In the background, the headquarters of the N. Over time that awareness of wrongdoing sort of builds up. After setting up his personal security systems and piling pillows against the door so no one in the hallway could eavesdrop, he sat on the bed, anxious and alone, in a Hong Kong hotel room.
He was 29 years old that night, May 24, , but he looked much younger, thin and pale, like a college kid, in his blue jeans and white T-shirt. He was walking away from everything he had ever known, his career, his girlfriend, his entire life, and now it appeared that his plan might fall through. He had come to Hong Kong four days earlier, his luggage filled with laptop computers and thumb drives containing tens of thousands of secret documents he had stolen from the U.
But time was running out. Before they did, he needed to give his documents to a journalist who would share them with the world, but none of the three he had contacted had yet traveled halfway around the planet to meet with him. Just that night the one who wrote for The Washington Post had passed. If it really had all been for nothing, if he really had spent months plundering government computers for secrets no one would ever see, the best he could hope for was asylum in a foreign countryβmaybe Iceland, maybe Ecuador.
If he failed, they would lead him away, in handcuffs, to prison. It had all begun some six months earlier, the way the best spy thrillers do, with a whisper in an exotic locale. This time, as befits the defining espionage story of our age, the whisper was first typed into a computer and sent to an expatriate American columnist and former lawyer living in a greenery-shrouded villa in Rio de Janeiro, then to a provocative documentary-film maker at her apartment in Berlin, and last to a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist in his office in downtown Manhattan.
The columnist, a year-old named Glenn Greenwald, ignored that strange first overture. Greenwald had transformed himself into a crusader in the fight against aggressive government surveillance. His columns and blog posts for Salon, and for a British newspaper, The Guardian, had won him a devoted following among a broad coalition of civil-rights and privacy activists.
