| --- |
| title: "House Oversight: Estate Documents (Nov 12) (HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_019570)" |
| source: "House Oversight: Estate Documents (Nov 12)" |
| sourceUrl: "https://www.justice.gov/epstein" |
| date: "2026-01-01" |
| category: "House Oversight" |
| eftaNumber: "HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_019570" |
| ocrPages: 1 |
| ocrChars: 2496 |
| ocrElapsed: 0.0 |
| parseTier: "external-legacy" |
| engine: "engine undisclosed (ep-nov-12.greg.technology mirror)" |
| externalSource: "greg-ep-nov-12" |
| externalLicense: "not granted" |
| externalCredit: "ep-nov-12.greg.technology" |
| externalUrl: "https://ep-nov-12.greg.technology" |
| --- |
| |
| 82 HOW AMERICA LOST ITS SECRETS |
| Hong Kong lawyer, Snowden stayed at a residence arranged for him |
| in advance by a party whom Snowden knew prior to his arrival. As |
| noted earlier, for the next ten days, Snowden did not use his credit |
| card or leave any paper trail to his location. Wherever he was, "his |
| first priority," as he later told Greenwald, was to find a place safe |
| from U.S. countermeasures. He brought with him a large number |
| of electronic copies of NSA documents marked TS/SCI/NOFORN, |
| which stood for "Top Secret, Sensitive Compartmented Informa- |
| tion, and No Foreign Distribution." According to government rules, |
| data carrying these labels could not be removed from a government- |
| approved "SCI facility." But Snowden, who brought them with him |
| into this semiautonomous zone in China, broke these rules. |
| Wherever Snowden was staying, apparently he believed he was |
| relatively safe. "That whole period was very carefully planned and |
| orchestrated," Snowden later told The Guardian in Moscow. On |
| May 22, he sent an e-mail to Bay (who did not know he had left |
| Hawaii) saying that his epilepsy tests came back with "bad" results, |
| and he needed further medical attention. Here Snowden commu- |
| nicated directly first with Gellman and then with Greenwald. He |
| e-mailed Gellman under the alias "Verax." |
| Already, via Poitras, he had provided Gellman with PowerPoint |
| slides from an NSA presentation about a joint FBI-NSA-CIA |
| operation code-named PRISM. He believed it qualified as whistle- |
| blowing because it revealed that the NSA, in intercepting e-mails, |
| tweets, postings, and other web interactions about foreign terrorists, |
| incidentally also picked up data about Americans. According to the |
| rules imposed on the NSA by a 2007 presidential directive, whatever |
| information was accidently picked up about Americans was sup- |
| posed to be filtered out, and hundreds of compliance officers were to |
| recheck the data every ninety days to assure that directive was being |
| carried out. Even so, it was likely some data was not expunged in this |
| process. So PRISM could cause embarrassment for the NSA. |
| Snowden had not yet made arrangements to meet journalists, but |
| now he proposed that Gellman join him in Hong Kong. In attempting |
| to convince him of the urgency of the trip, he wrote that he had rea- |
| son to believe that "omniscient State powers" imperiled "our free- |
| dom and way of life." He noted, with a touch of modesty, "Perhaps |
| Epst_9780451494566_ 2p_all_r1.z.indd 82 |
| 9/29/16 5:51 PM |
| HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_019570 |
|
|
