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140 | HOW AMERICA LOST ITS SECRETS tras identical copies of the NSA documents in Hong Kong. When Greenwald returned home to Rio de Janeiro, he found his copy was corrupted. But Poitras still had her digital copy of whatever stolen documents Snowden had distributed to them. So Greenwald dis- patched Miranda from Rio to Berlin to get a copy of Poitras’s thumb drive. On the return trip, Miranda’s plane stopped at Heathrow, where British authorities detained him and temporarily took the thumb drive from him. Poitras had written out the password for Greenwald, and Miranda kept it with the thumb drive. The Brit- ish copied the contents and shared them with the NSA. As a result, the NSA discovered that Snowden had only given Poitras fifty-eight thousand documents. The damage assessment team under Ledgett determined that some of these documents had been edited out of much larger documents that the NSA logs showed Snowden had copied. By the count of both the NSA and the Defense Department teams, almost one million documents were unaccounted for What happened to the missing documents? The NSA investigation found that the chronology of the theft ) of documents did not support Snowden’s claim to journalists that © he had only been seeking whistle-blowing documents. Most of the documents he took first did not concern the domestic activities of the NSA. Only toward the end of the theft did he copy documents that would qualify as whistle-blowing. The court order to Verizon that was the basis of the initial Guardian exposé was only issued by the FISA court on April 27, 2013. The other main whistle-blowing docu- ment he revealed, the PowerPoint presentation about PRISM, was only issued in April 2013. Yet Snowden had been downloading docu- ments for at least nine months before he copied these documents. When I discussed the chronology of the copied documents with a former government official briefed on the investigation, he sug- gested that Snowden’s purpose might have changed between 2012 and 2013. When I asked him what might have induced the change, he replied, “That is one of the unanswered questions.” That Snowden only took these two whistle-blowing documents at the tail end of his nine-month operation, and after he had contacted Poitras and Greenwald, suggests he might have had another motive prior to contacting journalists. In light of this chronology, the investigation | | Epst_9780451494566_2p_all_r1.z.indd 140 ® 9/30/16 11:09 AM | | HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_019628