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Greenwald was an activist as well as a journalist. Like Poitras, he joined the board of directors of the Freedom of the Press Foundation. The foundation, which eventually Runa Sandvik and Micah Lee would join, had been set up expressly to funnel money to both Assange’s Wikileaks site and the defense fund for Bradley Manning after he was arrested. Such a money laundry was necessary because, as will be recalled, American credit card companies were blocking money transfers to these two causes. This “blockade” was taking its toll on Wikileaks. According to Assange, “WikiLeaks had been cut off from more than 90 percent of its finances.” So the Freedom of the Press Foundation came to its rescue. John Perry Barlow, one of the song writers for the Grateful Dead band, 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 in December 2012.

Snowden was an avid reader of Greenwald’s screeds against the government. If he was to assume the role of a modern-day Prometheus, delivering forbidden secrets of the NSA 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 18 days before Snowden contacted him, Greenwald had written a blog in Guardian asserting that the United States was “a surveillance state run amok.” In it, echoing very closely what Snowden said at his Crypto party, Greenwald wrote that “any remnants of internet anonymity have been all but obliterated by the union 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 his blog on November 13, 2012, 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 crypto party.

One problem for Snowden was 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 he worked was itself a risky undertaking, especially if he wanted to pass classified NSA documents to him. If his emails were intercepted by the NSA in Brazil (where Greenwald lived) and where the NSA was not restricted by US law, he could lose his job or even be arrested. Under his alias Cincinnatus, he told Greenwald that he needed to immediately encrypt his computer. To make his point, he cited Greenwald’s own November 12, 2012 blog. In it, Greenwald noted that General David Petraeus, then the CIA director, had been caught in a minor sex scandal because his personal emails had been intercepted, Snowden wrote Greenwald that Petraeus would not have been exposed if he had used encryption. Snowden also sent Greenwald instruction on how to install the necessary encryption software and a link to a 12-

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