Permanent Record(88)

That isn’t to say that I just sat around during that week and a half writing wheedling messages. I also tried to organize the last briefing I’d ever give—going through the archive, figuring out how best to explain its contents to the journalists in the surely limited time we’d have together. It was an interesting problem: how to most cogently express to nontechnical people who were almost certainly inclined to be skeptical of me the fact that the US government was surveilling the world and the methods by which it was doing so. I put together dictionaries of terms of art like “metadata” and “communications bearer.” I put together glossaries of acronyms and abbreviations: CCE, CSS, DNI, NOFORN. I made the decision to explain not through technologies, or systems, but through surveillance programs—in essence, through stories—in an attempt to speak their language. But I couldn’t decide which stories to give them first, and I kept shuffling them around, trying to put the worst crimes in the best order.

I had to find a way to help at least Laura and Glenn understand something in the span of a few days that it had taken me years to puzzle out. Then there was another thing: I had to help them understand who I was and why I’d decided to do this.



* * *



AT LONG LAST, Glenn and Laura showed up in Hong Kong on June 2. When they came to meet me at the Mira, I think I disappointed them, at least initially. They even told me as much, or Glenn did: He’d been expecting someone older, some chain-smoking, tipsy depressive with terminal cancer and a guilty conscience. He didn’t understand how a person as young as I was—he kept asking me my age—not only had access to such sensitive documents, but was also so willing to throw his life away. For my part, I didn’t know how they could have expected some graybeard, given my instructions to them about how to meet: Go to a certain quiet alcove by the hotel restaurant, furnished with an alligator-skin-looking pleather couch, and wait around for a guy holding a Rubik’s Cube. The funny thing was that I’d originally been wary of using that bit of tradecraft, but the cube was the only thing I’d brought with me that was likely to be unique and identifiable from a distance. It also helped me hide the stress of waiting for what I feared might be the surprise of handcuffs.

That stress would reach its visible peak just ten or so minutes later, when I’d brought Laura and Glenn up to my room—#1014, on the tenth floor. Glenn had barely had the chance to stow his smartphone in my minibar fridge at my request when Laura started rearranging and adjusting the lights in the room. Then she unpacked her digital video camera. Though we’d agreed, over encrypted email, that she could film our encounter, I wasn’t ready for the reality.

Nothing could have prepared me for the moment when she pointed her camera at me, sprawled out on my unmade bed in a cramped, messy room that I hadn’t left for the past ten days. I think everybody has had this kind of experience: the more conscious you are of being recorded, the more self-conscious you become. Merely the awareness that there is, or might be, somebody pressing Record on their smartphone and pointing it at you can cause awkwardness, even if that somebody is a friend. Though today nearly all of my interactions take place via camera, I’m still not sure which experience I find more alienating: seeing myself on film or being filmed. I try to avoid the former, but avoiding the latter is now difficult for everyone.

In a situation that was already high-intensity, I stiffened. The red light of Laura’s camera, like a sniper’s sight, kept reminding me that at any moment the door might be smashed in and I’d be dragged off forever. And whenever I wasn’t having that thought, I kept thinking about how this footage was going to look when it was played back in court. I realized there were so many things I should have done, like putting on nicer clothes and shaving. Room-service plates and trash had accumulated throughout the room. There were noodle containers and half-eaten burgers, piles of dirty laundry and damp towels on the floor.

It was a surreal dynamic. Not only had I never met any filmmakers before being filmed by one, I had never met any journalists before serving as their source. The first time I ever spoke aloud to anyone about the US government’s system of mass surveillance, I was speaking to everyone in the world with an Internet connection. In the end, though, regardless of how rumpled I looked and stilted I sounded, Laura’s filming was indispensable, because it showed the world exactly what happened in that hotel room in a way that newsprint never could. The footage she shot over the course of our days together in Hong Kong can’t be distorted. Its existence is a tribute not just to her professionalism as a documentarian but to her foresight.

I spent the week between June 3 and June 9 cloistered in that room with Glenn and his colleague from the Guardian, Ewen MacAskill, who joined us a bit later that first day. We talked and talked, going through the NSA’s programs, while Laura hovered and filmed. In contrast to the frenetic days, the nights were empty and desolate. Glenn and Ewen would retreat to their own hotel, the nearby W, to write up their findings into articles. Laura would disappear to edit her footage and do her own reporting with Bart Gellman of the Washington Post, who never made it to Hong Kong but worked remotely with the documents he received from her.

I’d sleep, or try to—or else I’d put on the TV, find an English-language channel like the BBC or CNN, and watch the international reaction. On June 5, the Guardian broke Glenn’s first story, the FISA court order that authorized the NSA to collect information from the American telecom Verizon about every phone call it handled. On June 6, it ran Glenn’s PRISM story, pretty much simultaneously with a similar account in the Washington Post by Laura and Bart. I knew, and I think we all knew, that the more pieces came out the more likely it was that I’d be identified, particularly because my office had begun emailing me asking for status updates and I wasn’t answering. But though Glenn and Ewen and Laura were unfailingly sympathetic to my ticking time-bomb situation, they never let their desire to serve the truth be tempered by that knowledge. And following their example, neither did I.