The Snowden Revelations Reconsidered

Ten years ago, an unorthodox reporting team flew from New York to Hong Kong to meet someone claiming to be a spy who was ready to hand over a trove of top-secret documents. The hastily assembled group of journalists comprised the U.S. documentary filmmaker Laura Poitras; the blogger Glenn Greenwald, then a columnist at The Guardian; and myself, a Guardian reporter based in New York.

I did not know the identity of the person we were to meet. He or she had sent a “welcome pack,” a sample of classified documents that appeared genuine—but I was still uncertain, wondering whether the potential story might be an elaborate fraud or the work of a disgruntled crank. The source turned out to be no hoaxer but a contractor with the National Security Agency: Edward Snowden.

Then age 29, Snowden had become disillusioned by what he had seen inside the NSA of the scale of intrusion into privacy in the post-9/11 U.S.—some of it illegal—and around the world. He had decided to become a whistleblower. We spent almost a week interviewing him during the day in his cluttered room, in the Mira Hotel in Kowloon, and then writing stories late into the night.  

At the end of one of the interviews, I asked Snowden for evidence showing the involvement of the NSA’s British surveillance partner, the Government Communications Headquarters. The next morning, he gave me a memory stick. I expected it to contain one or two examples; instead, it stored tens of thousands of documents, covering both the NSA and GCHQ. These were to form the basis for subsequent reporting, , and ProPublica, which became partners in investigating and publishing the story. Snowden had given even more material to Poitras and Greenwald. In sheer quantity, this was the biggest leak in intelligence history.