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  Both Snowden and Ellsberg also received similarly ferocious criticism not only from top government officials but also from much of the news media and general public. Henry Kissinger, Nixon’s national security adviser and a former colleague of Ellsberg’s, was heard on Nixon’s secret White House taping system calling Ellsberg “the most dangerous man in America,” adding that he “had to be stopped at all costs.” Nixon told his attorney general, John Mitchell, “We’ve got to get this son of a bitch. You can’t be in a position of ever allowing … this kind of wholesale thievery, or otherwise it’s going to happen all over the government.” Mitchell duly indicted Ellsberg on espionage and conspiracy charges that carried a potential 115 years in prison, but the government’s case collapsed into a mistrial when the Plumbers’ break-in of Ellsberg’s psychiatrist’s office came to light.

  Four decades later it was déjà vu all over again as Secretary of State John Kerry blasted Snowden as a “coward” who “betrayed his country,” adding, “What he’s done is expose, for terrorists, a lot of mechanisms which now affect operational security of those terrorists and make it harder for the United States to break up plots, harder to protect our nation.” Hillary Clinton was equally harsh during the first Democratic 2016 presidential candidates’ debate. Asked whether Snowden should do jail time, Clinton said, “He stole very important information that unfortunately has fallen into a lot of the wrong hands. So I don’t think he should be brought home without facing the music.”

  General Michael Hayden, the director of the NSA during and after 9/11, went so far as to joke about putting Snowden on a government kill list. Hayden ranked among the elite of the elite in the national security state; he was the only person ever to be the director of both the NSA and the CIA, respectively. Appearing at a conference sponsored by the Washington Post in October 2013, Hayden noted that Snowden had been nominated for a European human rights award, then added, “I must admit, in my darker moments over the past months, I’d also thought of nominating Mr. Snowden, but it was for a different list.” As reported by Brendan Sasso in the Hill, “The audience laughed, and Rep. Mike Rogers (R-Michigan), chairman of the House Intelligence Committee who was also on the panel, responded, ‘I can help you with that.’”

  Former CIA director James Woolsey was even more explicit in his call for Snowden’s head. In the wake of the November 13, 2015, Paris terrorist attacks, Woolsey told CNN that “the blood of a lot of these French young people is on his hands,” and Woolsey added, “I would give [Snowden] the death sentence, and I would prefer to see him hanged by the neck until he’s dead, rather than merely electrocuted.”

  Which raises a macabre but pertinent question: why hasn’t Edward Snowden been captured or killed? Numerous former and current US military officials reportedly have expressed a fervent desire to take out a target they regard as a traitor. “I would love to put a bullet in his head,” an unnamed Pentagon official told the website BuzzFeed in January 2014. It’s no secret that Snowden is living in Russia, apparently in or near Moscow. He told the Nation in a November 2014 interview that ordinary Russians occasionally recognized him in local computer shops. (They tended to be young and friendly, he added, and surprised: “Snowden?” they asked.) Of course, Moscow is a bustling metropolis of eight million inhabitants. But it is also a city where the United States presumably has more than the usual number of spies, informants, and undercover operatives. How is it that Snowden remains at large? And how long will that remain true?

  Even as they were vilified, Snowden and Ellsberg were also hailed as heroes. Their supporters tended to argue that, yes, they broke the law but they did so for a noble reason: to tell the public things that, in a democracy, the public deserved to know. After all, if the US government considered the Vietnam War a hopeless mission, shouldn’t Americans have been told that when being asked to put their sons, brothers, and fathers in harm’s way? And if the government believed it needed vastly expanded surveillance authority to keep the nation safe from terrorism after 9/11, shouldn’t it have made that argument openly and sought the consent of the governed rather than institute such policies in secret? (Kerry, whose 2004 campaign for president was dogged by accusations of “flip-flopping,” again tried to have it both ways, lauding Ellsberg as a “patriot” while blasting Snowden as a “traitor.” Ellsberg, who from the beginning praised Snowden’s leak as “the most important in American history,” rejected Kerry’s comments as “despicable” and called Snowden a “hero.”)

  Snowden tended to receive more support overseas, both from the general public and from political and media elites. When he was stuck in the transit lounge of the Moscow airport after the US government revoked his passport in 2013, he was informally invited to Germany, where many people displayed signs in their windows saying, “I have a bed for Ed.” In October 2015, the European Parliament approved a resolution asking the EU’s member states to grant asylum to Snowden in view of his “status as a whistleblower and an international human rights defender.” But the resolution, which passed 285 to 281, was nonbinding, and since all EU states had extradition treaties with the United States, they would in fact be obligated to send him to the United States if he did enter their territories. The vote nevertheless signaled that many in Europe viewed Snowden as a hero, and it perhaps presaged a deal that would enable him to leave Russia, where his visa was due to expire in 2017. Snowden hailed the European Parliament vote as “a chance to move forward,” taking care to assert that it was “not a blow against the US government but an open hand extended by friends.”

  Both the vituperation and the adulation showered upon Ellsberg and Snowden implicitly underscored the most striking thing the two had in common as whistle-blowers: Each was successful, spectacularly so. Each got his message out through influential news outlets and then saw it amplified when the rest of the media joined in. Each changed the public conversation about one of the most controversial issues of his time. Each triggered substantial policy changes. And while each paid a high personal price—Snowden ended up living in exile, Ellsberg barely avoided prison—the price easily could have been much higher. Agree with them or not, Snowden and Ellsberg indisputably had enormous impacts on the world around them.

  In the short term, those impacts were most visible in the sphere of politics, but the greater effects over time were in the realms of mass consciousness and social attitudes.

  Ellsberg’s immediate motivation for leaking the Pentagon Papers was to help stop the Vietnam War, and many detractors and admirers alike think he did exactly that. Ellsberg, however, does not share these judgments, and not for reasons of false modesty.

  Nixon actually welcomed the release of the Pentagon Papers, Ellsberg told me: “He thought they made the Democrats look bad, since they covered the years before Nixon became president.” What worried Nixon, Ellsberg continued, was that Ellsberg possessed other documents that did implicate Nixon. (With Ellsberg’s permission, Senator Charles Mathias of Maryland, an antiwar Republican, had alerted the White House to this fact.) Ellsberg had only one such document, but it was an explosive one. National Security Council Memorandum 1, which he helped prepare under orders from Kissinger, discussed options for Vietnam, where Nixon was contemplating the use of nuclear weapons. Only because Nixon feared Ellsberg would start releasing dirt on him did he pursue the measures against Ellsberg that helped trigger the Watergate scandal. “If I hadn’t copied other documents beyond the Pentagon Papers, and [Nixon] hadn’t known that, the war would have continued and he would have stayed in office,” Ellsberg told me. “But how many people who are sympathetic to me know that? Not one in a thousand. The story’s never really been picked up.”

  Ellsberg’s most lasting effect was to help change how Americans thought about their government. The Pentagon Papers demonstrated in irrefutable black and white that senior US government officials, up to and including the president, routinely lied to the American people and their elected representatives about some of the gravest matters facing the
country. Banal as that realization may sound to twenty-first–century ears, it was nothing less than earthshaking in 1971. “Exposing the fact that the government lied was a shattering, revolutionary thing at that time,” said Louis Clark, the Government Accountability Project’s president. “It was embedded in the culture, this belief that the president and his advisers have the information and the expertise and if only we knew what they knew, we would have made the same decisions. What Daniel revealed is that it was all built on lies.”

  Living in the Age of Snowden

  Snowden’s effect on contemporary politics and government was likewise unmistakable but limited. A striking example involves the USA PATRIOT Act, the law rushed through Congress after the 9/11 attacks. The administration of President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney relied on the Patriot Act to justify the expanded surveillance Snowden later exposed. Until Snowden’s disclosures, Congress had voted repeatedly and by wide margins to reauthorize the Patriot Act, dismissing critics’ complaints that the law endangered civil liberties. (Not only did the Patriot Act enable expanded surveillance, it canceled habeas corpus rights for the twenty million people in the United States who were not citizens and authorized government agents to search a citizen’s house and public library records without notifying him or her.)

  In May 2015, mass anger kindled by Snowden’s revelations gave rise to a strange bedfellows alliance on Capitol Hill between the liberal left and the Tea Party right that defeated a reauthorization of the USA Patriot Act. Instead, Congress passed the USA Freedom Act, ending the NSA’s indiscriminate collection of telephone records and requiring the agency to obtain individual warrants to surveil specific targets. Privacy advocates disagreed about whether the law represented thoroughgoing reform or incremental change, but it marked a shift from Congress’s previous rubber-stamping. “Without Snowden’s whistle-blowing, Congress would have reauthorized the Patriot Act,” said GAP’s Devine, who described the new law as “nothing to get excited about but a solid reform that ends the NSA’s reality of taking whatever information they wanted and doing whatever they wanted with it.”

  Snowden’s influence on mass consciousness and conduct, on the other hand, was fundamental enough to qualify as epoch-making. In essence, Snowden changed the way people all over the world thought about their cell phones, their computers, their online lives—the defining technologies and behaviors of early twenty-first-century civilization. Thanks to Snowden, people learned they were being tracked by a modern version of Big Brother; their phone calls, emails, web searches, and other online activities were being recorded, collected, and stored for possible future investigation. “You don’t have to have done anything wrong,” Snowden explained in his first filmed interview with Poitras. “You simply have to eventually fall under suspicion … and then they could use this system to go back in time and scrutinize every decision you’ve ever made, every friend you’ve ever discussed something with, and attack you on that basis.”

  Let that last remark sink in for a moment. Its implications are so profound and far-reaching, it may take a while to grasp them. It did for me. I followed Snowden’s revelations when they first appeared in June 2013—what journalist didn’t?—and I thought I understood the core of his message. But only while researching this book did I comprehend the full truth: all of my phone calls, emails and Internet communications during the years since the 9/11 terrorist attacks have been and continue to be collected and stored for potential future examination. The same is true for all of your communications.

  Should they so desire, NSA officials can retrieve any of your or my electronic communications and learn a great deal about us both. In theory, they now need a judge’s warrant to take that second step and would have to take the additional step of requesting the information from private telecommunications companies. But considering how friendly the NSA and those companies have been during the years since 9/11, these safeguards offer cold comfort.

  Which is why I took steps while writing this book to install Pretty Good Privacy encryption on my computer, which should make my communications safer from prying eyes. You might consider doing the same.

  Like Ellsberg’s revelation that the government lied, Snowden’s revelations that the government was always watching triggered a shift in how large parts of society perceived and acted on the world around them. Although the knock-on effects can be subtle and hard to trace, history teaches that such shifts can give rise to transformative changes across a range of issues. Learning that one’s government has lied about an ongoing war can lead to wondering what else one’s leaders may have lied about.

  In the 1970s, this train of thought led the US Congress to launch wide-ranging investigations of the NSA and the CIA and impose the first meaningful limits on their activities—the very limits the Bush-Cheney administration would secretly override after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. In Snowden’s case, the public and congressional reactions he sparked apparently doomed the NSA’s ambition to gain authorization for even more extensive surveillance by passing the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act. “Whatever trust was there is now gone,” a senior US intelligence official told the New York Times. “I mean, who would believe the NSA when it insists it is blocking Chinese [cyber] attacks but not using the same technology to read your email?”

  What larger changes Snowden’s revelations may unleash will become evident only over time. Critics such as Secretary of State Kerry and former NSA and CIA director Hayden warned that the changes that have already taken place damaged national security. “We’re in a different place now, a place called ‘less safe,’” Hayden wrote in the Washington Times in August 2015. Journalist Greenwald and other supporters countered that Snowden’s disclosures were vital to preserving liberty and increasing accountability for government officials who are charged not only with keeping the nation safe but also with upholding the Constitution. “The real issue is not just privacy but the subversion of democracy,” Greenwald argued. “[The US government] essentially put the whole Internet under surveillance and never told the American public about it.”

  What’s clear is that none of this would have happened if Edward Snowden had not blown the whistle in the first place. And there’s no going back; previously secret knowledge, once dispersed, cannot be “unknown.” Like it or not, we all now live in the Age of Snowden.

  “No Reason to Destroy a Man”

  But we wouldn’t be here if not for Thomas Drake. Probably not one in a hundred of the people who know about Edward Snowden also recognize the name Thomas Drake. But Snowden’s accomplishments cannot be fully understood without knowing that he was following in Drake’s footsteps.

  Snowden ultimately pursued a different path than Drake; indeed, Snowden adjusted his strategy specifically to avoid the retaliation that hammered Drake. Had Snowden pursued the same path Drake did—following the rules, blowing the whistle but through official channels—“He would have been taken down immediately,” Drake told me. Instead, Snowden followed the model Ellsberg pioneered: leak the documents needed to prove his case to journalists. This entailed breaking the law and all the risks that came with that, but it meant that the disclosures actually reached the general public.

  Drake’s journey as whistle-blower began near the pinnacle of the US intelligence community on a red-letter date in its history: his first day of work as a full-fledged employee of the NSA was September 11, 2001. Although the agency would soon balloon in size, budget, and reach as the United States responded to the worst attack on the homeland since Pearl Harbor, the NSA already ranked as the world’s largest, most lavishly funded spy organization. Created in secret in 1952 via an executive order signed by President Harry Truman, the NSA was the government’s code-breaker as well as its all-hearing global “ear”: NSA intercepted the communications of foreign governments and individuals and translated this raw intelligence into information usable by the CIA, the FBI, and kindred US government agencies.

  Drake, a forty-four-year-
old father of five, had worked for the NSA for the previous twelve years but as a private sector contractor. Tall, somber, intense, Drake had been a champion high school chess player whose gift for mathematics, computers, and languages later made him a natural for cryptography and foreign eavesdropping. He worked for Air Force intelligence during the Cold War, including a long stint in Europe monitoring the communications of East Germany’s infamous secret police, the Stasi. Now he joined the NSA’s senior staff, reporting directly to its third highest-ranking official, Maureen Baginski, chief of the agency’s largest department, the Signals Intelligence Directorate, which was responsible for the physical interception of phone calls and other communications.

  From this position of honor and accomplishment, Thomas Drake descended into a nightmare that eventually saw him arrested, stripped of his security clearances and government pension, threatened with life in prison, and blackballed from employment in his field of expertise. In the end, he was reduced to clerking at an Apple store in the Washington suburb of Bethesda, Maryland.

  All the while, hovering throughout the stories of both Drake and Snowden was Michael Hayden, the former NSA boss who was a primary target of both men’s whistle-blowing.

  Michael Hayden was, as previously noted, unique in the history of the American national security elite: he is the only person to have directed both the NSA and the CIA. The former four-star Air Force general served under both Democrats and Republicans; Bill Clinton nominated him to run the NSA in 1999, a job he held until 2005, and George W. Bush nominated him to head the CIA, a post he occupied from 2006 until 2009. At age seventy, when he was interviewed for this book, Hayden still had the take-charge attitude and solid build of the quarterback he was in Catholic grade school, though his head was bald now except for a laurel of close-cropped silver hair.

  Hayden grew up working class Irish in Pittsburgh—his father was a welder—and in Washington his ability to convey complex issues in language an ordinary person could understand made him the briefer of choice when presidents, members of Congress, or journalists needed to be told what he and his colleagues were up to in the shadowy worlds of electronic eavesdropping and covert operations. Thus Hayden was the chief public spokesman for the Bush administration after the New York Times in December 2005 published the first exposé describing some of the expanded post-9/11 surveillance programs. Hayden also took the lead in publicly defending the administration’s use of waterboarding and other forms of torture—or, as he preferred to label them, “high-end interrogation techniques”—against suspected terrorists. “I lean pretty far forward in trying to explain what American espionage does for the American democracy,” Hayden told me. “And I’m quite happy to do it.”