Greenwald flew back to Brazil that day. Soon afterward, he would

96 | HOW AMERICA LOST ITS SECRETS Greenwald flew back to Brazil that day. Soon afterward, he would resign from The Guardian. In February 2014, he became the co- founding editor of The Intercept, an online publication dedicated to investigative journalism, which was backed by the Internet billion- aire Pierre Omidyar. Poitras remained in Hong Kong, where she moved, along with the Guardian reporter MacAskill, to the five-star Sheraton Hong Kong Hotel & Towers, which, like the Mira hotel, was on Nathan Road in Kowloon. The Guardian paid the bill. Her next task was to set up what turned out to be Snowden’s final interview in Hong Kong. It was scheduled for June 12. The journalist chosen was Lana Lam, a young Australian reporter working for the South China Morning Post. Tibbo had suggested Lam to Snowden. She had served as Tibbo’s outlet on previous news stories, and, as he told me, he found her to be a totally reliable jour- nalist. He brought her to Poitras’s suite at the Sheraton in Kowloon. First, Lam had to agree to the conditions of the interview, which included submitting the story to Poitras for Snowden’s approval. ® Next, as Lam put it, Poitras “confiscated” her cell phone. Finally, © after a ten-minute wait, Poitras took her to another room and sat her before a black laptop. The laptop, which had a Tor sticker on it, had on its screen an online chat room where she was connected by Poitras to Snowden. “Hi Lana, thanks for coming for this,” Snowden said from his safe house. He told her that the NSA had intercepted data from at least sixty-one thousand different computers in Hong Kong, China, and elsewhere. To expose what he called America’s “hypocrisy” in accus- ing China of cyber espionage, he supplied her with relevant NSA documents. “Last week the American government happily operated in the shadows with no respect for the consent of the governed, but no longer,” he said. “The United States government has committed a tremendous number of crimes against Hong Kong [and] the People’s Republic of China as well.” Under Poitras’s close supervision, Lam was allowed to ask Snowden more questions about the NSA’s inter- ception of communications in Hong Kong and China. He told her, “I have had many opportunities to flee Hong Kong, but I would rather | | Epst_9780451494566_2p_all_r1.z.indd 96 ® 9/29/16 5:51 Pa | | HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_019584