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MacAskill had stayed at the W Hotel when Poitras and Greenwald Poitras went to the Mira Hotel. Poitras did not want to bring along an uninvited guest to the first meeting with Citizen Four. As instructed, at 10 AM on June 3rd, she and Greenwald went to the Mira restaurant. They gave the recognition signal, twice. After a few minutes, a young man walked over to them, holding a Rubik cube. Greenwald noted: “The first thing I saw was the unsolved Rubik’s cube twirling in the man’s left hand.” The man said “Hello” and introduced himself as "Ed Snowden." Greenwald was particularly surprised by Snowden’s boyish looks. “The initial impression was one of extreme confusion,” Greenwald wrote in his book. “I was expecting to meet somebody in his sixties or seventies, someone very senior in the agency, because I knew almost nothing about him prior to our arrival in Hong Kong.” His initial confusion was understandable. Snowden, it will be recalled, had falsely identified himself to them in an email as a senior member of the intelligence community.

Snowden led Greenwald and Poitras through various corridors of the hotel to his room, 1014. It was in a single room mainly occupied by a king-sized bed. Its other furniture included a sleek writing desk in the corner, a modernistic chair and a tall lamp. The bathroom was behind a glass partition, which could be closed off by a black louver blind. There was also a small refrigerator in the minibar in which Snowden asked them to stow their cell phones,

Snowden had already told Poitras that he wanted her to make a documentary of the meeting. She therefore wasted no time in mounting her camera on a tripod. “Minutes after meeting, I set up the camera.” Snowden had told her, as she later recalled, “when you are involved in an action which is likely to get you indicted, you typically don’t have a camera rolling in the room.” Nevertheless, he allowed her to film his actions for the next eight days. One possible reason is that he had no intention of standing trial. In any case, as Poitras found out, Snowden was anything but camera shy. Over the next week, she would shoot over 20 hours of Snowden’s activities in that small room. It was essentially a one man show, a presentation of him, by himself, for the appreciation of a global public. Poitras knew virtually nothing about her subject until ten minutes before she began filming him. She had not even googled him, since she was concerned that her Internet search might alert the NSA and law enforcement authorities

In an extraordinary waiver of his own privacy, he allowed her to film him washing in the bathroom, preening his hair in the mirror, napping on his bed, getting dressed, and packing his bag. He even permitted her to film a private computer exchange between him and Mills (who was in Honolulu.) Mills now informed Snowden that two government investigators had come to their home in Hawaii. Mills reported that they were asking her about Snowden’s whereabouts. Evidently when he had failed to show up for work on June 1st, it set off alarm bells at Booz Allen and the NSA. Snowden expressed anger to the journalists in the room at the NSA intrusion on the privacy of his girlfriend (although he had left her in the lurch by telling her in the note he was away on a brief business trip.)

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