Glenn Greenwald, adversarial journalist and scribe for fugitive former NSA hacker Edward Snowden's leaks, has never been able to keep the story straight of when Snowden first contacted him, when he seriously began working with him, and what stories and documents he discussed.
I've chronicled the half dozen versions of the story that existed before his book. Now that his book has come out, No Place to Hide, I suppose we must accept the "versions" as finally set in stone. But are they?
In some instances, it seems as if he goes to enormous trouble to make a detailed new chronicle of events as if to ward off various "convergence" theories that place him with too early access to Snowden before he goes to BHA to hack more NSA documents -- and thus implicate Greenwald and his fellow "adversarial journalist" Laura Poitras and her hacker friend Jacob Appelbaum as accomplices going beyond the protections of the Pentagon Papers Supreme Court decision.
As we know, Greenwald absolutely bristled at any such suggestion early on in the criticism of the Snowden operation by a Hillary Clinton campaigner, Zach Green, and called such persons "drooling imbeciles."
Except, we're not stupid when we see so many changing versions and so many strenuous efforts at building detailed narratives at variance with the past record. Greenwald is a lawyer. Something's up.
The issue of when Greenwald really began to deal with Snowden of course matters regarding any culpability he might have in guiding his hacks, enabling his hacks, knowing about his hacks, etc. Again, remember, this isn't the Pentagon Papers. This is not Daniel Ellsberg taking only 7,000 documents, many of which he wrote himself, and all of which he was authorized to access as an employee -- and then standing, alone, at a Xerox machine to make a copy to pass to the New York Times without any tech help.
The Snowden story involves 1.7 million documents, involves him stealing and exploiting other workers' passwords, reaching documents he was not authorized to access, and is far more damaging. It also involves more people in the middle (Jacob Appelbaum and Laura Poitras and possibly others) helping with encryption and communications, and the need to store and forward the documents safely -- it's not a one-off affair with one delivery.
So let's look at what Greenwald told Michael Calderone back in June, when he first met Snowden in Hong Kong, then stayed with him as Snowden outed his identity on June 9th, 2013. Calderone published an article on June 10, 2013 which means he had to have been talking to Greenwald before that. Obviously, he is a "progressive" like-minded journalist, and Greenwald took time out for him at a very hectic moment when he was surrounded by numerous press and even sneaking out the back door of his hotel to escape undected.
So here's what Calderone writes, in a context where a dispute has arisen over "who had Snowden first" with Barton Gellman of the Washington Post, who also published a Snowden leak at the time, but had declined to come to Hong Kong.
Greg Mitchell of The Nation who also wrote about the story early calls Calderone's article a "valuable untangling".
Indeed. Now it's a valuable stark contrast to what Greenwald himself is saying in his book:
Edward Snowden, the NSA whistleblower who revealed his identity Sunday, first approached The Guardian’s Glenn Greenwald in February and, by the journalist’s account, said he had information "that would be of great interest.”
But there was a problem. Snowden only wanted to communicate securely using PGP encryption, for which Greenwald didn’t have the proper software installed at the time. In an interview with The Huffington Post, Greenwald acknowledged that he's no expert in using such technology and said that Snowden even provided a step-by-step email and video to help secure their communication. At that point, however, Greenwald didn't know what his would-be source had (or didn't have) and continued to prioritize other stories instead.
Snowden also approached Laura Poitras, a filmmaker who is working on a trilogy about post-9/11 America and last year published a short documentary featuring NSA whistleblower William Binney on The New York Times' website. Both Poitras and Greenwald serve on the Freedom of the Press Foundation, an organization that supports independent journalism. Greenwald had written last year about the difficulties Poitras faced after she was put on a government watch list.
A few months ago, Poitras met Greenwald at a New York hotel and informed him that the source in question was working for an NSA contractor and had "documents showing serious government wrongdoing." Greenwald set up the encryption software and began speaking directly with Snowden in late March or early April, he said.
Questions about the length of time Greenwald communicated with Snowden have arisen since Barton Gellman suggested in The Washington Post on Sunday that the source approached Greenwald only in recent weeks -- and only after he had approached the Post with materials related to the NSA's top-secret PRISM program and the paper refused to guarantee their full publication.
On Monday morning, Greenwald tweeted that “Gellman's claims about Snowden's interactions with me -- when, how and why -- are all false,” but did not elaborate.
Bart Gellman's claims about Snowden's interactions with me - when, how and why - are all false.
— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) June 10, 2013p>Greenwald told HuffPost that Snowden was communicating with him for months on what would become a series of stories. Since May 16, he had apparently also been speaking to Gellman for what would become the Post's PRISM story. Greenwald said they expected an article in The Washington Post would “invest official Washington in the leak," so they brought in Gellman, a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner, for that particular story. He said it was Poitras who introduced Snowden to Gellman.
So in his zeal to one-up Gellman -- about whom he had doubts and who he didn't want in the story but was overridden by Gellman's friend Poitras -- Greenwald likely told what was the truth: that he had been in touch with Snowden through encrypted email as early as "March or April". Snowden deliberately took the job at Booz, Hamilton Allen on March 15, 2013 and went for training on March 31, 2013. He hacked his last document on May 17, 2018 and departed for Hong Kong May 18 or May 19.
Now let's look at the other version of this story in Greenwald's book:
On December 1, 2012, I received my first communication from Edward Snowden, although I had no idea at the time that it was from him. The contact came in the form of an email from someone calling himself Cincinnatus, a reference to Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus, the Roman farmer who, in the fifth century BC, was appointed dictator of Rome to defend the city against attack.
Not February. December.
Then:
After returning to Rio, I heard nothing for three weeks. I spent almost no time thinking about the source because all I could do was wait. Then, on May 11, I received an email from a tech expert with whom Laura and I had worked in the past. His words were cryptic but his meaning clear: "Hey Glenn, I’m following up with learning to use PGP. Do you have an address I can mail you something to help you get started next week.
The tech expert was likely Jacob Appelbaum, who Greenwald has had spats with and may have decided not to identify to limit his liability for prosecution.
Then this:
The tech person then sent a package via Federal Express, scheduled to arrive in two days. I did not know what to expect: a program, or the documents themselves? For the next forty-eight hours, it was impossible to focus on anything else. But on the day of scheduled delivery, 5:30 p.m. came and went and nothing arrived. I called FedEx and was told that the package was being held in customs for "unknown reasons." Two days went by. Then five. Then a full week. Every day FedEx said the same thing—that the package was being held in customs, for reasons unknown.
I briefly entertained the suspicion that some government authority—American, Brazilian, or otherwise—was responsible for this delay because they knew something, but I held on to the far likelier explanation that it was just one of those coincidental bureaucratic annoyances.
By this point, Laura was very reluctant to discuss any of this by phone or online, so I didn’t know what exactly was in the package.
Finally, roughly ten days after the package had been sent to me, FedEx delivered it. I tore open the envelope and found two USB thumb drives, along with a typewritten note containing detailed instructions for using various computer programs designed to provide maximum security, as well as numerous passphrases to encrypted email accounts and other programs I had never heard of.
So on May 21 ("roughtly") he gets the USB sticks and the encryption programs and tutorials.
But he told Michael Calderone it was "in March or April" that he set up the encryption software.
Furthermore, Calderone describes Greenwald meeting Poitras "a few months ago" i.e. April. Not May, or he would have said "last month".
Then there's a slightly different account of this story, in Luke Harding's book, evidently based on existing press reports and his interview with Ewan McAllister -- he doesn't get to interview either Greenwald or Poitras for the book from all appearances.
In mid-April, Greenwald received an email from Poitras. It told him to expect a FedEx delivery. Neither of the two parties had communicated much in the interim; Greenwald still hadn't got encryption. But the FEDEx parcel signalled that things were moving and that, as Greenwald puts it, 'the eagle had landed'.
The package arrived; inside it were two thumb drivs. Greenwald at first imagined that the USB sticks contained top-secret documents 'wrapped in layers of encryption and Linux programs'. In fct, they contained a security kit, allowing Greenwald to install a bsaic encrypted chat program."
So in Greenwald's book, the email comes from "the tech person" on May 11 to expect a package. In Harding's book, the email comes from Poitras herself but earlier, in April. Of course, both could be true, and Greenwald is leaving Poitras out of the story now for some reason, just like he's leaving out Appelbaum's name.
(BTW, this is an awful shaggy dog story about the FedEx being stopped at customs, and it's hard to know what it's really all about -- perhaps it's meant to establish that both US and Brazilian customs had the means of communicating with Snowden in their hands in the mail system, and evidence of Greenwald's involvement with an NSA hacker that early, yet let it go through, i.e. are to blame in some way.)
It seems there is a discrepancy in the descriptions about when Greenwald met with Poitras first to really discuss all this with her as well.
In Harding's book, this is the account:
"In late March she returned to the States. From here she sent Greenwald a message, suggesting that they meet face to face, without any electronics.
Greenwald was already due to fly to New York to give a talk to the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR), the Muslim civil rights organisation. The pair met in the lobby of Greenwald's hotel, the Marriott in Yonkers -- an unlikely, 'horrible' venue for what was to be the first step of the most significant leak i nUS intelligence history.
Poitras showed Greenwald two emails. She didn't know the unknown source had already tried to reach Greenwald himself. Was he real? Or an imposter, trying to entrap her?
[...]
In another email Snowden said that the 'hard part' of pulling the document was over, but that a different dangerous phase was beginning. "I could sense the stakes," says Poitras. 'He was very worried about his friends and family being implicated. He didn't want to remain anonymous. He didn't want other people to take the fall.'
[...]
By late spring 2013, the idea of a conclusive meeting was in the air.
'I need six to eight weeks to get ready to do this," Snowden wrote.What exactly the 'this' meant was still tantalising unclear. Poitras returned to Berlin. Greenwald returned to Rio. He got on with his life. The shadowy source wsa interesting. But -- as is so often the case with journalistic leads -- the 'this coul dhave been less lluring than it seemed: one of journalism's many false starts. 'I didn't sit around fantasising about it. He could be fake," Greenwald says. As the weeks went by it seemed less rather than more likely that something would happen. 'I gvae it almost no thought. I really wasn't focused on it at all.'
So the CAIR speech in Yonkers is April 20.
Here's Greenwald's version now:
On January 28, 2013, I emailed C. to say that I would get someone to help me with encryption and hopefully would have it done within the next day or so.
C. replied the next day: "That’s great news! If you need any further help or have questions in the future, you will always be welcome to reach out. Please accept my sincerest thanks for your support of communications privacy! Cincinnatus."
But yet again, I did nothing, consumed as I was at the time with other stories, and still unconvinced that C. had anything worthwhile to say. There was no conscious decision to do nothing. It was simply that on my always too-long list of things to take care of, installing encryption technology at the behest of this unknown person never became pressing enough for me to stop other things and focus on it.
C. and I thus found ourselves in a Catch-22. He was unwilling to tell me anything specific about what he had, or even who he was and where he worked, unless I installed encryption. But without the enticement of specifics, it was not a priority to respond to his request and take the time to install the program.
In the face of my inaction, C. stepped up his efforts. He produced a ten-minute video entitled PGP for Journalists. Using software that generates a computer voice, the video instructed me in an easy, step-by-step fashion how to install encryption software, complete with charts and visuals.
Still I did nothing. It was at that point that C., as he later told me, become frustrated. "Here am I," he thought, "ready to risk my liberty, perhaps even my life, to hand this guy thousands of Top Secret documents from the nation’s most secretive agency—a leak that will produce dozens if not hundreds of huge journalistic scoops. And he can’t even be bothered to install an encryption program."
That’s how close I came to blowing off one of the largest and most consequential national security leaks in US history.
The next I heard of any of this was ten weeks later. On April 18, I flew from my home in Rio de Janeiro to New York, where I was scheduled to give some talks on the dangers of government secrecy and civil liberties abuses done in the name of the War on Terror.
On landing at JFK Airport, I saw that I had an email message from Laura Poitras, the documentary filmmaker, which read: "Any chance you’ll be in the US this coming week? I’d love to touch base about something, though best to do in person." [...]
At JFK, reading Laura’s email, I replied immediately: "Actually, just got to the US this morning. . . . Where are you?" We arranged a meeting for the next day, in the lobby at my hotel in Yonkers, a Marriott, and found seats in the restaurant, At Laura’s insistence, we moved tables twice before beginning our conversation to be sure that nobody could hear us. Laura then got down to business. She had an "extremely important and sensitive matter" to discuss, she said, and security was critical.
Note the difference between the first version, where Poitras sends an email in March, and Greenwald tells her plenty in advance that he is coming to NYC for lectures (and we know that was April 20 -- there was a subsequent one at the Massachusetts ACLU as well) -- and the second version, where Greenwald lands in New York already and then Laura simultaneously contacts him. None of this "gosh, whaddya know, what a coincence, I'm here already" in the first version that he has now in his own version.
Why?
Maybe Harding got the month wrong. Maybe Greenwald wanted to play down the fact that lots more communication was taking place in March when Snowden is about to steal documents.
Even if Harding got the month wrong, there's still the sequencing -- that first comes and email from Poitras, then comes the meeting later -- not nearly simultaneously.
Were there two meetings with Poitras? That seems unlikely but could be researched.
Most likely the two were repeatedly in touch via email, and in fact the encryption did happen earlier and they really did talk to Snowden substantively in March and April. And that means they had more input into what he stole, and he had more input into what they should leak first, than any of them are telling us.
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