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surveillance, if Gellman agreed to write a story on it for the Washington Post. Even though
Gellman had left the staff of the Washington Post in 2010, he had previously written several
stories on that subject for the newspaper. He was also highly-regarded by the editors there. He
was therefore interested in Poitras’ offer (although he would consult a friend at the Justice
Department about the legality of publishing NSA documents.

Snowden now had laid the groundwork for at least two possible outlets; one an establishment
newspaper in Washington DC, the Washington Post; and a well-respected international
newspaper, the Guardian.

Poitras, however, was having some difficulty in bringing Greenwald in on the plan. Like
Snowden, she did not trust writing him in unencrypted emails and, since Greenwald lived in
Brazil, she still had not found an opportunity for a face-to-face meeting with him.

That opportunity arose in mid-April 2013. Greenwald had flown to New York to give the lead
speech at an event in Yonkers, N.Y. sponsored by the Council on American-Islamic Relations, or
CAIR, a pro-Moslem civil rights and anti-Zionist organization. He had delivered the keynote
speech at its previous meeting in San Jose, California on November 22, 2012, where his
impassioned depiction of the American “Surveillance State” in America received a rousing
ovation from the attendees. He was invited to speak at this award dinner for its east coast chapter.

Poitras flew from Berlin to New York to see him. On April 19, 2013, she arranged to meet
Greenwald at noon in the restaurant of the Marriott hotel where Greenwald was staying. When
Greenwald arrived at the restaurant carrying a cell phone, she explained to him that the NSA
could surreptitiously turn his cell phone into a microphone and use it to eavesdrop on their
conversation. She told him to go back to his room to get rid of the phone. When he returned,
phoneless, she took further precautions by having them change tables several times. Greenwald
accepted these tactics because, as Greenwald later said, she was in charge of their “operational
security.”

After they finally found a secure table in the nearly empty restaurant, she showed Greenwald
emails she had received from Snowden under the alias Citizen 4. Greenwald, as he recounted,
made “no connection to the “long-forgotten emails” he had received from Snowden under the
alias Cincinnatus. Reading the emails to Poitras, he was impressed with the “sincerity” of the
anonymous correspondent.

When Poitras showed Greenwald Citizen 4’s mission statement in which he said his motive was
to end the US “surveillance state.” Greenwald was further impressed with the source. After all,
the surveillance state Snowden described closely dovetailed with the surveillance state that
Greenwald had described himself in his speech at the Council on American-Islamic Relations
dinner in 2012. Of course, the close proximity of the phrasing may not have been entirely
coincidental. Greenwald’s 2012 speech had been put on YouTube and widely circulated on the
Internet just a few days before Snowden first wrote Greenwald on December 1, 2012. Snowden

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