwald instructions on how to install the necessary encryption software and a link to a twelve-minute video on encryption (which might have been the same video he used at his CryptoParty a few weeks earlier).
Greenwald did not manage to encrypt his computer, however, and Snowden, unwilling to deal with Greenwald through an unencrypted channel, broke off contact with him in January 2013. Even so, he did not give up his plan of using Greenwald in his enterprise. He merely sought an intermediary who used encryption.
He chose Laura Poitras. He knew she and Greenwald were founding board members of the Freedom of the Press Foundation. Greenwald had written about her extensively. For example, he wrote an entire blog about her confrontation with the U.S. government and her plans to make a documentary about the “US Government’s increasing powers of domestic surveillance [through] its expanding covert domestic NSA activities.”
Since 2011, Poitras had been diligently filming the construction of a massive NSA repository for data in Bluffdale, Utah. In the anti-surveillance culture, the structure had become symbolic of the powers of the NSA. In fact, it was the same NSA site that Parker Higgins photographed from a blimp in the fall of 2013 and posted on the Internet after Poitras had released her documentary about the NSA’s use of the Bluffdale repository for domestic spying.
Aside from her connections with Greenwald, Poitras had other impressive credentials. Born in 1964 in Boston, she came from a wealthy family that donated large sums of money to philanthropic causes, including $20 million for research on bipolar disorders. After graduating from the New School for Public Engagement in 1996, she pursued a career as an activist filmmaker. Her focus quickly became exposing NSA surveillance. One of her short documentaries about the NSA’s domestic surveillance program was featured on the New York Times website and attracted enormous attention in 2012. As a dedicated opponent of the surveillance state, she participated in public events with William Binney, the ex-NSA whistle-blower, and Jacob Appelbaum. In April 2012, for example, she made a presentation at the Whitney Museum in New York with Binney and Appelbaum. She had become such a leading activist against the NSA by December 2012 that Appelbaum, after lauding her work, interspersed clips from her short film in his keynote address at the Chaos Computer Club convention of hacktivists in Berlin that month.
Snowden also closely followed her rise in this world. By simply googling Poitras’s name in January 2013, he would have learned about her connections with Greenwald, Appelbaum, Binney, Assange, and other leading figures in the anti-surveillance camp. When asked later by Poitras why he had chosen her to help him, Snowden replied, “I didn’t. You chose yourself.” The problem for Snowden was anonymously drawing her into his enterprise.
Poitras was living in Berlin in January 2013, which made her vulnerable to NSA surveillance. To get to her through an encrypted channel, Snowden chose a circuitous approach. On January 11, he wrote to Micah Lee in Berkeley, California. Given Lee’s residence in the United States, as Snowden knew, the NSA would be legally barred from monitoring his communications without a warrant. He used Lee, who was the chief technology officer at the Freedom of the Press Foundation, as the encrypted gateway to Poitras. Lee was also well-connected to others whom Snowden had contacted for his CryptoParty. Lee had been an associate of Runa Sandvik’s at Tor and was a prominent member of Noisebridge, an eclectic anti-government hackers’ commune based in Northern California, of which Appelbaum was also a member.
To contact Lee, Snowden chose the alias Anon108. Anon is an alias frequently used by members of the Anonymous commune of hacktivists. “I’m a friend,” Snowden wrote to Lee. “I need to get information securely to Laura Poitras and her alone, but I can’t find an email gpg key for her.” The “gpg” encryption key he asked for, more commonly called a PGP key, was the so-called public key for an encryption system called Pretty Good Privacy, or, for short, PGP. This encryption system required both a public and a private key. Snowden asked Lee to provide the former one, because Poitras had the latter one. Lee wrote to Poitras about Anon108. The next day, with the approval of Poitras, Lee supplied Poitras’s public key to Snowden, or, as he knew him, Anon108.
With it, Snowden contacted Poitras directly. He asked her as a first step to open an anonymous e-mail account using Tor software. Poitras later wrote about this initial contact, “I was at that point filming with several people who were all being targeted by the [U.S.] government.” Many of the people she was filming, including Appelbaum, Assange, Binney, and the former NSA employee Thomas Drake, could attract interest by U.S. or foreign intelligence services.
Snowden asked Poitras to take out a new enciphering key to use exclusively for her liaison with him. It provided them both with an extra layer of protection from any surveillance by law enforcement. Presumably, she accommodated his requests because she anticipated that the anonymous person would use this encrypted channel to send her highly sensitive material.
On January 23, Snowden wrote to Poitras under yet another alias. This time he called himself Citizen Four. He wrote, “At this stage I can offer nothing more than my word.” He then said falsely, “I am a senior government employee in the intelligence community.” She had no way of knowing at this “stage” that despite giving her his “word,” he was not who he claimed to be. He was not a “government employee,” he was not a “senior” official, and he was not a member of the “intelligence community” (which is composed of the intelligence services of the U.S. government). He would later also claim to her that he had been “a senior adviser to the CIA” and “a senior adviser to the DIA.” That was untrue, too. In January 2013, he was merely a contract employee of Dell’s working as a computer technician at the NSA base in Hawaii.
Snowden told her in his initial e-mail that he was well acquainted with her career as an anti-surveillance activist. He said that he had read Greenwald’s account in Salon that past April, a blog in which Greenwald detailed the forty times in which Poitras was searched by U.S. authorities. The story also said that Poitras believed she was on a special watch list and under constant U.S. government surveillance. She had come under such scrutiny by U.S. authorities, it turned out, because of her documentary about American military abuses of civilians in Iraq in 2006, titled My Country, My Country. While filming it, she was at a place close to an insurgent ambush of U.S. troops in Iraq. Her presence at the ambush site led army intelligence officers to suspect (without any evidence) that she might have been tipped off by the insurgents. She firmly denied the charge, and the government never substantiated it. Even so, because of this incident, since 2006 she had been kept on a list that caused authorities to search her at airports. As a result, she took elaborate countermeasures to evade any possible surveillance of her communications.
Snowden knew about this incident because Greenwald described it in great detail in a blog that Snowden read (as he later told Greenwald). “Poitras is now forced to take extreme steps—ones that hamper her ability to do her work,” Greenwald wrote. “She now avoids traveling with any electronic devices. She uses alternative methods to deliver the most sensitive parts of her work—raw film and interview notes—to secure locations. She spends substantial time and resources protecting her computers with encryption and password defenses. Especially when she is in the US, she avoids talking on the phone about her work, particularly to sources. And she simply will not edit her films at her home out of fear—obviously well grounded—that government agents will attempt to search and seize the raw footage.” She claimed, as she told journalists, she was the victim of “Kafkaesque government harassment.”
Snowden was duly impressed with her concerns about government surveillance, which he agreed was ubiquitous. Indeed, he later described her as “more paranoid when it comes to electronic security than I can be.” He meant it as a compliment. Such functional paranoia or “operational security,” as Greenwald would call the precautions that she took, dovetailed with Snowden’s growing conviction that universal encryption was necessary to defeat the surveillance state. It also made her the perfect channel for Snowden to safely pass some of the classified documents he stole to Greenwald and other journalists.
It was not difficult to get her to cooperate in his plot. He wrote, for example, “The surveillance you’ve experienced means you have been ‘selected’—a term which will mean more to you as you learn how the modern SIGINT [signals intelligence] system works.” Just as she had been “chosen” by her work to act as his conduit, according to Snowden, she had been chosen by the NSA as a target because of her work. The idea of her being “selected” by an invisible signals intelligence agency, the NSA, could only excite her longtime concerns about being watched by the government.
“Your victimization by the NSA system means that you are well aware of the threat that [the NSA’s] unrestricted, secret abilities pose for democracies,” he continued. “I hope you understand that contacting you is extremely high risk and if you are willing to agree to the following precautions before I share more, this will not be a waste of your time.” Further playing on her concern, he asked her to confirm to him “that no one has ever had a copy of your private key and that it uses a strong pass phrase.” Such precautions were necessary because “your adversary is capable of one trillion guesses per second.” That “adversary” was, as she knew from her previous film, the NSA. At this point, she knew she was entering into a dangerous liaison with an unknown party in pursuit of NSA secrets. She wondered if he might be part of a plan to entrap her or her contacts like Assange and Appelbaum, as she noted in her diary. “Is C4 a trap?” she asked herself, referring to her Citizen Four source. “Will he put me in prison?”
To elude this “adversary,” Snowden stressed to Poitras that she would have to adopt a conspiratorial frame of mind. “If the device you store the private key and enter your pass phrase on has been hacked, it is trivial to decrypt our communications,” he explained. “If you publish the source material, I will likely be immediately implicated.” If her correspondent could be “immediately implicated,” it meant that he was a person authorized to handle these secrets. So Poitras knew, as early as January 2013, that she was creating an encrypted channel for someone with access to NSA secrets who would be incriminated by providing them to her.
The key source for Poitras’s previously referred to short video was Binney. Like her new source, he had been authorized to handle NSA secrets. Binney had been an NSA technical director until he had retired in 2001. The NSA’s domestic surveillance program that Binney told the press about years before being interviewed in Poitras’s film was called Stellarwind. It involved data mining domestic communications and financial transactions that had been authorized by President George W. Bush in 2001 after 9/11 as commander-in-chief under the war powers given to him following the attacks. It indeed led to a major exposé on domestic spying by The New York Times in December 2005.
Binney had never provided Poitras with any NSA documents to back up the charges he made that Stellarwind was an unlawful domestic surveillance operation. He could not have done so without violating his sworn oath and, for that matter, U.S. anti-espionage statutes. Binney made it clear to her and other journalists that he was not a lawbreaker. But her new source, C4, was willing to do what Binney (and other insiders) had refused to do. He was offering in these e-mails to provide her with secret government documents, even though it would implicate him as an outlaw. To further whet her appetite, he told her that these up-to-date NSA documents would fully substantiate the allegations that Binney made in her film. Even more important, he said Binney’s 2001 disclosures were still relevant to her cause. “What you know as Stellarwind has grown,” he wrote to her. “The expanded special source operations that took over Stellarwind’s share of the pie have spread all over the world to practically include comprehensive coverage of the United States.” In fact, as Snowden knew from the Inspector General report he had read, the NSA had terminated Stellarwind almost a decade earlier. President Bush ended it after top officials of the Justice Department insisted that he did not have the legal authority for the domestic part of Stellarwind. Instead, he asked Congress to revise FISA to meet the objections of the Justice Department. The result was the FISA Amendment Act of 2006. Unlike the previous Stellarwind program, it did not permit domestic surveillance. It specified that the government could not target any person in the United States or anywhere else in the world under this authority. Nor could it target any foreign person, even one residing outside of the United States, to acquire information from a particular known person inside the United States. As the act recognized that information about U.S. citizens might mistakenly be intercepted by the NSA, it required that such data about Americans be expunged in a bimonthly review by a Justice Department task force. Although the NSA program in place in 2013 was not the comprehensive domestic surveillance that Snowden claimed it to be, Poitras had no way of knowing at this early state that her source was misleading her.
He offered to substantiate her worst fears about the growth of NSA surveillance: “I know the location of most domestic interception points, and that the largest telecommunication companies in the US are betraying the trust of their customers, which I can prove.” He even proffered evidence implicating President Barack Obama in illegal surveillance. “There is a detailed policy framework, a kind of martial law for cyber operations, created by the White House. It’s called presidential policy 20,” he wrote to her. It was an eighteen-page directive that Obama had signed four months earlier in October 2012. Snowden was offering to reveal to her up-to-date evidence of a surveillance state in America presided over by the president himself. It was what she had been searching for over the past three years. How could she, as an activist filmmaker, resist such a sensational offer?
He further explained to her that he had placed great trust in her discretion. “No one, not even my most trusted confidante, is aware of my intentions, and it would not be fair for them to fall under suspicion for my actions,” he said.
Poitras must have found it flattering that a total stranger was willing to disclose to her in e-mails what he would not tell even his “most trusted confidante” about his intentions to commit an illicit breach of U.S. national security. It also put her under enormous stress. She noted in her journal that the pressure made her feel as if she were “underwater.” “I am battling with my nervous system. It doesn’t let me rest or sleep. Eye twitches, clenched throat, and now literally waiting to be raided.”
Snowden was also taking an extraordinary risk. After all, he had no way of knowing who else she told about him. She had long been concerned, with good reason, that the U.S. government was out to get her. An unknown person offering to supply her with secret documents could be attempting to entrap her. So Snowden could not preclude the possibility that she would consult with others about the offer he was making her. Because her current documentary project included interviews by her with Assange, Appelbaum, and three ex-NSA executives, intelligence services with sophisticated surveillance capabilities might also have taken a professional interest in her communications, as Poitras herself had suspected. Even if Snowden was somehow able to use his position as a system administrator at Dell to ascertain that the NSA did not have Poitras under surveillance, he could not be sure that other agencies, such as the Russian and Chinese intelligence services, were not monitoring his communications with her. It was, however, a chance Snowden was willing to take.
Snowden, in any case, did not intend to conceal his identity for more than a few months. He told Poitras he had a specific purpose in allowing her to name him in her ongoing film project. Indeed, he said it was essential in his plan to prevent others, including presumably his “most trusted confidante,” from being suspected by law enforcement of helping him in his enterprise. He prevailed on her to accommodate his plan, saying, “You may be the only one who can prevent that, and that is by immediately nailing me to the cross rather than trying to protect me as a source.” His choice of the imagery of crucifixion suggested that like Jesus Christ he was willing to sacrifice himself for the sake of others.
In keeping with their operational security arrangement, Snowden said that he would first send her an encrypted file of documents that she would not be able to read. Only after his conditions were met and “everything else is done,” he said, “the key will follow.” He was now pulling the strings. To get that key, she had to follow his instructions.
One of his conditions was that she help him recruit Greenwald and other outlets for his disclosures. “The material provided and the investigative effort required will be too much for any one person,” he wrote to Poitras. He next directed her to contact Greenwald. “I recommend that at the very minimum you involve Greenwald. I believe you know him.” (Snowden apparently did not tell her that he had unsuccessfully attempted to reach out to Greenwald before he had contacted her.)
His continued interest in Greenwald was understandable. Aside from Greenwald’s opposition to what he called the “Surveillance State,” he was a gateway to The Guardian. That publication had become an important player in the business of disclosing government documents by publishing a large part of the U.S. documents supplied to WikiLeaks, as we have seen. By breaking whistle-blowing stories about U.S. intelligence, it had also greatly increased the circulation of its website. As an establishment newspaper, it also gave these WikiLeaks stories credibility with the media. So despite Greenwald’s inability to create an encrypted channel, Snowden still needed him. He had no reason to believe that Greenwald would turn down the opportunity for a whistle-blowing scoop for The Guardian. After all, the classified documents Snowden would provide him would also give credence to both Greenwald’s book and his many blogs denouncing U.S. government surveillance.
Aside from Greenwald and Poitras, Snowden sought an outlet inside the American establishment. So he had Poitras write to Barton Gellman, the Pulitzer Prize–winning reporter for The Washington Post. Poitras had met Gellman in 2010, when they were both fellows at NYU’s Center on Law and Security. Poitras had requested help in encrypting her computer from Karen Greenberg, the executive director of the center, who took her “by the hand” to meet Gellman, Greenberg’s resident expert on encryption software. Born in 1960, Gellman graduated from Princeton in 1981 and became an award-winning investigative reporter for the Miami Herald, the Post, and Time magazine. He was also the author of Angler: The Cheney Vice Presidency. If Gellman could be drawn into the enterprise, he could provide Snowden with a gateway to the prestigious American paper credited with bringing down President Richard Nixon in the Watergate scandal.
Poitras, as the go-between for Snowden, immediately contacted Gellman. After telling him she was involved in a story about NSA surveillance, she suggested that they meet in New York City.
For their rendezvous, Poitras took a number of precautions to evade anyone attempting to follow her. She had Gellman first meet her in one coffee shop in lower Manhattan. When he arrived, she had him follow her on foot to another coffee shop, following her anti-surveillance tradecraft. Once assured no one was watching them, she ordered coffee for herself and Gellman. Over coffee, she told Gellman about Snowden, whom she described as her anonymous source. She said that he was willing to supply Gellman with documents that would expose domestic surveillance, if Gellman agreed to write a story on it for the Post. Even though Gellman had left the staff of the Post in 2010, he had previously written several stories on that subject for the newspaper, and he was also highly regarded by the editors there. Gellman was interested in Poitras’s offer (although he would consult a friend at the Justice Department about the legality of publishing NSA documents).
Snowden had now laid the groundwork for at least two possible outlets. Poitras, however, was having some difficulty in bringing Greenwald in on the plan. Like Snowden, she did not trust writing to him in unencrypted e-mails, and because Greenwald lived in Brazil, she still had not found an opportunity for a face-to-face meeting with him.
That opportunity arose in mid-April 2013. Greenwald had flown to the United States to give the lead speech at an event in Yonkers, New York, sponsored by the Council on American-Islamic Relations, a pro-Muslim civil rights organization. He had delivered the keynote speech at its previous meeting in San Jose, California, where his impassioned depiction of the American “Surveillance State” received a rousing ovation from the attendees. He was invited to speak at this award dinner for its East Coast chapter.
Poitras flew from Berlin to New York to see him. On April 19, 2013, she arranged to meet Greenwald at noon in the restaurant of the Marriott hotel where Greenwald was staying. When Greenwald arrived at the restaurant carrying a cell phone, she explained to him that the NSA could surreptitiously turn his cell phone into a microphone and use it to eavesdrop on their conversation. She told him to go back to his room and leave his phone there. When he returned, phoneless, she took further precautions by having them change tables several times. Greenwald accepted these tactics because, as he later said, she was in charge of their “operational security.”
When they finally settled at a table in the nearly empty restaurant, she showed Greenwald e-mails she had received from Citizen Four. Greenwald, as he recounted, made “no connection” to the “long-forgotten emails” he had received from Snowden under the alias Cincinnatus. Reading the e-mails that Snowden had sent to Poitras, he was impressed with the “sincerity” of the anonymous correspondent.
When Poitras showed Greenwald Citizen Four’s mission statement in which he said his motive was to end the U.S. “surveillance state,” Greenwald was further impressed with the source. The surveillance state Snowden described closely dovetailed with the surveillance state that Greenwald had described himself in his speech at the Council on American-Islamic Relations dinner in 2012. Of course, the similarity of the phrasing might not have been entirely coincidental. Greenwald’s 2012 speech had been put on YouTube and widely circulated on the Internet just a few days before Snowden first wrote to him on December 1, 2012. Snowden identified himself as a privacy advocate, which was also how Greenwald often identified himself in his speeches. He also echoed other concerns Greenwald had publicly expressed, including defending American privacy from government intrusions.
Snowden promised the leaks he would supply would provide dramatic results. He asserted in one of his e-mails to Poitras that the “shock” of the documents he would give Greenwald would result in the public’s learning about the secret “mechanisms through which our privacy is violated.” According to Snowden’s assessment, following that initial uproar, they could achieve another objective in their common cause. “We can guarantee for all people equal protection against unreasonable search,” he wrote. In light of this convergence of views, it is not surprising that Greenwald was fully convinced of Citizen Four’s bona fides. He said to Poitras, “He’s real,” and he agreed to help break the story in The Guardian.
Poitras now revealed to Greenwald that Citizen Four would deliver an entire trove of secret documents to them in six to eight weeks. According to this timetable, the Greenwald scoop and the “shock” Citizen Four promised would come in early to mid-June 2013.
At this point in April, Snowden was in full control. Although his job at Dell involved endlessly monitoring largely meaningless encrypted messages in the NSA tunnel, he had been able to get three major journalists to react favorably to his proposal. None of them knew his name, position, age, location, or where precisely he worked. Nor did they know the means by which he planned to obtain the secrets that he dangled before them. They also did not know where, or even if, they would meet their source. Their total knowledge about him was the description he improperly gave of himself: a “senior government employee in the intelligence community” (Greenwald speculated that he was a disgruntled CIA station chief).
Even though they were operating largely in the dark, these three journalists acted as almost any other ambitious reporter would if he or she were offered a major scoop about illegal acts of the government. In addition, the information was in line with what they had previously investigated or written about. None of these journalists had any reason to doubt at this point that their anonymous source was anything but the sincere whistle-blower he claimed to be. They could not have known from his anonymous e-mails that aside from the whistle-blowing documents he promised them, he was in the process of stealing a large number of other documents that concerned the NSA’s sources and methods in foreign countries. These documents, to which Snowden never referred in his correspondence with them, had little if anything at all to do with domestic spying on American citizens.