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resulted in an international incident but did not change the fact that Snowden was still in the custody of Russian authorities.

Snowden came to realize that those assisting him, including Assange and Harrison, were taking serious risks. “Anyone in a three-mile radius [of me] is going to get hammered,” he later said in 2015 to a reporter from Vogue. (After finally leaving Snowden in Moscow on November 3, 2013, Harrison moved to Berlin, where she set up an organization to provide, as she termed it, “an underground railroad” for other fugitives who had made available documents exposing government secrets.)

Snowden was sequestered in the transit zone of the Moscow airport for thirty-seven days. A Russian intermediary provided him with a Russian classic to read while awaiting asylum. It was Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment, whose protagonist, Rodion Romanovich Raskolnikov, is a dissenter who believes breaking the law is morally justified by the unfair abuses of the political system.

Snowden received official sanctuary in Russia on August 1, 2013. His public statements in Hong Kong that he was willing to go to prison so that others could live freely in a democratic society were, as it turned out, mere rhetoric. Instead of risking prison, he had successfully escaped to a country in which he would be treated as a hero for defying the U.S. government. He had not sacrificed himself; he had transformed himself. He had risen from being a lowly technician in Hawaii whose talents went largely unrecognized to the status of an international media star in Moscow. In his new role, he could make Internet appearances via Skype to prestigious gatherings, such as the TED conference, where he would be roundly applauded as an Internet hero, as well as be paid a $20,000 fee for just his electronic participation. He would be beamed into dozens of ACLU meetings where he was celebrated as a defender of American liberty. He would describe to sympathetic audiences in Germany, Norway, and France the unfairness of the American legal system, asserting that it was denying him a “fair trial.” He would now make front-page news by granting interviews to The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Nation, and other publications. He would join Poitras and Greenwald on the board of directors of the Freedom of the Press Foundation. He would be the subject of an Oscar-winning documen-

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9/29/16 5:51 PM | HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_019597