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Even though Snowden had greatly exaggerated the positions he held with the CIA and DIA,
no effort was made to check them by the team of journalists. Instead, MacAskill wrote Janine
Gibson in New York “The Guinness is good.” It was a pre-arranged code by which MacAskill
certified Snowden’s credibility for the Guardian. Gibson told Greenwald to proceed with the
story.

Greenwald wrote his first story about NSA transgression based almost entirely on the FISA
warrant that Snowden had copied from the administrative file. Before the story could be
published, however, the Guardian policy required relevant American government officials be
allowed to respond. Gibson made the requisite, if pro forma, call to the White House National
Security spokesman, Caitlin Hayden, who arranged a conference call with FBI Deputy Director
Sean Joyce, NSA Deputy Director Chris Inglis and Robert Litt, the legal officer for the Office of
National Intelligence. After duly taking into account the response of these three officials, which
included the admonition by Litt “no serious news organization would publish this,” Gibson gave
the green light to publish the story. It was, after all, an incredible scoop.

The story finally broke finally on June 5, 2013. “NSA Collecting Phone Records of Millions of
Verizon Customers,” proclaimed the Guardian headline. Under Greenwald’s byline, it said:
“Exclusive: Top Secret Court Order Requesting Verizon To Hand Over Call Data Shows The
Scale of Domestic Surveillance Under Obama.” Along with it was the FISA warrant to Verizon.
The PRISM story broke hours later in the Washington Post. Written by Gellman and Poitras, it
claimed that the NSA and FBI were tapping directly into the central servers of nine leading U.S,
Internet companies which were knowingly participating on the operation. The latter allegation
turned out to be not entirely true, since all the Internet companies cited in the story denied that
they had knowingly participated. But the damage had been done. The back-to-back publication
of these two stories by the Guardian and Washington Post provided the explosive “shock,” at
least in the global media, that Snowden had predicted.

Snowden’s identity had not been revealed in either the Guardian or Washington Post stories
on June 5th. Snowden, however, insisted on outing himself. He explained to Greenwald that he
needed to “define himself” before the US Government “demonized” him as a spy. That self-
definition would be accomplished by the 12 minute video, entitled “Whistleblower.” For it, Poitras
extracted from the 20 hours she had shot much of the material for the video. In the filmed
interview, Snowden voiced many of the same statements he had made in his manifesto. So he no
longer needed to post the manifesto on the Internet. Instead, he used the video to broadcast his
views. When he insisted on the immediate airing of the video, Greenwald told him that by going
public in this way he was saying “fuck you” to the American government. Snowden replied, “I
want to identify myself as the person behind these disclosures.”

On June 9th, the video was posted on the Guardian website with the Freedom of the Press
Foundation getting an on-screen credit. “My name is Ed Snowden,” the extraordinary disclosure
began. He then described how the NSA was watching U.S. citizens. Even though the NSA

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