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Escape Artist | 85 focus on him as the sole perpetrator of the leak so that no one else at the NSA would be suspected. Poitras and Gellman were not the only journalists involved in the news event. Poitras also asked Appelbaum to help her interview Snowden about the NSA’s operations. She later said that she needed someone with technical expertise in government surveillance to test the bona fides of Citizen Four. She believed that Appelbaum, who had participated in her anti-NSA presentations in 2012, qualified for the position. Snowden previously had contact with Appelbaum. Appelbaum had communicated with Snowden under his Oahu CryptoParty alias about an obscure piece of software just a few weeks after Snowden had met with Runa Sandvik in Hawaii in December 2012. Appel- baum, in fact, had worked with Sandvik as a core developer of Tor software. Snowden allowed Appelbaum to put detailed questions to him concerning the secret operations of the NSA before he met with Poitras and Greenwald in Hong Kong. Indeed, Poitras joined him in asking Snowden via encrypted e-mails such questions as “What ) are some of the big surveillance programs that are active today ® and how do international partners aid the NSA?” “Does the NSA partner with other nations, like Israel?” and “Do private companies help the NSA?” Snowden answered all the questions to the satis- faction of Appelbaum and Poitras. (The interview was published on July 8, 2013, with Snowden’s approval on the website of Der Spie- gel, the German weekly, which had also published the WikiLeaks documents.) As the days ticked away while Snowden was waiting for Green- wald in Hong Kong, Greenwald was awaiting a green light to go there from Janine Gibson, the editor of the Guardian website, who was based in New York. Under Gibson’s leadership, The Guardian's website had effectively “gone into the business of publishing gov- ernment secrets,” as the Guardian columnist Michael Wolff pointed out. Most of the documents had been supplied by Bradley Man- ning via WikiLeaks. Few if any of these previous documents The Guardian published were highly classified, and none were SCI top secret documents. The NSA documents Greenwald had received | | Epst_9780451494566_2p_all_r1.z.indd 85 ® 9/29/16 5:51 Pa | | HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_019573