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CHAPTER ONE
The Great Divide
“What you’ve seen so far is just the tip of the iceberg.”
-- retired Admiral Michael McConnell, vice chairman of Booz Allen Hamilton
On June 9, 2013, the Guardian, the British newspaper known for the quality and gravity of its
reporting posted Snowden’s 12-minute video on its website. In it, Snowden identified himself as
an infrastructure analyst at a regional base of National Security Agency that was located in Oahu,
Hawaii. He revealed in a calm, unemotional voice that he had been the source for the stories in
both the Guardian and the Washington Post. He said that he had supplied the secret, classified
documents that the two newspapers had used in their scoops about domestic surveillance being
conducted by the NSA, America’s enormous electronic surveillance agency. These sensational
revelations had been, literally, the talk of the world, and now, in another major news event, the
boyish-looking Snowden revealed his responsibility for what would turn out to be the largest theft
of top-secret documents in the history of U.S. intelligence.
In the video, Snowden was questioned by Glenn Greenwald, an American journalist living in
Brazil who had broken the NSA story in the Guardian. What was his motive? Greenwald asked.
Why did he do it? Snowden replied that he had become horrified by the NSA’s secret operations
which, to him, represented a kind of distillation of the excesses of the American national security
state, and he therefore made it his mission to blow the whistle. He believed that the public needed
to be informed of the existence of a vast, secret surveillance operation directed against tens of
millions of Americans that flagrantly violated US laws and was a grave threat to their privacy and
their freedoms. Within hours of the release of that video on the Guardian website, Snowden
was one of the most famous people in the world, celebrated by his supporters as a courageous
whistle-blower.
The Snowden interview in the video subsequently was expanded by the documentary filmmaker
Laura Poitras into the two-hour movie CitizenFour, which won the 2015 academy-award for the
best documentary. Poitras said in accepting her Oscar in the Academy Awards Theater in
Hollywood on February 22" 2015, that Snowden acted as a whistle-blower not only to “expose a
threat to our privacy but to our democracy itself.” She received a standing ovation. The film
convincingly depicts Snowden as an altruistic young man who is willing to risk his own personal
freedom and face years of imprisonment for the sake of others. Adding to the drama, almost all
the footage of Snowden in the film is from interviews with him in the confines of Snowden’s small
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