I mean, the guy knows how to work the Internet. If he wanted that, he could have done it himself.

He absolutely did not want us to dump the entire archive online. Snowden absolutely wanted us to make our own judgments about newsworthiness. And he began to insist that that was what he wanted all along. Later, he came to see the value and the importance of trying to avoid avoidable harm in the publication of these stories. And in fact, he saw it as potential evidence of a cowardly approach by The Washington Post. Snowden at first seemed a little skeptical about this and worried that it simply meant I was going to give the government veto power over an article. And so I had that conversation with the government every time. I would make my own judgment about the news value and that I would give the government an opportunity to tell me about damage they foresaw, if the story was published. On the terms Snowden agreed upon with Gellman, Poitras and Greenwald Your purchase helps support NPR programming. Gellman reached out to The Washington Post, the paper he had left three years earlier, which went on to publish a series of articles based on Snowden's classified information.Ĭlose overlay Buy Featured Book Title Dark Mirror Subtitle Edward Snowden and the American Surveillance State Author Barton Gellman

Snowden shared information about surveillance programs previously unknown to the American public, including the fact that the government was keeping records of private citizens' phone calls and that the NSA was harvesting data from big internet companies, including Google, Facebook and Microsoft. 'It took a lot of convincing for him, just as it took a lot of convincing for me that he was for real.'

'He thought that The Washington Post would be afraid to publish or would bow down to government pressure,' Gellman says. Gellman says initially Snowden was skeptical of him. surveillance programs.īarton Gellman, formerly of The Washington Post, was one of three journalists - including filmmaker Laura Poitras and Glenn Greenwald of The Guardian - with whom Snowden chose to share the documents. In 2013, Edward Snowden, a contractor with the National Security Agency, rocked the world when he leaked thousands of classified documents about U.S. National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden, shown broadcasting from Moscow in 2014, says he acted as a whistleblower when he shared classified documents with journalist Barton Gellman.

Permanent Record by Edward Snowden