room at the Mira hotel from June 3 to June 9", 2013, as the event was actually unfolding

19 room at the Mira hotel from June 3 to June 9", 2013, as the event was actually unfolding. Snowden, speaking for the camera, describes himself as a civilian contractor for the National Security Agency. He took full responsibility for the theft of classified documents, saying that he had acted alone. He said that he had been forced to take these documents to expose a crime that threatened the freedom of Americans: the US government’s illegal surveillance of US citizens. He said that he had a duty to bring this secret activity to the attention of the American people. “Sitting on his unmade bed—white sheets and covers, white headboard, white bathrobe, white skin—Snowden seems like a figure in some obscure ritual, being readied for sacrifice,” George Packer wrote about the film in a widely-read article in The New Yorker. He said repeatedly he was willing to make the ultimate sacrifice, by allowing himself to go to prison, so that Americans could live in freedom. A large part of the public, who viewed this powerful film, including many of my colleagues in journalism whose writing I greatly respect, came to accept Snowden’s whistle- blowing narrative. This powerful narrative, as lucidly articulated by Poitras, Greenwald and other Snowden supporters, described the NSA activities exposed by Snowden as part of a vast criminal conspiracy involving, among others, President Obama, James Clapper, the Director of National Intelligence and both Democrat and Republican members of the Congressional oversight committees. It further derided claims that there was evidence that Snowden’s theft of NSA secrets went beyond exposing government misdeeds as part of an orchestrated effort to demonize Snowden. The purpose of this demonization was to divert away from the government’s crimes. For example, this narrative asserted as if it was established fact, that US government officials had deliberately “trapped” Snowden in Russia. According to Snowden, the purpose of this government ploy was to “demonize” him. To be sure, it is not unprecedented for the government to release defamatory information about individuals who have embarrassed US intelligence by defecting. When two NSA analysts, William Martin and Bernon Mitchell, defected to Russia in the 1960s and accused the NSA of violating international law after arriving in Moscow, U.S. government officials responded by putting out the story that they were homosexual lovers, which was both untrue and irrelevant to the intelligence secrets that they compromised. So it is certainly possible that the government put out information to intentionally defame Snowden. Secretary of State John Kerry, after all, characterized him as a coward who should “man up” by returning to the United States. While one can discount such characterizations against him by government officials as demonization, as I do, one cannot as easily dismiss the independent evidence that undermines Snowden assertion that his sole motive was blowing the whistle on illicit surveillance in the United States. For example, by the Lawfare Institute in cooperation with The Brookings Institution in 2014 did an independent analysis of all the published documents that Snowden provided to the media. It concluded that, with some notable exceptions, such as the two documents initially published by the Guardian and Washington Post, the now famous FISA HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_020171