Snowden's Box. Dale Maharidge

Laura forged on. Now she faced her next challenge: convincing a journalist to join her on a trip to Hong Kong to meet a total stranger. The most likely candidate was Greenwald. They’d already met face-to-face in April when Greenwald was visiting New York and staying at a Marriott in Yonkers. Laura had them switch tables at the hotel restaurant twice, until she was satisfied they wouldn’t be overheard, and had him take his cellphone back to his room. When Greenwald returned, she showed him a pair of emails she’d received from her source. She’d asked him to work on the story with her, and he’d agreed.

      But now Greenwald was back home in Rio. That meant Laura had a trove of classified files on her hands — and no way to safely tell him about its contents.

      “The problem was that he still didn’t have encryption and would not travel without more information, which I would not provide without an encrypted channel to communicate on,” Laura recalled. The situation was maddening.

      Laura tried to help Greenwald set up encryption. In early May, she had Micah Lee, a technologist at the Freedom of the Press Foundation, send him a Tails USB drive with instructions via FedEx. But the package was held up in customs for ten days.

      “I was desperate,” she recalled. Going to get classified files in Hong Kong alone, without the support of another journalist or the legal protection of a major media outlet — that spelled trouble. “It would have pretty much guaranteed I would probably never be able to come back to the United States, if not be arrested,” she said.

      After all, she added, “I’m a lone wolf documentary filmmaker already on the terrorist watch list, with the biggest national security leak in history. This is not a good combination.”

      Laura planned to film Snowden at this critical juncture, as he prepared to upend his life in the name of civil liberties. And Snowden was ready to take the hit. “My personal desire is that you paint the target directly on my back,” he wrote to her. “No one, not even my most trusted confidant, is aware of my intentions and it would not be fair for them to fall under suspicion for my actions. You may be the only one who can prevent that and that is by immediately nailing me to the cross rather than trying to protect me as a source.”

      But it would all be for naught if the story wasn’t disseminated effectively. Laura knew the material Snowden wanted to leak — documents revealing widespread abuse of power — would hit hardest as a series of written news reports. “It wasn’t just a film,” she explained. “It was a print story.”

      For the sake of safety and credibility, the print version would have to go through a large media organization, one with strong editorial and legal teams and a history of publishing ground-shaking investigative journalism.

      Approaching the New York Times, however, was out of the question. Snowden didn’t have confidence that the newspaper would have the guts to break the story. In an earlier message to Laura, he’d written, “I don’t trust that the NYT will divulge the source document and company names until someone else does it first. Their reporters are fine, but their editors aren’t what they used to be, and are far too accommodating of power.”

      He worried the editors would cave to government pressure, as they had nearly a decade before, when the Times spiked a story by James Risen and Eric Lichtblau about the NSA’s warrantless spying on Americans. The scoop was scheduled to run right before the 2004 elections, but Executive Editor Bill Keller deferred to Bush administration officials, who claimed the revelations would damage national security. Frustrated, Risen included the material in his book State of War: The Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration. Aware that the book and its payload of revelations were coming in 2006, the New York Times was spurred in 2005 to finally publish a version of the story, which went on to win a Pulitzer Prize.

      Snowden didn’t want to see the New York Times sit on his disclosures for a year. To avoid getting tangled in the slow-moving bureaucracy of a large news organization, he’d decided to make direct contact with independent journalists who were passionate about exposing government overreach.