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time when he was stealing NSA secrets in February 2013, went to great lengths to impress on Poitras the need for operational security about his contacts with her, but that injunction did not prevent her from telling at least five people about her source, including Micah Lee, the Berkeley-based technology operative for the Freedom of the Press Foundation; Jacob Appelbaum, the TOR proselytizer; Ben Wizner, the ACLU lawyer; Barton Gellman; and Glenn Greenwald. “It is not me that can’t keep a secret, “Abraham Lincoln joked. “It’s the people I tell it that can’t.” In the same vein, Poitras could hardly rely on these five confidants not to tell her (and Snowden’s) to others. Hours after he was told, Greenwald told his lover David Miranda about the source in great detail. He even asked him to evaluate the source’s bona fides for him. Gellman, for his part, raised the matter with a former high official at the Justice Department.

Moreover, as the intelligence world knew, Poitras was herself a veritable lightning rod for attracting ex-NSA employees who objected to some of its surveillance programs. In 2012, her filming of NSA insiders, including Binney and Drake, would make her communications of interest to any intelligence services that wanted to keep tabs on possible NSA dissidents.

Nor was Snowden himself overly discreet. It will be recalled that he had also advertised his TOR-sponsored crypto party activities over the Internet, and supplied Runa Sandvik, who worked with Appelbaum, his true name and address in Hawaii. Sandvik had no reason not to share the identity of her co-presenter with others in the TOR movement. Snowden also had his girl friend make a video of his presentation, as will be recalled. He also bragged about operating the largest TOR outlets in Hawaii. Even if his TOR software provided him a measure of anonymity, it was not beyond the ability of the world-class cyber services to crack it.

Under Putin, Russia had built one of the leading cyber espionage services in the world. According to a 2009 NSA analysis of Russian capabilities, which was obtained by the New York Times in 2013, Russia’s highly-sophisticated tools for cyber-espionage were superior to those of China or any other adversary nation. For example, investigators from FireEye, a well-regarded Silicon Valley security firm, found that in 2007, Russian hackers had developed a highly-sophisticated virus that could bypass the security measures of the servers of both the US government and its private contractors. According to one computer security expert, the virus had made protected Internet websites “sitting ducks” for these Russian sophisticated hackers. The cryptographer Bruce Schneier, a leading specialist in computer security, explained, “It is next to impossible to maintain privacy and anonymity against a well-funded government adversary.”

Nor has the Russian cyber service has made a secret out of the fact that it targets TOR software. It even offered a cash prize to anyone in the hacking community who could break TOR. Prior to 2013, according to cyber security experts, it spent over a decade building cyber tools aimed at unraveling the TOR networks used by hacktavists, criminal enterprises, political dissidents and rival intelligence operatives. To this end, it reportedly attempted to map out computers that served as major TOR exit nodes (such as the one Snowden operated in 2012 near a NSA regional base in Hawaii.) It also reportedly attached the equivalent of “electronic ink” to

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