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94 | HOW AMERICA LOST ITS SECRETS

the response of these three officials, which included the admonition by Litt that “no serious news organization would publish this,” Gibson gave the green light to publish the story.
The story broke on June 6. “NSA Collecting Phone Records of Millions of Verizon Customers Daily,” proclaimed the Guardian headline. Under Greenwald’s byline, it said, “Exclusive: Top secret court order requiring Verizon to hand over all call data shows scale of domestic surveillance under Obama.” Along with it was the FISA order. The PRISM story broke hours later in The Washington Post. Written by Gellman and Poitras, it claimed that the NSA and the FBI were tapping directly into the central servers of nine leading U.S. Internet companies, which were knowingly participating in the operation. The latter allegation turned out to be not entirely true, because some of the Internet companies cited in the story denied that they had knowingly participated. The back-to-back publication of these two stories by The Guardian and the Post, however, provided the explosive “shock,” at least in the global media, that Snowden had predicted.
Snowden’s identity had not been revealed in either the Guardian or the Post story on June 6. Snowden, however, insisted on outing himself. He explained to Greenwald that he needed to “define himself” before the U.S. government “demonized” him as a spy. That self-definition would be accomplished by a twelve-minute video titled “Whistleblower.” Poitras extracted much of the material for the video from the twenty or so hours she had shot. In the filmed interview, Snowden voiced many of the same statements he had made in his manifesto, so he no longer needed to post that on the Internet. When he insisted on the immediate airing of the video, Greenwald told him that by going public in this way, he was saying “fuck you” to the American government. Snowden replied, “I want to identify myself as the person behind these disclosures.”
On June 9, the video was posted on the Guardian website with the Freedom of the Press Foundation getting an on-screen credit. “My name is Ed Snowden,” the extraordinary disclosure began. He then described how the NSA was watching U.S. citizens. Even though the NSA press spokesperson subsequently disputed some of his more dramatic claims, such as his assertion that he had the authority at

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