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114 | HOW AMERICA LOST ITS SECRETS which, to him, represented a kind of distillation of the excesses of the American national security state, and he had therefore made it his mission to blow the whistle. He believed that the public needed to be informed of the existence of a vast, secret surveillance opera- tion directed against tens of millions of Americans that flagrantly violated U.S. laws and was a grave threat to their privacy and their freedoms. Within hours of the release of that video on the Guardian website, Snowden was known throughout the world as a courageous whistle-blower. In Laura Poitras’s remarks in accepting her Academy Award for Citizenfour on February 22, 2015, she said that Snowden acted as a whistle-blower not only to “expose a threat to our privacy but to our democracy itself.” She received a standing ovation. A large part of the public who viewed this powerful film, includ- ing many of my colleagues in journalism whose writing I greatly respect, came to accept Snowden’s whistle-blowing narrative. The film so convincingly depicted Snowden as an altruistic young man willing to risk his own personal freedom and face years of imprison- ) ment for the sake of others that editorial writers asked that he be ® given clemency from prosecution. “Sitting on his unmade bed—white sheets and covers, white head- board, white bathrobe, white skin—Snowden seems like a figure in some obscure ritual, being readied for sacrifice,” George Packer wrote about the film in a widely read article in The New Yorker. This powerful narrative, as lucidly articulated by Poitras, Green- wald, and other Snowden supporters, described the NSA activities exposed by Snowden as part of a vast criminal conspiracy involv- ing, among others, President Obama, James Clapper, the director of national intelligence, and both Democratic and Republican members of the congressional oversight committees. It further derided any claims that there was evidence that Snowden’s theft of NSA secrets went beyond simply exposing government misdeeds. For example, this narrative asserted, as if it were established fact, that U.S. gov- ernment officials had deliberately “trapped” Snowden in Russia. According to Snowden, the purpose of this government ploy was to “demonize” him. “There was no question that I was going to be subject to a demonization campaign,” Snowden said in an interview | | Epst_9780451494566_2p_all_r1.z.indd 114 ® 9/29/16 5:51PM | | HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_019602