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the emails identified himself as a privacy advocate, which was also how Greenwald often
identified himself in his speeches. He also echoed other concerns Greenwald had publicly
expressed including defending American privacy from government intrusions.

Snowden promised the leaks he would supply would provide dramatic results. He asserted in
his email that the “shock” of the documents he would give Greenwald would result in the public’s
learning about the secret “mechanisms through which our privacy is violated.” According to
Snowden’s assessment, following that initial uproar, they could achieve another objective in their
common cause. “We can guarantee for all people equal protection against unreasonable search,”
he wrote. In light of this convergence of views, it is not surprising that Greenwald was fully
convinced of Citizen 4’s bona fides. He said to Poitras, “He’s real,” and he agreed to help break
the story in the Guardian.

After he said he was onboard the project, Poitras revealed to Greenwald that Citizen 4 would
deliver an entire trove of secret documents to them in six to eight weeks. According to this
timetable, the Greenwald’s scoop, and the “shock” Citizen 4 promised, would come in early to
mid June 2013.

At this point in late April, Snowden was in full control. Although his day job at Dell involved
endlessly monitoring largely-meaningless encrypted numbers in the NSA tunnel, he had been able
to get three major journalists to react favorably to his proposal. None of them knew his name,
position, age, location or where he precisely where he worked. Nor did they know the means by
which he planned to obtain the secrets that he dangled before them. They also did not know
where, or even if, they would meet their source. Their total knowledge about him was the
description he gave of himself: a “senior government employee in the intelligence community”
(which, as they only later would find out, was untrue.) For his part, Greenwald speculated that he
was a disgruntled CIA station chief. Yet by his anonymous emails, and by tugging at their strings,
he had lined up three journalists to break his story.

Despite the fact they were operating largely in the dark, these three journalists acted like almost
any other ambitious reporter would act if they were offered a major scoop about illegal acts of the
government. In addition, the information was in line with what they had previously investigated or
written about. None of these journalists had any reason to doubt at this point that their
anonymous source was anything but the sincere whistle-blower that he claimed to be. They could
not have known from his anonymous emails that, aside from the whistle-blowing documents he
promised them, he was in the process of stealing a large number of documents from the NSA’s
National Threat Operations Center that concerned the NSA’s sources and methods in foreign
countries. These documents, to which Snowden never referred in his correspondence with them,
had little, if anything at all, to do with domestic spying on American citizens.

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