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86 | HOW AMERICA LOST ITS SECRETS from Citizen Four were another matter. They contained the sort of SCI communications intelligence data that no major newspaper had ever published before. Their disclosure might result in journalists’ being imprisoned, because both British law and US. law criminal- ized the disclosure by anyone of communications intelligence. As a lawyer, Greenwald recognized this danger. On the other hand, the NSA documents were far more explosive than the WikiLeaks mate- rial and promised an even greater spike in circulation. So Greenwald assumed that Gibson would be willing to authorize their publication and provide the expenses for his trip to Hong Kong. He flew from Rio to New York on May 30 to meet in person with Gibson, who had concerns about publishing what were pur- ported to be top secret documents that came from an anonymous source. She was certainly not willing to go along with Citizen Four’s demand that The Guardian publish his personal manifesto alongside the documents. Aside from its shrill and alarming tone, it sounded, as she told Greenwald, “a bit Ted Kaczynski-ish,” referring to the mathematician known as the Unabomber who had maimed or killed ) twenty-six people with anonymous mail bombs between 1978 and © 1995. Kaczynski had also demanded that newspapers publish his personal manifesto. Gibson explained to Greenwald, “It is going to sound crazy to some people.” Her concern was that it would detract from the credibility of the rest of the story. Snowden had also writ- ten to Greenwald to explain his position. “Even the Constitution is subverted when the appetites of power demand it,” Snowden said. Paraphrasing President Thomas Jefferson, he continued, “Let us speak no more of faith in man, but bind him down from mischief by the chains of cryptography.” Snowden, showing his cultlike faith in encryption, substituted “cryptography” for Jefferson’s word “con- stitution.” Gibson was unmoved. The stolen NSA documents were another matter. They were an enormous scoop that could have a greater impact than the WikiLeaks scoop. Gibson authorized Greenwald’s trip to Hong Kong on the con- dition that he take with him a Guardian staffer in whom she had confidence, the Scottish-born Ewen MacAskill, a sixty-one-year-old veteran journalist who had been the Washington bureau chief for The Guardian. His assignment was to evaluate the bona fides of the | | Epst_9780451494566_2p_all_r1.z.indd 86 ® 9/29/16 5:51 Pa | | HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_019574