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Snowden had now laid the groundwork for at least two possible outlets. Poitras, however, was having some difficulty in bringing Greenwald in on the plan. Like Snowden, she did not trust writing to him in unencrypted e-mails, and because Greenwald lived in Brazil, she still had not found an opportunity for a face-to-face meeting with him.

That opportunity arose in mid-April 2013. Greenwald had flown to the United States to give the lead speech at an event in Yonkers, New York, sponsored by the Council on American-Islamic Relations, a pro-Muslim civil rights organization. He had delivered the keynote speech at its previous meeting in San Jose, California, where his impassioned depiction of the American "Surveillance State" received a rousing ovation from the attendees. He was invited to speak at this award dinner for its East Coast chapter.

Poitras flew from Berlin to New York to see him. On April 19, 2013, she arranged to meet Greenwald at noon in the restaurant of the Marriott hotel where Greenwald was staying. When Greenwald arrived at the restaurant carrying a cell phone, she explained to him that the NSA could surreptitiously turn his cell phone into a microphone and use it to eavesdrop on their conversation. She told him to go back to his room and leave his phone there. When he returned, phoneless, she took further precautions by having them change tables several times. Greenwald accepted these tactics because, as he later said, she was in charge of their "operational security."

When they finally settled at a table in the nearly empty restaurant, she showed Greenwald e-mails she had received from Citizen Four. Greenwald, as he recounted, made "no connection" to the "long-forgotten emails" he had received from Snowden under the alias Cincinnatus. Reading the e-mails that Snowden had sent to Poitras, he was impressed with the "sincerity" of the anonymous correspondent.

When Poitras showed Greenwald Citizen Four's mission statement in which he said his motive was to end the U.S. "surveillance state," Greenwald was further impressed with the source. The surveillance state Snowden described closely dovetailed with the surveillance state that Greenwald had described himself in his speech at the Council on American-Islamic Relations dinner in 2012. Of

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