ncrypted channel to send her highly sensitive material. On January 23, Snowden wrote to Poitras under yet another alias. This time he called himself Citizen Four. He wrote, “At this stage I can offer nothing more than my word.” He then said falsely, “I am a senior government employee in the intelligence commun

rt of a plan to entrap her or her contacts like Assange and Appelbaum, as she noted in her diary. “Is C4 a trap?” she asked herself, referring to her Citizen Four source. “Will he put me in prison?” To elude this “adversary,” Snowden stressed to Poitras that she would have to adopt a conspiratorial frame of mi

Greenwald, a Brazil-based blogger for the Guardian. Both journalists were longtime critics of NSA surveillance with whom Mr. Snowden (under the alias Citizen Four) had been in contact for four months. To provide them with scoops discrediting NSA operations, Mr. Snowden culled several thousand documents out of

sts whose trust he sought when it suited his purpose of protecting himself. For example, as we have seen, in contacting Laura Poitras under the alias Citizen Four in January 2013, he told her that he was currently a “government employee,” although in fact he was working for a private contractor at the time. Sn