The Man Who Knows Too Much

 [Continued from folio 1]

 

What do you think would happen if Snowden were to fly from, say, Moscow to New York today?
I think it would be a huge media circus, and then he would be instantly arrested and probably rendered incommunicado for the entire duration of his judicial proceeding on the grounds that he has classified information that could damage the United States. The prosecutors would say he would have to be kept away from media. He would just be disappeared. Rendered completely invisible and mute.

When Daniel Ellsberg was on trial [for leaking the Pentagon Papers], he was allowed to speak out and defend himself. Which is why Ellsberg wrote an op-ed in The Washington Post last July saying Snowden was absolutely right to flee, because America has changed so drastically. Snowden would never be released on bail and would never get a fair trial.

What do you say to people who believe that what the NSA is doing is really just the price we pay for our national security? Or people who say, “Why should I be worried? I have nothing to hide.”
They know that what they’re saying is such bullshit. Some things you want to hide because they are wrong—like if you’re stealing or you’re plotting to blow things up. But there are a lot of things you want to hide that aren’t remotely about wrongdoing. And everybody knows as much, because they put passwords on their e-mail accounts and social-media accounts. They wouldn’t give out lists of every website they visit or print out every chat they’ve had. That’s because we all do things in private that we don’t want other people to know about. It’s just how we are as human beings: We divide our psychic world between behavior that we want to display publicly and behavior that we’re only willing to engage in privately.

I think there was once a statistic about the Internet that showed that 70 percent of the commerce was sex-related. So if you can monitor what everybody is doing on the Internet at all times, of course pretty much everybody is going to do something they don’t want other people to know about. And that gives you great power over that person, if you do know.

What do you think the biggest illusions are about the various roles that you and Snowden have played in all of these revelations?
I think that there’s this ridiculous effort to attribute every leak to Snowden in terms of what he decided to publish or when he decided to publish it. It gets framed as “Snowden’s latest leak” or “Why did Snowden decide to leak this?” But he actually plays very little role in making decisions about what gets published. I make all those decisions myself. I consult with him—because what I publish reflects on him or affects his legal situation. But he doesn’t play any decision-making role at all in that process. So that’s a huge misconception.

On the other hand, some people assume that he’s played less of a role in how the reporting gets done. I mean, at the beginning he had very strong ideas for what he wanted to be published and not be published. And a lot of what has happened since then is the by-product of that process. Some people try to depict him as this sort of like reckless leaker and the newspapers, especially the Times and the Post, as the responsible journalists, when in reality, I mean, he’s actually probably been more conservative in thinking about what should he publish than those newspapers have been. I don’t think anyone really appreciates the extent to which that’s true.

That’s consistent with criticism you’ve had about how the archive has been revealed by the Times. 
The only two people that Snowden actually chose to approach were myself and Laura. And he basically chose to approach Laura because he wasn’t able to work with me in the beginning. So pretty much everyone else after that who got documents got them without having a specific relationship with him. Without his knowledge, let alone approval or consent, The Guardian gave a ton of documents to The New York Times and to ProPublica. And so, yeah, I mean, The New York Times has no source relationship with Snowden. It was a conscious choice that he made. And so they pretty much have published stuff that he didn’t think should be published, in a way that he didn’t necessarily think it should have been published. That last story being a perfect example, where he got accused of spilling American secrets about espionage against the Chinese, when in reality he had no role whatsoever to play in the decision to publish that story. They can basically damage his reputation by making choices that he doesn’t agree with and never approved.

In a wider context, can you talk about your well-known objections to the Times?
I think the Times has had a close relationship with the government in the last five to six decades. I mean, it’s interesting, if you go back and read left-leaning media critics during the Vietnam War, they were saying a lot of the same things that left-wing media critics were saying during the Iraq War. That in the wake of 9/11, news-media outlets are disseminating pro-government, pro-war falsehoods by doing nothing more than talking to government officials and laundering their claims as reporting—as though the government is on the editorial board of The New York Times.

Yeah, like the incident you quote in the book about Bill Keller [former executive editor of The New York Times] on the BBC…
Yeah, where he’s boasting about the fact that they don’t publish things without the government being happy with what they’re doing. And it obviously has resulted in the suppression of all kinds of important stories, which is the most inexcusable thing that can happen in journalism. And that has happened repeatedly at the Times. I think they’ve essentially become this mouthpiece for those in power, perhaps not consciously. When I make this critique, people at The New York Times are offended, because they actually don’t believe that it’s happening. And they’re not lying. It’s a more subtle dynamic than the government marching in and issuing memos to the Timesabout what they should and shouldn’t publish. It’s just a cultural approach to the news that basically says that the parameters of what can be discussed and viewed as reasonable are the ones that are endorsed by the most powerful financial and political factions in New York and Washington. They’re reflecting the mind-set of those elite groups rather than challenging them or confronting them. Obviously there are exceptions. There’s some good journalists there; they do some good journalism; they’ve done some adversarial journalism. It’s not an absolute, pure, constant, all-consuming formula. But in general, that’s become the posture of the Times.

You call out a few other names in this book, including David Gregory and Tim Russert. Why are these guys targets in your mind?
I think most TV journalists, like all those Sunday-talk-show hosts like David Gregory and Bob Schieffer and George Stephanopoulos, to a lesser extent—the whole kind of dynamic of those Sunday shows is to ensure that the most powerful people come on their shows, which they accomplish by giving them a platform to basically spew what they want in an unchallenged manner. I mean, there’s the appearance of adversarial questioning, but it’s all very reverent.

You write that when Cheney wanted to get his message out, he’d go on Meet the Press.
Right, and that was with Tim Russert, who was depicted as hard-nosed. You know, like everyone was petrified of him. When he died, Lewis Lapham described him as the overaccommodating head waiter at some really swanky restaurant who’s just really good at ass-kissing every rich person who comes into the door. And that was Tim Russert—which is why they all loved Tim Russert, right? Because the benefit of Tim Russert was that not only did he let them control the message, but he cast the appearance that they were subjected to really rigorous questioning. So it was the extra bonus of propagandizing while convincing the public that they weren’t being propagandized. And so I think all those TV hosts do that, and I think that most major newspapers are incredibly deferential to high-level government officials, and especially to military and intelligence officials.

So that goes with your concept of adversarial journalism—and the fact that you’re sitting here on your porch in Rio, not having lunch with anybody in D.C. right now, not having lunch with anybody in Manhattan.
And I don’t want to be, either! This is why I’m so optimistic about the future of journalism, based on what the Internet has permitted. I do think it is a huge change that the journalists who have been at the center of what everybody already knows is the biggest story of the year, if not the decade—meaning myself and Laura—didn’t go to journalism school. We didn’t intern at The New York Times or The Washington Post. We didn’t go to work for one of the five or six big media corporations that impose the standard set of orthodoxies about how you write and think. And we didn’t attach ourselves to those institutions. We didn’t make ourselves dependent upon the standard range of sources. And then, once I was in the position where people wanted to hire, basically, my blog, I was able to negotiate full editorial independence. So I’ve been able to forge my career, not only without depending on any of those processes and those people, but staying as far away from them as I can. I have zero incentive to avoid alienating them.

Tell me how First Look and The Intercept are going to be different.
What convinced me that Pierre [Omidyar] wanted to create something completely different [with First Look and The Intercept] was that if he wanted to just replicate The New York Times and The Washington Post, he could have just gone and bought one of those—and he almost did buy The Washington Post and, at the last minute, realized he’d rather take this $250 million and create a completely new structure from scratch, rather than buying this institution, with all of its existing baggage, that probably would be really hard to reform and change.

One thing we’ve instituted is this secure drop [for anonymously passed leaks and tips]. It’s a way of saying: This is the process that we want to not only support but strengthen. We want to give people a mechanism to provide this kind of information. There’s this incredibly vindictive assault on whistle-blowers, because it’s one of the very few avenues left that the government can’t completely control. In an ideal world, you wouldn’t need whistle-blowers who do unauthorized leaks. They would go to Congress; they would inform Congress of wrongdoing; Congress would act. But none of that actually happens. And so that’s why I see this as such an important innovation. And we want to do a lot more in the way of privacy technology like this to enable people who want to come to journalists with important stories to be able to do it in a safe way.

Do you see yourself as a patriot?
It all depends on what you mean by patriot. I try hard… To the extent that patriot means you have allegiance to your country in a way that makes you view the world through a prism of its interests and through allegiance to it, that’s a definition I consciously try to reject, particularly as a journalist. So when I weigh whether a story should be published or not, I try hard not to give added weight to the interests of Americans and the United States, as opposed to other people in the world. I think that one of my obligations is to remove myself from my nationalistic identity and not view journalistic choices through that prism, which a lot of people probably think is unpatriotic. But to the extent that patriotism means a belief in and a defense of the defining values of your country, I actually do think the work that I do meets that definition.

What other adjectives would you apply to your work?
Independent, fearless, provocative, interesting. Definitely adversarial.

Was there a formative moment in your childhood that might’ve cast you in the adversarial role?
Being gay was a big part of that process. I grew up gay in the ’70s and ’80s, when things were obviously much different than they are now. There was no gay culture for a gay teen in an American suburb, at all. The overriding message was there’s something wrong with you, there’s something inside of you that’s just wrong. It’s broken. It’s bad. It’s diseased. And so it’s a pretty harsh message to internalize when you’re, like, 11. It leaves you with three different options.

One is you just keep internalizing it and keep internalizing it and tell yourself that you’re this horrible, diseased, broken person. And that’s why gay teens kill themselves. Another strategy is to say I’m going to try and convince you that you’re wrong, right? I’m going to show you that I’m actually really normal in every other way. That’s the gay lobby in D.C., who are just, like, so intent on proving that they’re exactly like straight people in every single other way, so please accept us. And then, I think, a third strategy is just to say, You know what? Go fuck yourself. I’m going to be the one to impose judgments on you, and let’s examine the propriety of your behavior instead.

How did that play out?
I was always identified as the smart kid or whatever. But I had disciplinary problems starting in seventh, eighth grade. I would just start arguing with teachers. I realized that my ability to reason and debate were superior to theirs. Like, I would end up winning the debate even though I would be in detention. That kind of made the process of the injustice more acute. I had the better argument, I was actually right, but because they had the power, I ended up being the one who got punished, even though they should have been. And it just intensified my sense of grievance and anger. When I joined the debate team in high school, I won a bunch of awards, and it became really empowering.

What’s the Platonic ideal for a journalist? If you can just close your eyes and imagine this thing you’re doing, what does it look like twenty years from now?
The thing is, I don’t actually think there is one Platonic, pure way of doing journalism. I think the public and the political culture benefits from different forms of journalism that expose different kinds of things. But for me, the core of journalism is that it provides a check on people who we empower, by making certain that they can’t hide the corrupt and abusive things they do with that power. People wield power in all sorts of different ways. It can be local police officers. It can be the CIA. It can be school administrators. It can be corrupt corporations. All forms of human power are susceptible to abuse and likely to be abused, and transparency—shining a light on that which they’re trying to hide and that shouldn’t be hidden—is one critical way of evening the playing field. And that, to me, is what journalism in its purest essence is about.

Do you really believe you’ll be arrested or served a subpoena?
I have lawyers who are extremely well-connected at the Justice Department who usually can, with one phone call, get Holder on the phone. And they actually have gotten the people they wanted to get on the phone. And those people have been very unusually unforthcoming about what their thinking is or what’s happening, even to the extent of not being willing to tell them whether there’s already an indictment filed under seal or whether there’s a grand jury investigation impaneled or anything else. Like, they clearly want me to linger in this state of uncertainty.

And what’s even stranger about it is, you would think they would view that as an opportunity, right? Like, “He’s coming back and wants assurances that he won’t be arrested at the border,” which is an implicit invitation to talk about what might need to happen in order for that to happen. There’s all kinds of things you would expect them to ask for. They would never get it, I would never agree to that, but they could ask for an accounting of the documents Snowden gave me, which they still don’t know. They could, they should, ask me to just turn over everything I have and certify under oath that I no longer have any copies or won’t disclose any more documents. Right? Why not ask for that? That I testify against Snowden in a confidential grand jury proceeding. I mean, there’s lots of things you would expect them to say, but they purposely haven’t, because they want me to linger in this state of uncertainty—to the extent that even my lawyers have said it’s extremely unusual for them to act that way. [Ed note: Greenwald returned without incident to the U.S. on April 11. He and Laura Poitras were awarded Polk and Pulitzer prizes for their work published in The Guardian. Attorney General Eric Holder was quoted in a Washington Post article saying he has no plans to prosecute.]

Can you talk about the difference between fear and fearlessness?
To me, fear is like the most corrosive state of mind there is. And usually fears are about things that don’t actually exist and that aren’t real. And so I think fearlessness, meaning not allowing yourself to be limited by fears of things that aren’t real, is the most important state of being you can have. That’s the most empowering thing there is.

I’m thinking of the classic elementary-school-fight scenario.
Like, you’re gonna end up getting punched in the face a few times or whatever. And that fear is probably valid, right? There’s a good chance that’s going to happen. But then something gets attached to that that makes it so much worse than it really is, right? Like, “I’m gonna be humiliated, I’m gonna be embarrassed,” it’s going to be so much worse than it actually is, and your brain starts telling you that this is something that you have to avoid at all costs, that just cannot happen. And then you become so attached to the idea that it can’t happen that you become consumed by fear, because now it’s become so much bigger than it really is. In reality, what would it be? It would be a little bit of pain that might last a couple of hours. You get punched a few times by somebody who’s stronger than you, and then you move on with your life.

End of Folio 2 
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Note: You can also read this article at the original site HERE. 

[Continued from Folio 2]

 

I think what I realized is, there’s a lot to fear, but there’s actually very little that we need or can’t be without. I think once you kind of let go of the things you cling to no matter what and that you’re petrified of losing, that’s when you become a lot more powerful.

How does fear manifest itself with you? Like, what happens when you feel it?
Um, I mean, I just find myself drifting to a scenario—like, what it would be like if I get arrested, what it would look like, what it would feel like, what my physical environment would be. Just trying to game that all out. So you’re just walking down the street, and all of a sudden you’re imagining a twenty-year prison sentence for violation of the Espionage Act, right, where you’re convicted, and then your only other hope—like every other prisoner in the massive American prison leviathan—is some unseen appellate court that’s probably going to reject everything you say in like, three paragraphs, and then you’re just going to be confined to prison for the next twenty years, and how long twenty years would feel like. You know, you go through the whole scenario in your head, which is basically living negative outcomes that aren’t here, and then that in turn starts making you doubt whether or not you’re making the right choice.

Which is when your stomach goes into knots.
No, exactly. But I mean, at the same time, I don’t think courage is about an absence of fear; I think it’s about taking action despite fear, right? So I think it would be unhealthy and stupid of me to get on a plane back to America without contemplating all of those things, because in the event that they do happen, I want to be prepared.

And for the book tour, I’ve taken every precaution. Like, I have lawyers in every city. I have a whole chain of things that are going to happen if anything goes wrong, with all the right people who are immediately involved. So I’ve protected myself as best as I can.

How do you feel about the early presidential jockeying?
Hillary is banal, corrupted, drained of vibrancy and passion. I mean, she’s been around forever, the Clinton circle. She’s a fucking hawk and like a neocon, practically. She’s surrounded by all these sleazy money types who are just corrupting everything everywhere. But she’s going to be the first female president, and women in America are going to be completely invested in her candidacy. Opposition to her is going to be depicted as misogynistic, like opposition to Obama has been depicted as racist. It’s going to be this completely symbolic messaging that’s going to overshadow the fact that she’ll do nothing but continue everything in pursuit of her own power. They’ll probably have a gay person after Hillary who’s just going to do the same thing.

I hope this happens so badly, because I think it’ll be so instructive in that regard. It’ll prove the point. Americans love to mock the idea of monarchy, and yet we have our own de facto monarchy. I think what these leaks did is, they demonstrated that there really is this government that just is the kind of permanent government that doesn’t get affected by election choices and that isn’t in any way accountable to any sort of democratic transparency and just creates its own world off on its own.

Once the story shifted from Snowden to you, did you find yourself destabilized by the sudden attacks, the charges of traitor and the like?
If you’re a journalist, you say, “I want to challenge the powerful.” And I think it’s really easy to say that without actually thinking about what it means. Once the NSA fully understood the picture of what I intended to do, I knew that the attacks were going to be coordinated and very substantial, because that’s the nature of power, right? If they didn’t do that back to me, they wouldn’t be powerful.

What do your parents make of all of this?
They’re pretty typical parents, half supportive and half concerned. My father’s pretty conservative politically. He doesn’t really care about foreign policy or civil liberties. He mostly cares just about taxes. He’s an accountant. He believes taxes should be low. And you know, ordinarily what I’m doing would not be the kind of thing that he would support overall—taking a bunch of secrets from the government and just publishing them against their wishes, right? But it is interesting to watch the impulse of supporting your child overwhelm any kind of ideological resistance to it. So he’s been very supportive, but also very concerned. And my mother has been more of the same thing, very supportive but very concerned. Like, they think I shouldn’t come back to the U.S.

What is the nature of the threats you’ve received?
I get threatening e-mails, a few a week. But the threats I take much more seriously are the ones that are intended to be threats from people like James Clapper and Keith Alexander and Mike Rogers—you know, overt threats of prosecution and criminalization.

You mentioned before that you grew up poor. Can you describe what your childhood was like?
My father was a CPA, so he wasn’t super poor. But my parents divorced when I was 6. So my father moved out and remarried, and my mother was a typical 1960s, 1970s housewife who hadn’t gone to college. She had kids, didn’t have a career, didn’t work. She was a housewife. And so once my parents got divorced, my mother needed to work, because the child support and alimony that she was getting from my father was very minimal, and he then started having financial difficulties, because he had a second family that he was… You know, standard, typical kind of divorce situation. And so she was doing the only jobs she could. She worked for, like, two years as a cashier at McDonald’s, and I remember she would take home huge bags of those little scratch games where if you bought a Big Mac, you would get one of the things, and you would scratch it, and you could win a “Buy one Coke, get another Coke free,” or sometimes you’d win $5 or a $20 credit. So she would steal, like, thousands of them, and we would sit at the table, my brother and her. There was some big prize—$5,000 or whatever. And we would just scratch them all off and put them in little piles, and that was pretty much how we would eat. I wasn’t starving poor. I wasn’t living in an inner city. But it was very lower-middle-class to poor. There was no discretionary money. You know, there was just enough money to pay basic bills. And I think the sensation of poverty was enhanced because I went to this school with mostly rich kids. So there would be, like, field trips to Europe that they went on and I couldn’t. They all got cars, and I didn’t. Their houses were all nice, and mine was really old and dirty. So it felt probably more enhanced, even, than it really was.

And now your book has sold in twenty-four countries, so you’ve got these book advances, the job at The Intercept, and all sorts of other income sources.
There’s a movie deal. Somebody’s doing a movie.

I was gonna ask you about that. Do they have people attached?
We’re just signing the contract now. I mean, the producer who’s spearheading the project is Barbara Broccoli, whose father did all the Bond films, and she now produces the Bond films. So I was actually a little worried about that, because James Bond is stupid. But I haven’t seen her films, so I shouldn’t say that, but that’s my impression from a distance. But she’s a big mover in Hollywood, which is apparently important to, like, get a film done. And we want the film to be done, because, for me, like, when I was a kid, I was obsessed with All the President’s Men, the film. And you know, the ability to reach huge numbers of people who don’t stay online reading political writing is really important to everything we’ve done. [Ed. note: Sony didn’t respond to a request for comment.]

How did you decide to settle in Rio?
It was 2005, and two things happened: I’d gotten out of a really long-term relationship of eleven years, and I’d decided not to practice law anymore. I just wanted to come to Rio for seven weeks, because I wanted to figure out my life—and have fun. So I cleared my calendar, took my dog to a friend’s, rented a place. I got here, I went to bed, woke up, went to the beach right near my house, and that morning David was playing volleyball, and someone in his little volleyball thing hit a ball and almost knocked over my drink, or did knock over part of it. And he ran over to retrieve the ball and apologized, and we started talking and then from that point forward have been inseparable.

Are there moments, sitting here in Rio, when you think, How did I get here, in the middle of this firestorm?
Yeah, there’s a surreality to it, right? It’s been so global in scope. One of the things I used to love about being here was that I could just shut off the computer and all my work would disappear. None of my friends here know or care what I do. But because this story had such an important impact here and I’ve been on TV constantly, I lost all of that. Every time I make a choice to publish a story, it could disrupt diplomatic relations—I mean, it did disrupt diplomatic relations seriously between the U.S. and Brazil, the two largest countries in the hemisphere. And that’s happened in a lot of different places. There is a disconnect between sitting here on this veranda with my dogs, doing my work, and the implications in the world.

Right. You can hit “send” here in the jungle and set off your own nuclear weapon in whatever part of the world.
Right. And that part is difficult, because when everything you’re doing has such high stakes to it, there’s a lot of pressure. It’s why this book was so much harder to write than my prior ones, because I knew, with my prior ones, I was going to sell 30 to 40,000 copies and those books were mostly going to be read by my fans, people who were supportive of the work I was doing. The stakes weren’t high. Whereas this book is highly anticipated. People are going to be poring through it, looking for things to attack—and errors, right? It was just a lot more stressful.

Every journalist has stories where you have to make hard choices, things that you decide that can affect people one way or the other. Those are really stressful. But usually those are in isolation. You have one or two of those a year, right? I mean, I’ve had those every single day for ten months straight. And it isn’t just the countries you’re affecting and the governments you’re affecting, it’s the people with whom you’re working. It’s Snowden and his legal risk. It’s your own legal risks and your reputation, the media outlets who run your work in. I mean, there’s just a lot at stake in every single choice we’re making. And that does become a little bit of a burden.

Do you believe in God?
I mean, I grew up without organized religion. My parents tried to inculcate me a little bit into organized Judaism, but they weren’t particularly devoted to that, and my grandparents were, but it just never took hold. I wasn’t bar mitzvahed or anything. So I never had organized religion. I don’t really like aggressive atheists who are so convinced they know the answers to questions that they don’t actually know the answers to. Like, that level of hubris and certainty bothers me. They think they’re so scientific, and yet they’re asserting things that they don’t actually know without evidence. And I do believe in the spiritual and mystical part of the world. Like, obviously yoga is like a bridge into that, like a window into it. I think other things are as well. But my moral precepts aren’t informed in any way by religious doctrine or, like, organized religion or anything.

The dogs seem to play a huge role in your life.
One of the reasons I love dogs is because I think they perceive the world, things in the world, that we as humans don’t perceive. I think there’s something kind of just spiritual about it. They’re just completely in the experience. And so many times, we as human beings remove ourselves from the present by reliving the past or worrying about a future, neither of which we can control, and we destroy our present, and we lose all the power that we have, the ability to just be. That is really what I learn from dogs. That’s the thing that I would like to apprehend most about dogness.

Do you sometimes kick yourself and say, like, “Let’s get more ‘dog’ right now”?
Yeah, I do. I do. I mean, I really do.

Michael Paterniti (@MikePaterniti) is a GQ correspondent. He is the author of The Telling Room: A Tale of Love, Betrayal, Revenge, and the World’s Greatest Piece of Cheese, which is out this month in paperback.

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