Snowden’s Pre‑Publication Planning with Guardian Journalists and a Backup ‘Dead‑Man’s Switch’ Website

96 demanded that newspapers publish his personal manifesto. She explained to Greenwald, “It is going to sound crazy to some people.” Her concern was that it would detract from the credibility of the rest of the story. Snowden had also written Greenwald a letter explain his position. “Even the Constitution is subverted when the appetites of power demand it,” Snowden asserted, and paraphrasing President Thomas Jefferson, he continued. “Let us speak no more of faith in man, but bind him down from mischief by the chains of cryptography.” Snowden, showing his cult- like faith in encryption, had “cryptography” for Jefferson’s word “constitution. Despite his Jeffersonian rhetoric, she decided against publishing it or the Manifesto. The stolen NSA documents were another matter. They were an enormous scoop that could have a greater impact than the Wikileaks scoop. .She was not about to miss publishing it. She authorized Greenwald’s trip to Hong Kong on the condition that he take with him a Guardian staffer in whom she had confidence. He was Scottish-born Ewen MacAskill, a 61-year old veteran journalist who had been the Washington bureau chief for the Guardian. His assignment was to evaluate the mystery source in Hong Kong for Gibson. Greenwald accepted her terms. Poitras, who would be accompanying them, would be paying her own way. Snowden, for his part, had a contingency plan in place in case the Guardian failed to publish the story. While Greenwald was negotiating with Gibson, he arranged for Micah Lee, Poitras’ associate at the Freedom of the Press Foundation, to build a personal website for him. Writing Lee from Hong Kong under both his alias Anon108 and his real name, Snowden said that he planned to post on it his “anti-surveillance manifesto.” He would also use it to post “a global petition against surveillance. (A year earlier his girlfriend Mills had also asked her followers on her “super hero” blog to sign a petition against government interference with the Internet.) Snowden had Lee name the site “Supportonlinerights.com.” According to Lee, the website would be build with a “dead man’s switch,” which would automatically trigger the release of NSA documents if he was arrested. It was not clear whether Lee was doing this work as a freelancer or in his capacity as the chief technology officer for the Freedom of the Press Foundation. After Lee built the website for Snowden It proved unnecessary to activate it since Poitras emailed Snowden that the Guardian had approved the trip, and she and Greenwald were booked on a Cathay Pacific flight to Hong Kong. They would arrive on June 2, 2013, In his preparation to go public in Hong Kong, Snowden showed himself fully capable of orchestrating what would become a major news story. He not only picked the journalists who would break it, but he instructed each of them as to the timing, sequence, and content of their initial disclosures. In the security of his residence in Hong Kong, he also worked to carefully separate the purloined NSA documents into two very different caches. "I carefully evaluated every single document I disclosed,” Snowden explained to the Guardian journalists in early June 2013. The documents in this first cache were selected to serve what he termed the “public interest.” In the hands of journalists, these selected documents, and the story he fashioned to accompany them, would burnish his image in the public consciousness as a whistle blower. He did HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_020248