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176 | HOW AMERICA LOST ITS SECRETS also said that he was “100 percent” certain that no foreign intelli- gence service had had access to them at any point during his journey from Honolulu to Moscow. When I later asked Kucherena in Mos- cow why Snowden changed his story in direct contradiction of what Kucherena had stated, he said, “Wizner.” He was referring to Ben Wizner, Snowden’s ACLU lawyer in Washington, D.C. Wizner had joined the ACLU in August 2001 after graduating from NYU Law School and clerking for a federal judge. At the ACLU, he became an effective foe of NSA surveillance. “IT had spent ten years before this [Snowden leak] trying to bring lawsuits against the intelligence community,” he explained in an interview with Forbes in 2014. Prior to the Snowden leak, he had frequently been consulted by Poitras on government surveillance issues (and appeared in Poitras’s 2010 documentary, The Oath). He had also been engaged in a lawsuit aimed at exposing the NSA’s sub- poenas for Verizon records. He had first learned about Snowden from Poitras in January 2013 while Snowden was still working for Dell at the NSA base in ) Hawaii. At that time, Poitras did not know Snowden’s real name, but © she informed Wizner that she was in touch with a person identify- ing himself as a senior officer in U.S. intelligence. (Poitras did not know at that time that her source, Snowden, was lying to her about his position.) Wizner also was shown e-mails by Poitras in which Snowden said he had information about the government’s secret domestic surveillance program. Wizner, according to Poitras, advised her to stay in touch with this source. On July 13, 2013, after Snowden asked for asylum in Russia, Kucherena arranged an encrypted chat between Snowden and Wiz- ner. According to Wizner, Snowden asked him at the outset, “Do you have standing now?” It was a question that suggested that Snowden was aware that the ACLU needed to gain standing in federal court to challenge the government's alleged domestic surveillance. Up until now, it was unsuccessful because it had no way to show it was a vic- tim of surveillance. The FISA order to Verizon, which Snowden had taken had provided that standing to Wizner and the ACLU. Aside from the opportunity Snowden offered the ACLU, Wiz- ner no doubt believed in the salutary benefit of Snowden’s revela- | | Epst_9780451494566_2p_all_r1.z.indd 176 ® 9/29/16 5:51 Pa | | HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_019664