Cryptic Overtures and a Clandestine Meeting Gave Birth to a Blockbuster Story
By CHARLIE SAVAGE and MARK MAZZETTI, NY TIMES
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WASHINGTON — The source had instructed his media contacts to come to Hong Kong, visit a particular out-of-the-way corner of a certain hotel, and ask — loudly — for directions to another part of the hotel. If all seemed well, the source would walk past holding a Rubik’s Cube.

So three people — Glenn Greenwald, a civil-liberties writer who recently moved his blog to The Guardian; Laura Poitras, a documentary filmmaker who specializes in surveillance; and Ewen MacAskill, a Guardian reporter — flew from New York to Hong Kong about 12 days ago. They followed the directions. A man with a Rubik’s Cube appeared.

It was Edward J. Snowden, who looked even younger than his 29 years — an appearance, Mr. Greenwald recalled in an interview from Hong Kong on Monday, that shocked him because he had been expecting, given the classified surveillance programs the man had access to, someone far more senior. Mr. Snowden has now turned over archives of “thousands” of documents, according to Mr. Greenwald, and “dozens” are newsworthy.

Mr. Snowden’s ability to burrow deep into America’s national security apparatus and emerge clutching some of its most closely guarded secrets is partly a story of the post-Sept. 11 era, when the government’s expanding surveillance Leviathan and complex computer systems have given network specialists with technical skills tremendous power.

While some lawmakers in Washington accuse Mr. Snowden of treason, he casts himself as a truth teller. Like Pfc. Bradley Manning and Daniel Ellsberg, whom he says he admires for disclosing troves of government secrets, Mr. Snowden explained his actions in a Guardian interview by saying the American people have a right to know about government abuses that were kept hidden from them.

He portrayed himself as carefully selecting what to release, seeking to avoid the attacks that accused Private Manning of recklessness. Private Manning, who confessed to leaking hundreds of thousands of classified documents made public by WikiLeaks, faces a possible life sentence in a court-martial.

“He has no regret of any kind, no sense of, ‘Wow, what I have done here? I can’t go back,’ ” Mr. Greenwald said of Mr. Snowden. “He is so convinced that he did the right thing.”

He added: “It’s not like it’s delusional — he’s completely rational. He completely understands that more likely than not, he’s going to end up like Bradley Manning or worse. Yet he has tranquillity.”

It is not clear how Mr. Snowden extracted the secret documents, and the portrait of his transformation from a trusted National Security Agency contractor to a leaker is still impressionistic.

Last year, he donated money to the campaign of Ron Paul, the Republican presidential candidate who was long critical of government’s growing reach. People who knew Mr. Snowden as a teenager said he was enthralled by computers. Joyce Kinsey, who lived across from his apartment in Maryland a decade ago, said she would often see him through the window working at his computer at night.

“He was always on his computer over there — always,” she said. “He was just a quiet kid, really quiet.”

Mr. Snowden, who grew up in North Carolina, did not finish high school and sporadically attended classes at Anne Arundel Community College in Arnold, Md. Military records show he enlisted in the Army Reserve as a Special Forces recruit in May 2004 and was discharged less than four months later, reportedly after breaking his legs in a training accident.

Somewhere along the way, he acquired a top-secret clearance, which, with his computer expertise, was a ticket for admission to the national security establishment. For more than a decade, American intelligence agencies have been desperate for tech-savvy individuals who can run ever more complex computer networks — and who can pass rigorous and intrusive background checks.

Mr. Snowden bounced between jobs both inside the government and as a contractor for the Central Intelligence Agency in Switzerland and for the National Security Agency in Japan, Maryland and Hawaii, according to his account. Eventually working for nearly $200,000 a year in classified facilities as a computer systems administrator, he had access to enormous amounts of secret information.

In a video interview conducted by Mr. Greenwald and taped by Ms. Poitras, Mr. Snowden recounted seeing “disturbing” things on a “frequent basis” and asking questions about what he saw as abuses, only to find that no one cared. Over time, he said, he decided his comfortable life was helping build up an “architecture of oppression.”

Mr. Snowden told The Guardian that it was during his time in Geneva working as a computer technician for the C.I.A. that he first thought about spilling government secrets. But he said he had held off, in part because he hoped that Senator Barack Obama’s election as president in 2008 might reverse the growth of the surveillance state.

But the fact that Mr. Obama embraced many of the Bush administration’s counterterrorism policies “hardened” him, and he told The Guardian that he had decided one could not wait for others to act. “I had been looking for leaders, but I realized that leadership is about being the first to act,” he said.

Mr. Snowden, Mr. Greenwald said, had first reached out to Ms. Poitras in January. Her work has focused on national-security issues like surveillance, including a short documentary she made for The New York Times Op-Ed page in August. She and Mr. Greenwald, along with Mr. Ellsberg, are also helping with a new organization devoted to whistle-blowers and transparency, the Freedom of the Press Foundation.

The next month, Mr. Greenwald said, Mr. Snowden contacted him with an enigmatic e-mail identifying himself as a reader and saying he wanted to communicate about a potential story using encryption. Mr. Greenwald wrote back that he did not have such software. Mr. Snowden later sent him a homemade video with step-by-step instructions for installing it, which Mr. Greenwald watched but never completed.

Frustrated, Mr. Snowden is said to have told Ms. Poitras that he had a major story about the National Security Agency that required both technical and legal expertise, proposing that they work together with Mr. Greenwald. Ms. Poitras, who did not respond to an interview request, told Salon on Monday that she had contacted Barton Gellman, a former Washington Post reporter, around that time for his opinion of the whether the purported source seemed legitimate.

In early March, Mr. Greenwald said, Ms. Poitras called and said she needed to meet in person. At a New York hotel, she shared e-mails from Mr. Snowden recounting, in Mr. Greenwald’s words, that “he had come to see the surveillance state as out of control and an abuse, and that he felt ready to risk his own life and liberty to expose it.” At that point, neither knew his name yet.

In late April or early May, he and Mr. Snowden began to talk over an encrypted chat program.

“He sort of said, ‘My plan is, at some point, go somewhere far away, and I want you to come there and interview me and get the documents and go over them,’ ” Mr. Greenwald said.

About a week later, he said, Mr. Snowden sent a sample of about 20 documents, including slides for a presentation about a program called Prism under which the N.S.A. was collecting information about foreigners overseas from Internet companies like Google. Then, about two weeks ago, Mr. Snowden indicated that he was ready to meet.

Separately, in mid-May Mr. Snowden reached out to Mr. Gellman. Mr. Greenwald said Ms. Poitras had decided “it would be good to have The Washington Post invested in the leak, so it wasn’t just us — to tie in official Washington in the leak” — and picked Mr. Gellman. Mr. Snowden sent Mr. Gellman the same sample set of documents. In an account of his involvement, Mr. Gellman said Mr. Snowden had called himself “Verax” — truth teller in Latin — a pseudonym used by both a 17th- and a 19th-century British writer, one of whom died in the Tower of London, and the other much honored.

In the last week of May, Mr. Greenwald flew from Brazil, where he lives, to New York to meet with editors of The Guardian and review the preliminary documents. The next day, he, Ms. Poitras and Mr. MacAskill left for to Hong Kong.

After the Rubik’s Cube meeting, the three followed Mr. Snowden to his hotel room and spent six hours “going over his life from start to finish, sort of like I was conducting a deposition,” recalled Mr. Greenwald, who formerly practiced law. By the end, he was persuaded that Mr. Snowden was who he claimed to be.

John Schindler, a former N.S.A. counterintelligence officer and now a professor at the Naval War College, said that in the post-Sept. 11 age, the computer “systems administrators” had access to enormous amounts of classified information.

“They can be a critical security gap because they see everything,” he said. “They’re like code clerks were in the 20th century. If a smart systems administrator went rogue, you’d be in trouble.”

Christopher Drew and Richard A. Oppel Jr. contributed reporting from New York, and Theo Emery from Ellicott City, Md.

Edward Snowden says motive behind leaks was to expose ‘surveillance state’

Surveillance: Snowden Doesn’t Rise to Traitor
By THE EDITORIAL BOARD, NY TIMES
For several top lawmakers in Washington, Edward Snowden committed the ultimate political crime when he revealed to the world just how broadly and easily the government is collecting phone and Internet records. “He’s a traitor,” said Representative John Boehner, the House speaker. “It’s an act of treason,” said Senator Dianne Feinstein, the chairwoman of the Intelligence Committee.

Among prosecutors and defense lawyers, there’s a name for that kind of hyperbole: overcharging. Whatever his crimes — and he clearly committed some — Mr. Snowden did not commit treason, though the people who have long kept the secrets he revealed are now fulminating with rage.

If Mr. Snowden had really wanted to harm his country, he could have sold the classified documents he stole to a foreign power, say Russia or China or Iran or North Korea. But even that would not constitute treason, which only applies in cases of aiding an enemy with whom the United States is at war.

His harshest critics might argue that by exposing American intelligence practices, he gave aid and comfort to Al Qaeda and its allies, with whom the country remains in a military conflict, thanks to the Authorization for Use of Military Force, which Congress passed after Sept. 11, 2001, and is in force now. It’s unlikely that Qaeda leaders did not already know or suspect surveillance before Mr. Snowden’s disclosures. But treason means more than that, too. In the landmark 1945 case Cramer v. United States, the Supreme Court ruled that one had to provide aid and comfort and also “adhere” to an enemy to be guilty of treason.

“A citizen may take actions which do aid and comfort the enemy,” the court said, “making a speech critical of the government or opposing its measures, profiteering, striking in defense plants or essential work, and the hundred other things which impair our cohesion and diminish our strength — but if there is no adherence to the enemy in this, if there is no intent to betray, there is no treason.”

Clearly, Mr. Snowden did not join a terror cell, or express any hostility toward the United States, when he turned over documents to The Guardian and The Washington Post. (He was also not nearly as reckless as Bradley Manning, the soldier on trial on charges with giving classified materials to WikiLeaks, who seemed not to know or care what secret documents he was exposing.) Mr. Snowden’s goal was to expose and thus stop the intelligence community from what he considered unwarranted intrusions into the lives of ordinary Americans. “My sole motive,” he told The Guardian, “is to inform the public as to that which is done in their name and that which is done against them.”

While that principle is the right one, he should brace himself for the charges and possible punishment that may come in its wake. Most likely, he will be charged with disclosure of classified information under the Espionage Act, which carries a possible 10-year jail term for each count. Mr. Snowden broke the agreement he made to keep these materials secret. He appeared forthright in confessing to the act and can use his testimony, should he be brought to trial, to make the case that he exposed a serious abuse of power (though, technically, he did not blow the whistle on fraud or criminal activity).

That’s what civil disobedience means: accepting the consequences of one’s actions to make a larger point. Mr. Snowden may well be going to jail for exposing practices that should never have been secret in the first place.

Edward Snowden Vanishes From His Hong Kong Hotel Room
Chris Carrington, Activist Post
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According to reports from the BBC, Edward Snowden has vanished from his Hong Kong hotel room. Ex-CIA employee Snowden, 29, was not expected to check out and the move has taken many by surprise. His whereabouts are unknown and thus far he has not made contact with anyone as to his plans.

Snowden who is on record as saying he had “an obligation to help free people from oppression”

He is being investigated regarding the leaks and the case has been referred to the Department of Justice as a criminal matter.

An online petition on the White House website has so far gotten 30,000 signatures calling for an immediate pardon for Snowden, though, sadly, an opinion poll commissioned by the Washington Post reveals that the majority of American Citizens think that this kind of intrusive phone monitoring is acceptable if it is aimed at fighting terrorism.

The implications of Snowden's leaks have reverberated around the globe with similar allegations being leveled at GCHQ (Government Communication Headquarters) in the UK.

Before fleeing to Hong Kong Snowden said:
The NSA has built an infrastructure that allows it to intercept almost everything. With this capability, the vast majority of human communications are automatically ingested without targeting. I don’t want to live in a society that does these sorts of things. I do not want to live in a world where everything I say and do is recorded…. We have seen enough criminality on behalf of the government, it is hypocritical to make this allegation against me.

If You Had Edward Snowden's Proof — What Would You Do?

Ex-Contractor Is Charged in Leaks on N.S.A. Surveillance
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By SCOTT SHANE
Edward J. Snowden, the former National Security Agency contractor whose leak of agency documents has set off a national debate over the proper limits of government surveillance, has been charged with violating the Espionage Act and stealing government property for disclosing classified information to The Guardian and The Washington Post, the Justice Department said on Friday.

Each of the three charges unsealed on Friday carries a maximum prison sentence of 10 years, for a total of 30 years. But Mr. Snowden is likely to be indicted, and additional counts may well be added. In addition to the theft charge, the two charges under the Espionage Act include “unauthorized communication of national defense information” and “willful communication of classified communications intelligence information to an unauthorized person.” Communications intelligence is the technical term for eavesdropping and other electronic intercepts.

The charges were filed on June 14 by federal prosecutors in the Eastern District of Virginia, which handles many national security cases. American officials said they have asked the authorities in Hong Kong, where Mr. Snowden is believed to be in hiding, to detain him while an indictment and an extradition request are prepared. The attempt to extradite him is likely to produce a long legal battle whose outcome is uncertain. The extradition treaty between the United States and Hong Kong includes an exception for political offenses, and Mr. Snowden could argue that his prosecution is political in nature.

Hong Kong has limited autonomy, but matters involving national security and foreign policy are controlled by the Chinese government in Beijing. Regina Ip, a former Hong Kong secretary of security and a current legislator, said Saturday that Hong Kong authorities had “no choice but to comply” with an arrest warrant and that “our police will go and find Mr. Snowden.”

However, Ms. Ip said, Mr. Snowden could delay any extradition by claiming his is “a political offense,” or he could apply for asylum, “and those cases can take 10 years.”

Last week, hundreds of people turned out in the rain for a protest outside the United States Consulate in Hong Kong demanding that officials not cooperate with any American extradition request. The Global Times, a mainland newspaper controlled by the Communist Party, called an extradition of Mr. Snowden an “inconceivable option” in a recent commentary.

The charges against Mr. Snowden, first reported by The Washington Post, are the seventh case under President Obama in which a government official has been criminally charged with leaking classified information to the news media. Under all previous presidents, just three such cases have been brought.

Mr. Snowden, who turned 30 on Friday, fled to Hong Kong last month, carrying four laptops, after leaving his job at the N.S.A.’s eavesdropping station in Hawaii. He has given hundreds of highly classified documents to The Guardian, the British newspaper, which has been publishing a series of revelatory articles about American and British eavesdropping, and a smaller number to The Post.

Mr. Snowden’s disclosures have opened an unprecedented window on the details of surveillance by the N.S.A., including its compilation of logs of virtually all telephone calls in the United States and its collection of e-mails of foreigners from the major American Internet companies, including Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, Apple and Skype.

Mr. Snowden, who has said he was shocked by what he believed to be the N.S.A.’s invasion of Americans’ and foreigners’ privacy, told The Guardian that he leaked the documents because he believed the limits of surveillance should be decided not by government officials in secret but by American citizens.

American intelligence officials have said his disclosures have done serious damage to national security by giving terrorists and others information on how to evade the intelligence net.

Mr. Snowden’s supporters, including some associated with the antisecrecy organization WikiLeaks, have approached officials in Iceland on his behalf to inquire about whether he might be granted asylum there. Iceland’s Ministry of the Interior, however, said in a statement that he must be in the country to file an asylum application.

An Icelandic businessman with ties to WikiLeaks, Olafur Vignir Sigurvinsson, has told reporters that he has private aircraft on standby, prepared to fly Mr. Snowden to Iceland. But the American charges and detention request may short-circuit any attempt to reach Iceland.

Glenn Greenwald, the Guardian columnist who received most of Mr. Snowden’s leaked documents, blasted the Obama administration over the Espionage Act charges on his Twitter feed. “How is leaking to a newspaper and informing one’s fellow citizens about secret govt behavior ‘espionage’???” Mr. Greenwald wrote.

In the latest installment of the Snowden disclosures on Friday, The Guardian reported that the N.S.A.’s British counterpart has tapped into hundreds of fiber-optic communications lines and is sharing a vast quantity of e-mail and Internet traffic with American intelligence. Under a program called Tempora, the British agency, known as G.C.H.Q., has been able to tap into 200 of the approximately 1,600 high-capacity fiber cables in and out of Britain and aspires to be able to tap 400 lines at once, harvesting a staggering amount of information, the British newspaper reported.

The documents said that G.C.H.Q., which has worked very closely with the N.S.A. for decades, may store the content of the communications flowing over the cables for three days and the so-called metadata — information about who is contacting whom at what time — for 30 days. During that time, analysts from both G.C.H.Q. and the N.S.A. are able to search the stored data for information of interest.

The disclosures of the G.C.H.Q. initiative, called “Mastering the Internet,” immediately raised a question among privacy advocates: whether the N.S.A. might be able to obtain information about Americans from G.C.H.Q. that it is prohibited by law or regulations from collecting itself.

An N.S.A. spokeswoman, Judith Emmel, said the agency does not use foreign partners to evade American restrictions. “Any allegation that N.S.A. relies on its foreign partners to circumvent U.S. law is absolutely false,” she said. “N.S.A. does not ask its foreign partners to undertake any intelligence activity that the U.S. government would be legally prohibited from undertaking itself.”

Ms. Emmel said the N.S.A. “is unwavering in its respect for U.S. laws and policies” and has “a rigorous internal compliance program” as well as oversight from Congress and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.

One document released by Mr. Snowden lent some support for the Obama administration’s insistence that the N.S.A. is tightly controlled. In a confidential briefing, The Guardian reported, a G.C.H.Q. legal adviser declared: “We have a light oversight regime compared with the U.S.”

The latest documents in the gradual unveiling of what is already the most revealing window on the N.S.A. and its major international partner in their history describe a previously unknown reversal of roles for the two agencies. Historically, the N.S.A. has dwarfed G.C.H.Q. and the three other eavesdropping agencies in the so-called Five Eyes intelligence-sharing network — those of Canada, Australia and New Zealand.

But in one of Mr. Snowden’s documents, N.S.A. officials say that G.C.H.Q. now “produces larger amounts of metadata collection than the N.S.A.” and is working with the American agency to process the torrent of data. The Guardian quotes a secret report as saying Britain now has “the biggest Internet access in Five Eyes.”

That assertion is especially remarkable in light of the evidence that the N.S.A. already had extensive access to Internet data. In 2006, Mark Klein, a former AT&T technician, revealed the existence of a secret room controlled by the N.S.A. at a major Internet hub in San Francisco, where the agency appeared to divert a large amount of traffic.

In addition, an N.S.A. training slide previously disclosed by Mr. Snowden directed the agency’s eavesdroppers to collect Internet messages from two sources: “collection of communications on fiber cables and infrastructure as data flows past” and Prism, an N.S.A. program that gathers information from major Internet companies like Microsoft, Apple, Google, Facebook and Skype.

The Guardian posted only a few snippets of the latest documents, but one may prove embarrassing for the N.S.A. director, Gen. Keith Alexander, who has spoken repeatedly in the last two weeks of the agency’s careful protections for Americans’ privacy.

The slide posted by The Guardian quotes General Alexander during a June 2008 visit to Menwith Hill Station, the N.S.A.’s major listening post in North Yorkshire, England.

“Why can’t we collect all the signals all the time?” the N.S.A. director was quoted as saying. “Sounds like a good summer project for Menwith.”

An American official who would explain the remark only on condition of anonymity said: “General Alexander’s comment was a quip taken out of context — nothing more.”

Charlie Savage contributed reporting from Washington, Gerry Mullany from Hong Kong and John F. Burns from London.