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Whistle-blower | 97 stay and fight the United States government in the courts.” That bit of braggadocio would not be proven out. Greenwald, Poitras, and MacAskill in their reporting did not concern themselves with any of the mechanics of the largest theft of top secret documents in the history of the United States. In the entire filmed interview at the Mira hotel, for example, they did not ask their source how he managed to get access to the documents. Lam, however, asked him about how he widened his access. When she asked him why he had switched jobs from Dell to Booz Allen Hamilton in March 2013, his answer provided her with a real scoop: “My position with Booz Allen Hamilton granted me access to lists of machines all over the world the NSA hacked.” Snowden told her that he deliberately went to Booz Allen Hamilton to get access to the “lists” revealing the NSA’s sources in foreign countries. This admission could further complicate his legal situation in Hong Kong because it suggested that he meant to steal documents even before he had known their content. In fact, to protect himself, he restricted Lam from publishing this part of the interview until after he had ) departed Hong Kong. (It was not published until June 24, a day after © he arrived in Russia.) This condition indicated to Lam that as early as June 12, if not before, he was planning on leaving Hong Kong. His interview with Lam didn’t reveal how he had learned about these “lists” before taking the job. Nor did he reveal to her what he planned to do with these lists. He made it clear to her, however, that he had not disposed of all his secret documents. “If I have time to go through this information,” he said, “I would like to make it avail- able to journalists in each country to make their own assessment, independent of my bias, as to whether or not the knowledge of US network operations against their people should be published.” So as late as June 12, Snowden was still reading and assessing the files he had stolen from the NSA four weeks earlier. Poitras vetted the Lam interview. Soon afterward, she suspected that she was being followed. That was likely, because by June 14 all the intelligence services in Hong Kong knew that she was in contact with Snowden. “T was being tailed,” Poitras recalled in an interview with a Vogue | | Epst_9780451494566_2p_all_r1.z.indd 97 ® 9/29/16 5:51 Pa | | HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_019585