CHAPTER 13
The Great Divide
That moral decision to tell the public about spying that affects all of us has been costly, but it was the right thing to do and I have no regrets.
—EDWARD SNOWDEN, Moscow, 2013
N THE TWELVE-MINUTE VIDEO on The Guardian's website,
Snowden correctly identified himself as an infrastructure analyst at a regional base of the National Security Agency in Oahu, Hawaii. He also revealed in a calm, unemotional voice that he had been the source for the stories in both The Guardian and The Washington Post. He said that he had supplied the secret, classified documents that the two newspapers had used in their scoops about domestic surveillance being conducted by the NSA, America’s enormous elec- tronic surveillance agency. These sensational revelations had been, literally, the talk of the world, and now, in another major news event, the boyish-looking Snowden took responsibility for what would turn out to be the largest theft of top secret documents in the his- tory of U.S. intelligence.
In the video, it will be recalled, Glenn Greenwald, who had bro- ken the NSA story in The Guardian, questioned Snowden. What was his motive? Greenwald asked. Why did he do it? Snowden replied that he had become horrified by the NSA’s secret operations,
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