If WikiLeaks published them as authentic, it would suffer a serious blow to its credibility.Laura and I were aware of all the pitfalls but we discounted them, relying instead on our intuition. Please enable cookies on your web browser in order to continue. So it was one of those things I had never gotten around to doing.C.âs email did not move me to action. It also contained proof that the NSA had been collecting telephone and email data about millions of Americans every day. We had in our possession, on the plane, thousands of documents that the government had desperately tried to hide. The way he chose, analyzed, and described the thousands of documents I now had in my possession proved that.
I was right. With Poitras deeply reluctant to talk by phone or online, I was still frustrated: finally in possession of what I was waiting for, but with no clue where it would lead me. âI only have one fear in doing all of this,â he said, which is âthat people will see these documents and shrug, that theyâll say, âwe assumed this was happening and donât care.â The only thing Iâm worried about is that Iâll do all this to my life for nothing.ââI seriously doubt that will happen,â I assured him, but I wasnât convinced I really believed that.
For years, various senators had asked the NSA for a rough estimate of how many Americans were having their calls and emails intercepted. And Laura, who plans everything meticulously, was also bound to be furious at this sudden change in our plans. Nothing of this significance had ever been leaked from the NSA, not in all the six-decade history of the agency. âI got this and am going to work on it. With this work, both of us had struggled against the great wall of secrecy shielding government spying: How do you document the actions of an agency so completely shrouded in multiple layers of official secrecy? One map in the file showed that for a thirty-day period ending in February 2013, one unit of the NSA collected more than The source had given us clear proof that NSA officials had lied to Congress, directly and repeatedly, about the agencyâs activities.
Hailed as a âmodel of civic virtue,â Cincinnatus has become a symbol of the use of political power in the public interest and the worth of limiting or even relinquishing individual power for the greater good.The email began: âThe security of peopleâs communications is very important to me,â and its stated purpose was to urge me to begin using PGP encryption so that âCincinnatusâ could communicate things in which, he said, he was certain I would be interested. The source had created countless folders and then sub-folders and sub-sub-folders.
These companies . Heâs real. But Lauraâs inability to speak freely forced us to postpone that discussion. I wanted to be certain that this would be worthwhile, meaning: Had she obtained verification that this source was real? . Yet she repeatedly decided not to go public with the relentless harassment, fearing that the repercussions would make her work impossible. Had Petraeus encrypted his messages before handing them over to Gmail or storing them in his drafts folder, he wrote, investigators would not have been able to read them. I then spent a couple of days online as the source walked me through, step by step, how to install and use each program, including, finally, PGP encryption.
Second, it would be very difficult to deny his status as a classic whistle-blower. That, in turn, meant Laura had heard from our anonymous emailer and received what we had been waiting for.The tech person then sent a package via Federal Express, scheduled to arrive in two days. She had an âextremely important and sensitive matterâ to discuss, she said, and security was critical.Since I had my cell phone with me, Laura asked that I either remove the battery or leave it in my hotel room. The program essentially wraps every email in a protective shield, which is a code composed of hundreds, or even thousands, of random numbers and case-sensitive letters.
We sat in miserable, angry silence for ten minutes as the car was stuck in traffic on the way to JFK.I knew Laura was right: it shouldnât have happened this way, and I broke the silence by telling her so.
âItâs real. She had received a series of anonymous emails from someone who seemed both honest and serious. The first was how extraordinarily well organized it was. From the first glimpse Iâd had of just these few documents, I knew two things: I needed to get to Hong Kong right away, and I would have to have substantial institutional support to do this reporting. People who most fear having their communications monitored, such as intelligence operatives, spies, human rights activists, and hackers, trust this form of encryption to protect their messages. It would be difficult, I reasoned, for someone who did not truly believe and feel this alarm to replicate it so accurately, with such authenticity.In one of the last passages of Lauraâs emails, her correspondent wrote that he was completing the final steps necessary to provide us with the documents. âWe canât just add some new person at the last minute. The court is one of the most secretive institutions in the government. Iâm not arguing that every communication you are involved in be encrypted, but you should at least provide communicants with that option.ââCincinnatusâ then referenced the sex scandal of General David Petraeus, whose career-ending extramarital affair with journalist Paula Broadwell was discovered when investigators found Google emails between the two. The most advanced intelligence agencies around the worldâa class that certainly includes the National Security Agencyâpossess password-cracking software capable of one billion guesses per second. By Glenn Greenwald, star of Citizenfour, the Academy Award-winning documentary on Edward Snowden In May 2013, Glenn Greenwald set out for Hong Kong to meet an anonymous source who claimed to have astonishing evidence of pervasive government spying and insisted on communicating only through heavily encrypted channels. And besides, anyone who does something this extreme is going to have extreme thoughts.
It made sense to me that someone who had witnessed the shadowy construction of a ubiquitous system of state surveillance, with no oversight or checks, would be gravely alarmed by what he had seen and the dangers it posed.
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