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resided in America. This U.S. residence meant, as Snowden knew, the NSA would be legally barred from monitoring his communications. He used Lee, who was the chief technology officer at the Freedom of the Press Foundation, as the encrypted gateway to Poitras who, it will be recalled was a founding Board member of that small foundation. Lee also was well-connected to others with whom Snowden had contacted for his crypto party. 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 was an alias frequently used by members of the Anonymous commune of hacktavists. “I’m a friend.” Snowden wrote 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 private key. Snowden asked Lee to provide the former one, since Poitras had the latter one. Lee wrote Poitras about “anon108.” The next day, with the approval of Poitras, Lee supplied Poitras’ public key to Snowden, or, as he knew him, Anon108.

With it, Snowden now contacted Poitras directly. He asked her as a first step to open an anonymous email account using TOR software. He was now in contact with three members of the Freedom of the Press Foundation—Greenwald, Lee, and Poitras. (Sandvik would join the foundation in 2013.)

Poitras later wrote about this initial contact: “I was at that point filming with several people who were all being targeted by the [US] government.” The people she was filming included Appelbaum, Assange, and two former NSA employees, William Binney and Thomas Drake. It was in the midst of this project when she received the email from Anon108 aka Edward Snowden.

He next asked Poitras her 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, 2013 Snowden wrote 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 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.” In fact, he had never held such position at either

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