This timeline only shows the many reports stemming from documents the ex-NSA contractor handed over to journalists. If I have missed any leaks in the hundreds of news stories on these items, that mistake is mine alone. This post relied upon a similar timeline from Al Jazeera America , as well as a catalog at Lawfare Blog , and an article at the National Journal. For you. World globe An icon of the world globe, indicating different international options. Get the Insider App. Click here to learn more.
A leading-edge research firm focused on digital transformation. Good Subscriber Account active since Shortcuts. Account icon An icon in the shape of a person's head and shoulders. Live TV. This Day In History. History Vault. On June 6, , Americans learned that their government was spying broadly on its own people. Great Britain.
Civil Rights Movement. World War I. World War II. Sign Up. Vietnam War. Civil War. Art, Literature, and Film History. Then, on the day they set, she proposed getting together at his place.
As it happened, the Snowden files were at that time locked in a Washington Post vault, and kept separate from the electronic keys that allowed access to them, but outsiders would not know that. And an attractive spy might assume that, with the right enticements, anything was possible. When Soltani returned to OkCupid to document these interactions in more detail, he searched for the two women who had pursued him so aggressively.
Their online profiles no longer existed. I remember that feeling. I would never leave my phone when I went to the bathroom.
By the time we had this conversation, in the late fall of , Soltani and I had stopped writing stories for the Post. I was working on a book. Soltani had moved on to other things.
He had retired his old laptop, returned an encryption key fob to me, and shed his last connection to classified materials. How do you do on vacation? Well, about that. Preoccupation with surveillance had distorted my professional and personal life. I had balked at the main gate of Disney World when I realized I would have to scan a fingerprint and wear a radio-tagged wristband everywhere in the park.
My partner, Dafna, standing with our 7-year-old son, dared me with her eyes to refuse. I caved, of course. I brought my laptop almost everywhere I went, even on beach and hiking trips. I refused to leave my bag at coat checks at parties. The precautions I took to protect my electronics inconvenienced my friends and embarrassed my family.
I had not come to terms, until that moment, with how abnormal my behavior had become. I never felt safe enough.
From the November issue: What surveillance will look like in the future. I built ever-thicker walls of electronic and physical self-defense. At one point in the spring of , I requested a dedicated locked room at the Post for use by the reporters who worked with the Snowden documents. The room had one feature I had specifically asked to avoid: a wall full of windows.
Crestfallen, I asked for a windowless space. The Post found one, installed a high-security lock, put a video camera in the hall outside, and brought in a huge safe that must have weighed pounds.
I acquired a heavy safe for my office in New York as well. I will not enumerate every step I took to keep my work secure, but they were many and varied and sometimes befuddled me. The computers we used for the NSA archive were specially locked down.
If a stranger appeared at the door, we merely had to tug on the quick-release power cables to switch off and re-encrypt the machines instantly.
We stored the laptops in the vault and kept encryption keys on hardware, itself encrypted, that we took away with us each time we left the room, even for bathroom breaks. We sealed the USB ports. I disconnected and locked up the internet-router switch in my New York office every night. I dabbed epoxy and glitter on the screws along the bottom of all my machines, to help detect tampering in my absence.
The glitter dries in unique, random patterns. A security expert had told me that detection of compromise was as important as prevention, so I experimented with ultraviolet powder on the dial of my safe in New York.
Photographing dust patterns under a UV flashlight beam turns out to be messy. I kept my digital notes in multiple encrypted volumes, arranging the files in such a way that I had to type five long passwords just to start work every day. The reporter Carol Leonnig, playing the role of Anne, pulled out blindfolds for everyone in the pretend meeting.
They had to cover their eyes, she explained, before Bart could speak. Funny and fair, I had to admit. I was a giant pain in the ass. But I felt I had to be, and my fear was that any single barrier could be breached. A friend who runs a lock and safe company told me that an expert safecracker could break into just about any commercial vault in less than 20 minutes. Intelligence agencies have whole departments working on how to stealthily circumvent barriers and seals.
Special antennae can read the emanations of a computer monitor through walls. Against adversaries like this, all I could do was make myself a less appealing target. I layered on so many defenses that navigating through them became a chronic drain on my time, mental energy, and emotional equilibrium. To include not just remote stuff, but hands-on, sneak-into-your-house-at-night kind of stuff. On January 29, , James Clapper, then the director of national intelligence, sat down at a Senate witness table to deliver his annual assessment of worldwide threats, covering the gravest dangers facing the United States.
He did not open his remarks with terrorism or nuclear proliferation or Russia or China. He opened with Edward Snowden, and within a few words he was quoting one of my stories. I pretty much stopped listening after the word accomplices. This was not an off-the-cuff remark. It was prepared testimony on behalf of the Obama administration, vetted across multiple departments, including Justice.
Accomplice has a meaning in criminal law. I asked Clapper whether I was a valid counterintelligence target. It became a running joke among U. Mueller cross-examined me: Were the NSA documents not lawfully classified? Were they not stolen? Did I not publish them anyway? I held out my arms toward him, wrists together, as if for handcuffs. The audience laughed. Mueller did not. I know perfectly well that government agencies prefer not to read their secrets on the front page.
Sometimes they resent a story enough to investigate. He said it was during his CIA stint in Geneva that he thought for the first time about exposing government secrets. But, at the time, he chose not to for two reasons. Secondly, the election of Barack Obama in gave him hope that there would be real reforms, rendering disclosures unnecessary.
He left the CIA in in order to take his first job working for a private contractor that assigned him to a functioning NSA facility, stationed on a military base in Japan.
I had been looking for leaders, but I realised that leadership is about being the first to act. But he believed that the value of the internet, along with basic privacy, is being rapidly destroyed by ubiquitous surveillance. As strong as those beliefs are, there still remains the question: why did he do it?
Giving up his freedom and a privileged lifestyle? If I were motivated by money, I could have sold these documents to any number of countries and gotten very rich. For him, it is a matter of principle. There is no public oversight. Another hails the online organisation offering anonymity, the Tor Project. Asked by reporters to establish his authenticity to ensure he is not some fantasist, he laid bare, without hesitation, his personal details, from his social security number to his CIA ID and his expired diplomatic passport.
There is no shiftiness. Ask him about anything in his personal life and he will answer. He is quiet, smart, easy-going and self-effacing. A master on computers, he seemed happiest when talking about the technical side of surveillance, at a level of detail comprehensible probably only to fellow communication specialists. But he showed intense passion when talking about the value of privacy and how he felt it was being steadily eroded by the behaviour of the intelligence services. His manner was calm and relaxed but he has been understandably twitchy since he went into hiding, waiting for the knock on the hotel door.
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