Meeting between Laura Poitras and Glenn Greenwald arranged to securely share Snowden emails in April 2013

85 surveillance, if Gellman agreed to write a story on it for the Washington Post. Even though Gellman had left the staff of the Washington Post in 2010, he had previously written several stories on that subject for the newspaper. He was also highly-regarded by the editors there. He was therefore interested in Poitras’ offer (although he would consult a friend at the Justice Department about the legality of publishing NSA documents. Snowden now had laid the groundwork for at least two possible outlets; one an establishment newspaper in Washington DC, the Washington Post; and a well-respected international newspaper, the Guardian. Poitras, however, was having some difficulty in bringing Greenwald in on the plan. Like Snowden, she did not trust writing him in unencrypted emails and, since Greenwald lived in Brazil, she still had not found an opportunity for a face-to-face meeting with him. That opportunity arose in mid-April 2013. Greenwald had flown to New York to give the lead speech at an event in Yonkers, N.Y. sponsored by the Council on American-Islamic Relations, or CAIR, a pro-Moslem civil rights and anti-Zionist organization. He had delivered the keynote speech at its previous meeting in San Jose, California on November 22, 2012, where his impassioned depiction of the American “Surveillance State” in America received a rousing ovation from the attendees. He was invited to speak at this award dinner for its east coast chapter. Poitras flew from Berlin to New York to see him. On April 19, 2013, she arranged to meet Greenwald at noon in the restaurant of the Marriott hotel where Greenwald was staying. When Greenwald arrived at the restaurant carrying a cell phone, she explained to him that the NSA could surreptitiously turn his cell phone into a microphone and use it to eavesdrop on their conversation. She told him to go back to his room to get rid of the phone. When he returned, phoneless, she took further precautions by having them change tables several times. Greenwald accepted these tactics because, as Greenwald later said, she was in charge of their “operational security.” After they finally found a secure table in the nearly empty restaurant, she showed Greenwald emails she had received from Snowden under the alias Citizen 4. Greenwald, as he recounted, made “no connection to the “long-forgotten emails” he had received from Snowden under the alias Cincinnatus. Reading the emails to Poitras, he was impressed with the “sincerity” of the anonymous correspondent. When Poitras showed Greenwald Citizen 4’s mission statement in which he said his motive was to end the US “surveillance state.” Greenwald was further impressed with the source. After all, the surveillance state Snowden described closely dovetailed with the surveillance state that Greenwald had described himself in his speech at the Council on American-Islamic Relations dinner in 2012. Of course, the close proximity of the phrasing may not have been entirely coincidental. Greenwald’s 2012 speech had been put on YouTube and widely circulated on the Internet just a few days before Snowden first wrote Greenwald on December 1, 2012. Snowden HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_020237