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At this venue, Snowden apparently believed he was relatively safe. “That whole period was very carefully planned and orchestrated,” Snowden later told the Guardian in Moscow. Here, for the first time, Snowden communicated directly with first Gellman and then Greenwald.

He emailed Gellman under the alias “Verax

.” Already, via Poitras, he had provided this Washington Post journalist with power point slides from a NSA presentation about a joint FBI-NSA-CIA operation codenamed PRISM. He believed it qualified as whistle-blowing because it revealed that the NSA, in intercepting emails, tweets, postings and other Web interactions about foreign terrorists, incidentally also picked up data about Americans. According to the rules imposed on the NSA by a 2007 presidential directive, whatever information accidently picked up about Americans was supposed to be filtered out, and hundreds of compliance officers rechecked the data ever 90 says to assure that directive was being carried. Even so, it was likely some data was not expunged in this process. So PRISM could cause embarrassment for the NSA.

Snowden proposed that Gellman join him in Hong Kong. In attempting to persuade him of the urgency of the trip, he wrote him that he had reason to believe that “omniscient State powers” imperiled “our freedom and way of life.” He noted, with a touch of modesty, “Perhaps I am naïve.” He added dramatically “I have risked my life and family.” Even so, Gellman declined coming to Hong Kong. (According to Greenwald, Gellman could not make the trip because lawyers for the Washington Post were uneasy with having a reporter receive classified documents in a part of China.)

Next, on May 24, 2013, Snowden attempted to apply more pressure on Gellman by telling him that the story about the PRISM program had to be published by the Post within 72 hours. Gellman could not accede to such a condition because the decision of when to publish a story was made not by him but by the editors of the newspaper. He told Snowden that the earliest the story could be published was June 6, 2013, which was well past Snowden’s deadline.

Snowden next turned to Greenwald. Both Poitras and Micah Lee had made great efforts to tutor Greenwald on encryption protocols, with Lee, who was in Berkeley, California, sending Greenwald by Fedex a DVD that would allow him to receive both encrypted messages and phone calls. Even then, Greenwald was unable to fully install it. As a result, Greenwald still had not met Snowden’s requisites on encrypting his computer.

In addition, possibly because of a lost message, Snowden believed that Greenwald was reluctant to fly to the place that he designated for a meeting. With Gellman uncertain, Greenwald was now essential to his plan. If he was to have any newspaper outlet, he needed to persuade Greenwald to come to Hong Kong. At this point, he took matters in his own hands. On May 25, 2013, Snowden somewhat aggressively emailed Greenwald “You recently had to decline

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