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en a year earlier, Unfortunately, that room was occupied, but I was given a nearby room that served my purpose. Snowden had told Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras, the Guardian reporters he met in Hong Kong, that he had hidden out at the Mira hotel since his arrival in Hong Kong because he feared that the CIA m
t necessary), Bolivia, and Ecuador. Yet he did not apply for visas during this time period. Even as late as June 8, after meetings with Greenwald and Poitras, his name had still not been revealed, no criminal complaint had been issued against him, and there was no Interpol red alert for his deten- tion. He
SA might not have been too happy about.” On November 18, 2012, while still working for Dell at the NSA, his dual role led him to begin organizing a “CryptoParty” aimed at finding new recruits for Tor. The CryptoParty movement had been started in 2012 by Asher Wolf, a radical hacktivist and anarchist liv- ing
ournal. Snowden was certainly aware that he would soon be the object of a manhunt that could involve those with whom he was acquainted. He instructed Poitras to mask their e-mail communications in cyber- space “so we don’t have a clue or record of your true name in your file communication chain.” Such prec
eedoms. Within hours of the release of that video on the Guardian website, Snowden was known throughout the world as a courageous whistle-blower. In Laura Poitras’s remarks in accepting her Academy Award for Citizenfour on February 22, 2015, she said that Snowden acted as a whistle-blower not only to “expose a th
d Snowden’s antipathy to NSA surveillance. Cer- tainly, we know that Snowden found other NSA workers who were willing to attend his anti-surveillance CryptoParty in December 2012. Some might be willing to offer Snowden help if he was willing to go public. Indeed, if the geek culture produced one Snowden, why w
h as putting their cell phones in refrigerators, remain visible to a sophisticated intelligence service such as the SVR. All the defensive tactics of Laura Poitras, including PGP encryption, Tor software, and air-gapped computers (computers that have never been connected to the Internet), did not keep secrets ab
rets about her sources entirely to herself. Snowden, at a time when he was stealing NSA secrets in February 2013, went to great lengths to impress on Poitras the need for operational security about his contacts with her, but that injunction did not prevent her from telling at least five people about her so
to keep tabs on possible NSA dissidents. Nor was Snowden himself overly discreet. It will be recalled that he had also advertised his Tor-sponsored CryptoParty activities over the Internet and supplied Runa Sandvik, who worked with Appel- baum, his true name and address in Hawaii. Sandvik had no reason not t
vidently did not want to expose himself to prosecution or defect from the NSA. That was Snowden’s role. By accepting the sole blame in the video that Poitras made about him in Hong Kong, Snowden shielded anyone else from suspicion, which was, as he told Poitras, his purpose. Whoever helped him may still be
“Mini Documentary Reveals Full Extent of ‘Stellarwind’ Domestic Spy Program,” Infowars, Aug. 28, 2012. 62 Poitras had other impressive credentials: “Laura Poitras: Secret No Longer,” New School News, Aug. 14, 2013. 63 “I didn’t. You chose yourself”: Snowden’s e-mails to Poitras were extracted from her film Cit
disclosed in his book No Place to Hide that Snowden used the alias Cincinnatus that Internet investigators discovered he had hosted with Sandvik the CryptoParty. Sandvik then wrote her account of it. See Sandvik, “That One Time I Threw a CryptoParty with Edward Snowden.” Also, Kevin Poulsen, “Snowden’s First
Entities connected to both Laura Poitras and CryptoParty

Edward Snowden
PERSON
Barack Obama
PERSON
Jeffrey Epstein
PERSON
Glenn Greenwald
PERSON
Woody Allen
PERSON
George W. Bush
PERSON
Hawaii
LOCATION
Department of Justice
ORGANIZATION
Oliver Stone
PERSON
Booz Allen
PERSON
Alan Dershowitz
PERSON
Assange
ORGANIZATION
Mitch McConnell
PERSON
WikiLeaks
ORGANIZATIONGellman
PERSON
Micah Lee
PERSON
United States
LOCATIONMorell
PERSON
Jacob Appelbaum
PERSON
Barton Gellman
PERSON