Edward Snowden: The Untold Story | WIRED

The afternoon of our third meeting, about two weeks after our first, Snowden comes to my hotel room. I have changed locations and am now staying at the Hotel National, across the street from the Kremlin and Red Square. An icon like the Metropol, much of Russias history passed through its front doors at one time or another. Lenin once lived in Room 107, and the ghost of Felix Dzerzhinsky, the feared chief of the old Soviet secret police who also lived here, still haunts the hallways.

But rather than the Russian secret police, its his old employers, the CIA and the NSA, that Snowden most fears. If somebodys really watching me, theyve got a team of guys whose job is just to hack me, he says. I dont think theyve geolocated me, but they almost certainly monitor who Im talking to online. Even if they dont know what youre saying, because its encrypted, they can still get a lot from who youre talking to and when youre talking to them.

More than anything, Snowden fears a blunder that will destroy all the progress toward reforms for which he has sacrificed so much. Im not self-destructive. I dont want to self-immolate and erase myself from the pages of history. But if we dont take chances, we cant win, he says. And so he takes great pains to stay one step ahead of his presumed pursuershe switches computers and email accounts constantly. Nevertheless, he knows hes liable to be compromised eventually: Im going to slip up and theyre going to hack me. Its going to happen.

Indeed, some of his fellow travelers have already committed some egregious mistakes. Last year, Greenwald found himself unable to open a large trove of NSA secrets that Snowden had passed to him. So he sent his longtime partner, David Miranda, from their home in Rio to Berlin to get another set from Poitras, who fixed the archive. But in making the arrangements, The Guardian booked a transfer through London. Tipped off, probably as a result of surveillance by GCHQ, the British counterpart of the NSA, British authorities detained Miranda as soon as he arrived and questioned him for nine hours. In addition, an external hard drive containing 60 gigabits of dataabout 58,000 pages of documentswas seized. Although the documents had been encrypted using a sophisticated program known as True Crypt, the British authorities discovered a paper of Mirandas with the password for one of the files, and they were able to decrypt about 75 pages, according to British court documents. *

Another concern for Snowden is what he calls NSA fatiguethe public becoming numb to disclosures of mass surveillance, just as it becomes inured to news of battle deaths during a war. One death is a tragedy, and a million is a statistic, he says, mordantly quoting Stalin. Just as the violation of Angela Merkels rights is a massive scandal and the violation of 80 million Germans is a nonstory.

Nor is he optimistic that the next election will bring any meaningful reform. In the end, Snowden thinks we should put our faith in technologynot politicians. We have the means and we have the technology to end mass surveillance without any legislative action at all, without any policy changes. The answer, he says, is robust encryption. By basically adopting changes like making encryption a universal standardwhere all communications are encrypted by defaultwe can end mass surveillance not just in the United States but around the world.

Until then, Snowden says, the revelations will keep coming. We havent seen the end, he says. Indeed, a couple of weeks after our meeting, The Washington Post reported that the NSAs surveillance program had captured much more data on innocent Americans than on its intended foreign targets. There are still hundreds of thousands of pages of secret documents out thereto say nothing of the other whistle-blowers he may have already inspired. But Snowden says that information contained in any future leaks is almost beside the point. The question for us is not what new story will come out next. The question is, what are we going to do about it?

*CORRECTION APPENDED [10:55am/August, 22 2014]: An earlier version of this story incorrectly reported that Miranda retrieved GCHQ documents from Poitras; it also incorrectly stated that Greenwald has not gained access to the complete GCHQ documents.

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Edward Snowden: The Untold Story | WIRED