Edward Snowden: The Untold Story | WIRED
The message arrives
on my “clean machine,” a MacBook Air loaded only with a sophisticated
encryption package. “Change in plans,” my contact says. “Be in the lobby
of the Hotel ______ by 1 pm. Bring a book and wait for ES to find you.”
¶ ES is Edward Snowden, the most wanted
man in the world. For almost nine months, I have been trying to set up
an interview with him—traveling to Berlin, Rio de Janeiro twice, and New
York multiple times to talk with the handful of his confidants who can
arrange a meeting. Among other things, I want to answer a burning
question: What drove Snowden to leak hundreds of thousands of top-secret
documents, revelations that have laid bare the vast scope of the
government’s domestic surveillance programs? In May I received an email
from his lawyer, ACLU attorney Ben Wizner, confirming that Snowden would
meet me in Moscow and let me hang out and chat with him for what turned
out to be three solid days over several weeks. It is the most time that
any journalist has been allowed to spend with him since he arrived in
Russia in June 2013. But the finer details of the rendezvous remain
shrouded in mystery. I landed in Moscow without knowing precisely where
or when Snowden and I would actually meet. Now, at last, the details are
set.
Edward Snowden, June 13, 2014.
Platon
