The Man Who Knows Too Much

Glenn Greenwald is trying to lose fifteen pounds. “Um, it’s been a little crazy these past nine months,” he says. “And I will eat French fries or potato chips if they’re in front of me.” On his porch, perched on a jungle mountaintop in Rio, the morning is fresh. Greenwald, in board shorts and a collared short-sleeve shirt, has done his daily hour’s worth of yoga and attached himself to one of his five laptops as his dozen dogs yap and wag to begin the day’s circus in his monkey-and-macaw paradise.

To put it simply, Greenwald has had one hell of a dizzying run. The Bourne plotline is familiar now: In late 2012, a shady contact calling himself Cincinnatus reached out via e-mail with the urgent desire to reveal some top-secret documents. As a blogger, author, and relentless commentator on all things related to the NSA, Greenwald had been here before. He figured it was a setup, or nut job, and disregarded the message. The source then contacted Greenwald’s friend Laura Poitras, an Academy Award-nominated documentary filmmaker, and sent along a sample of encrypted documents. Poitras got in touch with Greenwald immediately: Not only did this seem like a potential jackpot, she said, but Cincinnatus wouldn’t go ahead until Greenwald had been looped in.

Soon, per the source’s instructions, they were on a plane to Hong Kong. Greenwald and Poitras did exactly as they were told, showing up at the Mira hotel at 10:20 a.m. on June 3, in front of a giant plastic alligator, looking for a man holding a Rubik’s Cube. “I thought he would be a 60-year-old senior NSA guy,” says Greenwald. And then here’s this pale, stringbeany kid with glasses, “looking all of twentysomething.” This, of course, was the 29-year-old NSA contractor Edward Snowden. Once they retired to his hotel room, he turned over an estimated tens of thousands of documents, the vast majority of them classified “Top Secret,” comprising arguably the biggest leak of classified material in U.S. history. After days of intensive work with Greenwald and Poitras, Snowden fled—just minutes ahead of the press—only to reappear in Moscow.

“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…”

This left Greenwald with the most exhilarating and daunting task of his career: to figure out how to curate and publish the vast Snowden archive in his Brazilian self-exile. Once he began, his work triggered an avalanche of articles that branded him a hero, a traitor, a collaborator. In one fell swoop, he had piqued and scandalized and provoked the world into a deeper debate about not just surveillance and privacy but power and truth. The odyssey eventually led him from The Guardian, where the first articles appeared revealing the NSA’s secret surveillance of Verizon records, to his central position in Pierre Omidyar’s $250 million muckraking gambit known as First Look Media and The Intercept, where Greenwald is figurehead, main attraction, and blogitor-in-chief.

Just a week before returning to the U.S. for the first time since last June to accept the Polk Award with Poitras (he also shared this year’s Pulitzer Prize for Public Service)—and with a new book slated to be released in mid-May entitled No Place to Hide—Greenwald took time out of his relentless schedule over three days in April to talk with GQ. In person, Greenwald, 47, is both more affable and happier than he comes across in television interviews, where in shirt and tie he appears as the ever sober-and-serious collegiate debater, ready to blow up his opponents, which he frequently does with drone-like precision. Rather than imbuing his contradictory arguments with that rumpled, hungover Hitchensian grandeur, Greenwald is an aggressive battering ram—offering breathless, unapologetic, attorney-like deconstructions of the issues at hand, while calling out everyone from The New York Times to Hillary Clinton.

What was your first impression of Snowden?
I first started talking to Snowden, sitting right at this table, by chat on the computer. People e-mail you and say, “Oh, I have a huge story,” and you read it and it’s like, this is the ranting of a crazy person. So once I was encrypted, which took a while, I just kept insisting that he send me some sampling of what he had. So he sent me two dozen extraordinary documents. And I remember, I mean, I literally just physiologically couldn’t breathe. As I was reading them, I had to keep stopping and running around the house and telling [my partner] David what I had. I was half celebrating but half freaking out, because I started, for the first time, to realize the potential of what this was.

Even when we got to Hong Kong, I did have a big fear that this was all going to be bullshit. Why would you assume that it’s going to actually all work out exactly the way you hoped it would? It never does, right? So even though I’d seen the documents that Laura had, I still was concerned about who this guy was. When we first met him at the hotel, it was just more confusion—definitely like there’s something really wrong, really strange here. This is not what I was expecting at all. Why would a person this age have access to this kind of information?

What were those moments like when you went back up to his room?
Laura just started filming, because that’s what Laura does. We’re sitting in a small room, and we just tried to have some pleasantries, like, “How was the trip?” And it just… Everyone was so tense. So the only thing to do was to dive right in to the substance. And that was absolutely my tactic. I was just going to pound the shit out of him with the hardest questions I could. Not let him take a break, because I needed to know that he wasn’t someone impetuously throwing his life away. I wanted to know why he was willing to risk his whole life for this political ideal. How Snowden was perceived [by the public] was going to matter a lot for the story. So I was able to really interrogate him for like five or six hours, until I realized, no, actually he is a very independent thinker and extremely knowledgeable, and I got his whole biography.

He said his parents were Republicans, that he enlisted in the military and got injured in a training accident. He doesn’t come across as unstable or completely alienated and weird. He’s not acting out of anger at the world for rejecting him. There’s a normalcy to him, an unassuming humility that people can relate to, or at least not feel threatened by.

You mention in your book that Snowden’s moral universe was first informed by video games.
In Hong Kong, Snowden told me that at the heart of most video games is an ordinary individual who sees some serious injustice, right? Like some person who’s been kidnapped and you’ve got to rescue them, or some evil force that has obtained this weapon and you’ve got to deactivate it or kill them or whatever. And it’s all about figuring out ways to empower yourself as an ordinary person, to take on powerful forces in a way that allows you to undermine them in pursuit of some public good. Even if it’s really risky or dangerous. That moral narrative at the heart of video games was part of his preadolescence and formed part of his moral understanding of the world and one’s obligation as an individual.

Did you like him from the start?
After the initial awkwardness, I was surprised by how much I liked him. I didn’t expect that. I didn’t know that we were going to be so compatible and friendly and this bond was going to develop. I mean, yeah, he’s funny. He has a very dry sense of humor. Even now, every time one of us says something a little bit risqué, even just joking, it’s always like, “That’s definitely going into your indictment.” In Hong Kong, we would say, “I get the top bunk at Gitmo.”

What has been your philosophy with the archive?
I knew from the start that I was going to be super-aggressive with how it got reported. If I had a document about Norway or Brazil, I was going to try to team with a journalist in those places. I knew that I wasn’t going to abide by the normal rules that the U.S. government has told media outlets they have to abide by if they want to do this stuff without being prosecuted. I knew I was going to cross those lines, because I don’t believe in those lines.

And so it wasn’t so much that I knew that I had this huge archive and could get in trouble for having it, it was more that I knew that what I was about to do and the way that I wanted to do it was going to be extremely controversial and would create legal risks. But then, I admired Snowden’s example, the risks that he had rushed headlong into. To worry over my own risks—or limit them—would have just been untenable, psychologically, for me.

How much more is there to release—and what burden do you feel to get it out there?
We published the first article [about the NSA collecting Verizon phone records] while I was in Hong Kong last June and won’t stop until we’re done. I think we will end the big stories in about three months or so [June or July 2014]. I like to think of it as a fireworks show: You want to save your best for last. There’s a story that from the beginning I thought would be our biggest, and I’m saving that. The last one is the one where the sky is all covered in spectacular multicolored hues. This will be the finale, a big missing piece. Snowden knows about it and is excited about it.

Afterwards, there’ll be more to release—I made a promise to Snowden that we’d get as much of the archive out as possible—but I think the big media splashes will probably be over. But it takes time. We’re reporting on stories right now, finding things in the archive still that we’re trying to corroborate. We have one reporter who has done nothing but read documents, trying to cross-reference and make connections, every day since November.

Sometimes people think that, like, we have the entire NSA archive and that we can just go in and pick whatever we want at any moment and just report it. We don’t have the entire NSA archive. We have snippets of the NSA archive. Some things we have a pretty comprehensive look at, because there’s a lot of proximity to that program and Snowden’s access and what he was doing. Other things were much more remote, and he was only able to grab portions of things. So we have kind of a fractured window into some things that needs to be connected to other things, where reporting needs to be done for us to get the full picture in order to report it. But yes, I feel a ton of pressure to get these documents out into the world. Somebody has risked their liberty to give me all these documents, with the intention of informing the world about what is being done. And every day that I don’t work on the archive, I feel a little bit guilty. Like, I’ve almost failed in my obligation, right?

If Snowden had been nabbed before you guys had completed the full transfer in Hong Kong, did he have a backup plan? 
Oh yeah. I don’t want to say what his specific plans were. I don’t actually even know them all. But yeah, he had multiple plans, Plan A, Plan B, Plan C, Plan D, Plan E, Plan F contingencies, because he was determined this story was going to get reported no matter what happened, no matter how extreme people got, no matter how unanticipated the events were—that there was no stopping the information from getting out. And I mean, that’s still true. Like, he still has plans for that.

But he claims he doesn’t have anything now—and nothing to offer Russia, for instance?
He says he has nothing with him. The only reason he’s in Russia is that the U.S. blocked his attempt to go to Ecuador. Russia is planning on extending his visa either for another year or for five years or maybe even permanently. But it’s an odd situation, because he’s obviously expressed interest in having asylum in other places. At the same time, if you’re him, I think it’s sort of a bird-in-the-hand mentality, that you want permanent asylum somewhere, because you know that the U.S. is desperate to get ahold of you.

We actually created a pretty widespread campaign here for Brazil to give him asylum. I’ve always had an amusing dream: to take a picture of the two of us drinking caipirinhas on Ipanema beach and then uploading it to Instagram, and then tweeting it, and causing this systemic massive-heart-attack syndrome in Fort Meade.

Do you know how he got all this stuff?
What he did is so fucking audacious, but it wasn’t actually that technologically complicated. It didn’t really take technical brilliance. It took some adeptness, some skill, to figure out how to do it without getting detected. He just took advantage of a system that was not very thorough. One of the most ironic, underappreciated points of this whole episode is the NSA’s ability to convince people to trust them with this incredibly massive power—”Oh, don’t worry, we have all these really extremely rigorous oversight provisions to make sure that this isn’t abused.” And yet he did this right under their fucking noses—and they still have no idea what he took.

It’s one thing to think about the possibility of doing it. But there’s usually something in your brain that tells you that that’s way too big, you’re going to get caught, or it’s not actually going to change anything. But to disregard that voice and say: “I believe that actually even I, Edward Snowden, who’s 29 and who grew up poor and who has no family connections and no power and is totally ordinary, that I actually can do something on this scale that can create this worldwide earthquake.”

What was your good-bye like in Hong Kong?
It was definitely sad, but at the same time I was consciously aware of the fact that that was going to inevitably and imminently happen the whole time, which was a weird feeling, right? Like you’re bonding with this person. And at the same time, I was really worried about what was going to happen to him. I felt very impotent. I couldn’t do anything to help him, really.

Once we revealed that Snowden was Snowden in that [Guardian article] with the video interview and said we were reporting from Hong Kong, the entire media world descended on Hong Kong and then started searching for us. And so we had to get him out of his hotel, because he was about to be found.

Did it feel like you were really racing the media to get him out of that room?
Oh yeah, we were racing the media to get him out of that room. In fact, we probably beat them by like twenty minutes. They were bribing everybody; they were bribing the entire city. I mean, it’s funny how scumbaggy the media horde can be. Like, that morning when I woke up and I found them all outside my door, I knew it was only a matter of time before they found Snowden’s room. He was all calm about it and said, “I’ll just change my appearance.” He was ready to shave his head and put on a wig.

It was crucial that he controlled his own image. Had the first footage of him been as a prisoner, it would have changed everything, the way it was with Chelsea Manning. But also, had the media found him that day and had he been running out of his hotel with his hand covering his face, you know, any of that kind of stuff would have completely undermined the image he had cultivated for himself.

How often are you in touch now?
We were just talking now. Sometimes we miss a day or neither of us are online at the same time. But yeah, very regularly, with encrypted chat.

What did you talk about today?
One of the big controversies at first was this claim that Snowden made early on, about how any analyst sitting at their desk can eavesdrop and wiretap the president if they have a personal e-mail account. And he remembered, and then found, this 2009 article from the Times saying that an NSA analyst had been investigated because he’d improperly accessed the personal e-mail of Bill Clinton. So I just tweeted that.

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