Snowden’s pre‑leak communications with journalists described as a privacy‑advocate whistle‑blower

86 the emails identified himself as a privacy advocate, which was also how Greenwald often identified himself in his speeches. He also echoed other concerns Greenwald had publicly expressed including defending American privacy from government intrusions. Snowden promised the leaks he would supply would provide dramatic results. He asserted in his email that the “shock” of the documents he would give Greenwald would result in the public’s learning about the secret “mechanisms through which our privacy is violated.” According to Snowden’s assessment, following that initial uproar, they could achieve another objective in their common cause. “We can guarantee for all people equal protection against unreasonable search,” he wrote. In light of this convergence of views, it is not surprising that Greenwald was fully convinced of Citizen 4’s bona fides. He said to Poitras, “He’s real,” and he agreed to help break the story in the Guardian. After he said he was onboard the project, Poitras revealed to Greenwald that Citizen 4 would deliver an entire trove of secret documents to them in six to eight weeks. According to this timetable, the Greenwald’s scoop, and the “shock” Citizen 4 promised, would come in early to mid June 2013. At this point in late April, Snowden was in full control. Although his day job at Dell involved endlessly monitoring largely-meaningless encrypted numbers in the NSA tunnel, he had been able to get three major journalists to react favorably to his proposal. None of them knew his name, position, age, location or where he precisely where he worked. Nor did they know the means by which he planned to obtain the secrets that he dangled before them. They also did not know where, or even if, they would meet their source. Their total knowledge about him was the description he gave of himself: a “senior government employee in the intelligence community” (which, as they only later would find out, was untrue.) For his part, Greenwald speculated that he was a disgruntled CIA station chief. Yet by his anonymous emails, and by tugging at their strings, he had lined up three journalists to break his story. Despite the fact they were operating largely in the dark, these three journalists acted like almost any other ambitious reporter would act if they were offered a major scoop about illegal acts of the government. In addition, the information was in line with what they had previously investigated or written about. None of these journalists had any reason to doubt at this point that their anonymous source was anything but the sincere whistle-blower that he claimed to be. They could not have known from his anonymous emails that, aside from the whistle-blowing documents he promised them, he was in the process of stealing a large number of documents from the NSA’s National Threat Operations Center that concerned the NSA’s sources and methods in foreign countries. These documents, to which Snowden never referred in his correspondence with them, had little, if anything at all, to do with domestic spying on American citizens. HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_020238