HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_020247.jpg

95

Poitras and Gellman were not the only journalists involved in the news event. Poitras also
asked the hacktivist Jacob Appelbaum to help her interview Snowden about the NSA’s
operations. She later said that she needed someone with technical expertise in government
surveillance to test the bona fides of Citizen 4. She believed that Appelbaum, who had
participated in her anti-NSA presentations in 2012, qualified for the position.

As it turns out, Appelbaum was already known to Snowden. Appelbaum had communicated
with Snowden under his Oahu Crypto party alias about an obscure piece of software just a few
after Snowden had met with Runa Sandvik in Hawaii in 2012. Appelbaum, after all, was
Sandvik’s long-time ally in developing the use of TOR software. However he learned about him,
Snowden allowed Appelbaum to put to him detailed questions to concerning the secret operations
of the NSA before he met with Poitras and Greenwald in Hong Kong. Indeed, Poitras joined him
in asking Snowden via encrypted emails, such questions as: “What are some of the big
surveillance programs that are active today and how do international partners aid the NSA?”
“Does the NSA partner with other nations, like Israel?” and “Do private companies help the
NSA?” Snowden answered them all to the satisfaction of Appelbaum and Poitras. (The interview
was published on June16, 2013 with Snowden’s approval on the website of Der Spiegel, the
German weekly, which had also published the Wikileaks documents.)

Even though the days were ticking away while Snowden was waiting for him in Hong Kong,
Greenwald still had to overcome a final hurdle at the Guardian. He needed to get a green light to
go to Hong Kong from Janine Gibson, the editor of the Guardian website, who was based in New
York. Under Gibson’s leadership, the Guardian’s website effectively “gone into the business of
publishing government secrets,” as Guardian columnist Michael Wolff pointed out. Most of
these secrets had been supplied by Manning via Wikileaks. Few, if any of these previous
documents the Guardian published were highly-classified and none were SCI top secret
documents. The NSA documents Greenwald had received from Citizen 4 were another matter.
They contained the sort of SCI communications intelligence data that no major newspaper had
ever published before. Their disclosure could even result in journalists being imprisoned since
both U.S. and British law criminalized the disclosure by anyone of communications intelligence.
As a lawyer, Greenwald recognized this danger. On the other hand, the NSA documents were far
more explosive than the Wikileaks material, and promised an even greater spike in circulation. So
Greenwald assumed that Gibson would be willing to authorize the publication of the
documents—and provide the expenses for his trip to Hong Kong to meet the source.

He flew from Rio to New York on May 30, 2013 to meet in person with Gibson, who had
concerns about publishing what purported to be top secret documents that came from an
anonymous source. For one thing, she was also not willing to go along with Citizen 4’s demand
that the Guardian publish his personal manifesto alongside the documents. Aside from its shrill
and alarming tone, it sounded, as she told Greenwald, “a bit Ted Kaczynski-ish.” She was
referring to Ted Kaczinski, the deranged mathematician who had maimed or killed 23 people with
anonymous mail bombs between 1978 and 1995. Like Citizen 4/Snowden, Kaczynski had

HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_020247