Escape Artist | 87

Escape Artist | 87 anonymous source in Hong Kong for Gibson. Greenwald accepted her terms. Poitras, who would be accompanying them, would be paying her own way. In case The Guardian failed to publish the story, Snowden had a contingency plan in place. While Greenwald was negotiating with Gibson, Snowden arranged for Micah Lee, Poitras’s associate at the Freedom of the Press Foundation, to build a personal website for him. Writing to Lee from Hong Kong, first under his alias Anon108 and later under his real name, Snowden said that he planned to post his “anti-surveillance manifesto.” He would also use it to post “a global petition against surveillance.” Snowden had Lee name the site “SupportOnlineRights.com.” According to Lee, the website would be built with a “dead man’s switch,” which would automatically trigger the release of NSA documents if Snowden was arrested. It was not clear whether Lee was doing this work as a freelancer or in his capacity as the chief technology officer for the Freedom of the Press Foundation. The website Lee built for Snowden proved unnec- essary when Poitras e-mailed him on June 1 that The Guardian had © approved the trip and she and Greenwald were booked on a Cathay ® Pacific flight to Hong Kong. They would arrive the next day. In his preparation to go public in Hong Kong, Snowden showed himself fully capable of orchestrating what would become a major news story. He not only picked the journalists who would break it but also instructed each of them as to the timing, sequence, and content of their initial disclosures. In the security of his unknown residence in Hong Kong, he also worked to carefully separate the purloined NSA documents into two very different caches. “I care- fully evaluated every single document I disclosed,” Snowden explained to the Guardian journalists in early June. The documents in this first cache were selected to serve what he termed the “pub- lic interest.” In the hands of journalists, these selected documents, and the story he fashioned to accompany them, would burnish his image in the public consciousness as a whistle-blower. He did not turn over the second cache, telling Greenwald, “There are all sorts of documents that would have made a big impact that I didn’t turn over.” By the time he received the message from Poitras, Snowden had | | Epst_9780451494566_2p_all_r1.z.indd 87 ® 9/29/16 5:51 Pa | | HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_019575