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296 | HOW AMERICA LOST ITS SECRETS

These precise tips for evading U.S. and British surveillance were
not accidentally leaked. Snowden supplied them in written answers
to interrogatives sent to him by Poitras and Appelbaum in May
2013 while he was still on the NSA payroll. He also carefully orches-
trated the exposure of the PRISM surveillance programs, precisely
specifying, as Greenwald writes in his book No Place to Hide, who
was to release the "scoops" in which newspapers. He gave Gellman a
seventy-two-hour ultimatum for exposing PRISM, as we know. He
further provided Poitras with well-organized files for publications
revealing, among other things, that the NSA had paid RSA, a lead-
ing computer security provider, to build flawed encryption protocols,
which allowed the NSA to read encrypted messages on computers
and online video games. In short, he used these journalists to accom-
plish his purpose. In light of the way he micromanaged the leaks, it is
difficult to conclude that he did not deliberately plan to compromise
and render useless these U.S. and British operations.

Whatever he intended, he clearly succeeded in blowing the cover
off NSA's operations authorized under the Foreign Intelligence Sur-
veillance Act for monitoring terrorists' activities. After all, terrorist
groups are no different from other criminal enterprises in their need
to keep their communications secret from the authorities pursuing
them. If they find out that the police are tapping their phone lines or
intercepting other channels of communication, they can be expected
to either stop using them or use them to divert attention away from
their real plans.

In addition, Snowden suggested an alternative means to those who
wanted to evade government surveillance. He recommended that
they use end-to-end encryption, which results in messages being
encrypted before they are sent over the Internet. He told Greenwald,
for example, that encryption was "critically necessary" for anyone
to evade NSA surveillance. Just as Robert Hanssen had deliberately
compromised the NSA's interception of Soviet communications in
Washington, D.C., in the 1990s, Snowden deliberately compromised
the NSA's interception of concealed messages by potential terrorists
on the Internet. We cannot know whether or not any of the jihadists
involved in subsequent terrorist attacks (such as those in Paris or
San Bernardino, California, in 2015) would have used the Internet

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