The disclosures did bring some tangible results. Ten years on, what has changed? How should we now balance the benefits of greater awareness of surveillance against the damage that intelligence agencies claim was done to their capabilities? And what of the protagonists in the original story, caught up in the political turmoil of the past decade? T he Snowden revelations about the collection of citizens’ private communications provoked public outrage in the U.S. Secret legal authorities empowered the NSA to sweep in the telephone, Internet and location records of whole populations.” Writing in the Post near the end of 2013, Gellman summarized the significance of the Snowden story thus: “Taken together, the revelations have brought to light a system that cast off many of its historical restraints after the attacks of Sept. For various reasons, including the concerns of Post lawyers, Gellman decided against going to Hong Kong, opting to work on the stories from the United States. grant asylum to a man who exposed Russia’s spying?Īlso reporting the story was the investigative journalist Barton Gellman, then of The Washington Post (and now a staff writer at The Atlantic). I hope one day an answer to this conundrum might emerge in a release of declassified archives or a disclosure by a retired intelligence officer. agencies were unaware of how many documents Snowden was sharing with us. Greenwald and I stayed in a hotel a taxi ride away, and each morning, as we traveled to see Snowden, I expected to find him gone, spirited away. intelligence agencies seemingly never tried to stop him or us. What remains a puzzle to me is why the U.S. In sheer quantity, this was the biggest leak in intelligence history. Snowden had given even more material to Poitras and Greenwald. These were to form the basis for subsequent reporting by The Guardian, The New York Times, and ProPublica, which became partners in investigating and publishing the story. I expected it to contain one or two examples instead, it stored tens of thousands of documents, covering both the NSA and GCHQ. The next morning, he gave me a memory stick. We spent almost a week interviewing him during the day in his cluttered room, in the Mira Hotel in Kowloon, and then writing stories late into the night.Īt the end of one of the interviews, I asked Snowden for evidence showing the involvement of the NSA’s British surveillance partner, the Government Communications Headquarters. He had decided to become a whistleblower. Then age 29, Snowden had become disillusioned by what he had seen inside the NSA of the scale of intrusion into privacy in the post-9/11 U.S.-some of it illegal-and around the world. The source turned out to be no hoaxer but a contractor with the National Security Agency: Edward Snowden. He or she had sent a “welcome pack,” a sample of classified documents that appeared genuine-but I was still uncertain, wondering whether the potential story might be an elaborate fraud or the work of a disgruntled crank. I did not know the identity of the person we were to meet. documentary filmmaker Laura Poitras the blogger Glenn Greenwald, then a columnist at The Guardian and myself, a Guardian reporter based in New York. The hastily assembled group of journalists comprised the U.S. T en years ago, an unorthodox reporting team flew from New York to Hong Kong to meet someone claiming to be a spy who was ready to hand over a trove of top-secret documents.
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