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140 | HOW AMERICA LOST ITS SECRETS

tras identical copies of the NSA documents in Hong Kong. When
Greenwald returned home to Rio de Janeiro, he found his copy was
corrupted. But Poitras still had her digital copy of whatever stolen
documents Snowden had distributed to them. So Greenwald dis-
patched Miranda from Rio to Berlin to get a copy of Poitras’s thumb
drive. On the return trip, Miranda’s plane stopped at Heathrow,
where British authorities detained him and temporarily took the
thumb drive from him. Poitras had written out the password for
Greenwald, and Miranda kept it with the thumb drive. The Brit-
ish copied the contents and shared them with the NSA. As a result,
the NSA discovered that Snowden had only given Poitras fifty-eight
thousand documents. The damage assessment team under Ledgett
determined that some of these documents had been edited out of
much larger documents that the NSA logs showed Snowden had
copied. By the count of both the NSA and the Defense Department
teams, almost one million documents were unaccounted for. What
happened to the missing documents?

The NSA investigation found that the chronology of the theft
of documents did not support Snowden’s claim to journalists that
he had only been seeking whistle-blowing documents. Most of the
documents he took first did not concern the domestic activities of the
NSA. Only toward the end of the theft did he copy documents that
would qualify as whistle-blowing. The court order to Verizon that
was the basis of the initial Guardian exposé was only issued by the
FISA court on April 27, 2013. The other main whistle-blowing docu-
ment he revealed, the PowerPoint presentation about PRISM, was
only issued in April 2013. Yet Snowden had been downloading docu-
ments for at least nine months before he copied these documents.

When I discussed the chronology of the copied documents with
a former government official briefed on the investigation, he sug-
gested that Snowden’s purpose might have changed between 2012
and 2013. When I asked him what might have induced the change,
he replied, “That is one of the unanswered questions.” That Snowden
only took these two whistle-blowing documents at the tail end of
his nine-month operation, and after he had contacted Poitras and
Greenwald, suggests he might have had another motive prior to
contacting journalists. In light of this chronology, the investigation

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