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82 | HOW AMERICA LOST ITS SECRETS

Hong Kong lawyer, Snowden stayed at a residence arranged for him in advance by a party whom Snowden knew prior to his arrival. As noted earlier, for the next ten days, Snowden did not use his credit card or leave any paper trail to his location. Wherever he was, “his first priority,” as he later told Greenwald, was to find a place safe from U.S. countermeasures. He brought with him a large number of electronic copies of NSA documents marked TS/SCI/NOFORN, which stood for “Top Secret, Sensitive Compartmented Information, and No Foreign Distribution.” According to government rules, data carrying these labels could not be removed from a government-approved “SCI facility.” But Snowden, who brought them with him into this semiautonomous zone in China, broke these rules.

Wherever Snowden was staying, apparently he believed he was relatively safe. “That whole period was very carefully planned and orchestrated,” Snowden later told The Guardian in Moscow. On May 22, he sent an e-mail to Bay (who did not know he had left Hawaii) saying that his epilepsy tests came back with “bad” results, and he needed further medical attention. Here Snowden communicated directly first with Gellman and then with Greenwald. He e-mailed Gellman under the alias “Verax.”

Already, via Poitras, he had provided Gellman with PowerPoint slides from an NSA presentation about a joint FBI-NSA-CIA operation code-named PRISM. He believed it qualified as whistleblowing because it revealed that the NSA, in intercepting e-mails, tweets, postings, and other web interactions about foreign terrorists, incidentally also picked up data about Americans. According to the rules imposed on the NSA by a 2007 presidential directive, whatever information was accidentally picked up about Americans was supposed to be filtered out, and hundreds of compliance officers were to recheck the data every ninety days to assure that directive was being carried out. Even so, it was likely some data was not expunged in this process. So PRISM could cause embarrassment for the NSA.

Snowden had not yet made arrangements to meet journalists, but now he proposed that Gellman join him in Hong Kong. In attempting to convince him of the urgency of the trip, he wrote that he had reason to believe that “omniscient State powers” imperiled “our freedom and way of life.” He noted, with a touch of modesty, “Perhaps

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