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72 | HOW AMERICA LOST ITS SECRETS course, the similarity of the phrasing might not have been entirely coincidental. Greenwald’s 2012 speech had been put on YouTube and widely circulated on the Internet just a few days before Snowden first wrote to him on December 1, 2012. Snowden identified himself as a privacy advocate, which was also how Greenwald often identi- fied himself in his speeches. He also echoed other concerns Green- wald had publicly expressed, including defending American privacy from government intrusions. Snowden promised the leaks he would supply would provide dra- matic results. He asserted in one of his e-mails to Poitras that the “shock” of the documents he would give Greenwald would result in the public’s learning about the secret “mechanisms through which our privacy is violated.” According to Snowden’s assessment, follow- ing that initial uproar, they could achieve another objective in their common cause. “We can guarantee for all people equal protection against unreasonable search,” he wrote. In light of this convergence of views, it is not surprising that Greenwald was fully convinced of Citizen Four’s bona fides. He said to Poitras, “He’s real,” and he ) agreed to help break the story in The Guardian. ® Poitras now revealed to Greenwald that Citizen Four would deliver an entire trove of secret documents to them in six to eight weeks. According to this timetable, the Greenwald scoop and the “shock” Citizen Four promised would come in early to mid-June 2013. At this point in April, Snowden was in full control. Although his job at Dell involved endlessly monitoring largely meaningless encrypted messages in the NSA tunnel, he had been able to get three major journalists to react favorably to his proposal. None of them knew his name, position, age, location, or where precisely he worked. Nor did they know the means by which he planned to obtain the secrets that he dangled before them. They also did not know where, or even if, they would meet their source. Their total knowledge about him was the description he improperly gave of himself: a “senior government employee in the intelligence community” (Greenwald speculated that he was a disgruntled CIA station chief). Even though they were operating largely in the dark, these three journalists acted as almost any other ambitious reporter would if he or she were offered a major scoop about illegal acts of the govern- | | Epst_9780451494566_2p_all_r1.z.indd 72 ® 9/29/16 5:51 Pa | | HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_019560