Wikileaks’ ties to Snowden journalists

After being repeatedly threatened in 2010, banks and credit card companies declined to process any donations for Wikileaks. By the end of 2012 Wikileaks was running perilously short on cash. A new U.S.-based group, the Freedom of the Press Foundation, launched with the explicit purpose of funneling cash to Wikileaks.

On its board of directors are Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras, the two journalists to whom Snowden chose to leak his documents. In an interview with Harper’s, Greenwald, the only human being followed by the Wikileaks account and a long-time defender and correspondent of Assange, says Snowden initially emailed him around the same time this foundation launched. He says he initially ignored them.

The next month, Snowden contacted Poitras. In an interview with Salon, she noted that her previous involvement with Wikileaks for a film had given her the knowledge to effectively use encryption to hide her communications from most forms of surveillance.

Still, being fellow ideological travelers is not evidence of any malign intent. But the close relationship between Greenwald and Poitras and Wikileaks shows why Wikileaks became involved so early in the Snowden saga.

Wikileaks’ Snowden-brand t-shirt

Wikileaks co-opts Snowden

Snowden began downloading documents in April of 2012 — anywhere between 20,000 and 50,000. Working as a National Security Agency systems administrator, he had the ability to create false network accounts and impersonate others, even senior officials. Far from “brilliant,” as some anonymous sources call him, that is standard for a sysadmin.

Over the next few years, he used government money to finance his training as a hacker. Then, when Snowden took his job as an infrastructure analyst with Booz Allen, his duty was to probe network security for weaknesses, which would complicate any security review of his activity. He could explain away suspicious behavior as being his job description.

In a way, Snowden was the perfect infiltrator: trusted, technically savvy, strategically minded and thinking long term. He is a goldmine to any intelligence service interested in circumventing, spoofing, avoiding, defeating or delegitimizing American espionage.

Once he was outside the familiar world of IT and U.S. agencies, real world politics seemed to stump him. He was reportedly terrified of losing access to the Internet. He did not seem to have any real escape plan when he went public in Hong Kong — rather than fleeing immediately to a friendly consulate where he could seek asylum, Snowden instead made the inexplicable decision to travel to Moscow.

In Hong Kong, a series of events happened, one right after the other, that suggest a deliberate move by Wikileaks to deliver Snowden to Russia. First, Snowden revealed himself, through Poitras and Greenwald, as the leaker on June 9. The next day Assange publicly praised him as a hero, and Snowden checked out of his hotel to whereabouts unknown.

Then on June 11, Russian Pres. Vladimir Putin offered to consider his asylum request. On June 19, Wikileaks said it was offering Snowden “legal counsel” and helping him “broker” his asylum in Iceland.

At about the same time, according to a new article in Kommersant, Snowden was staying in the Russian consulate in Hong Kong (rumors say at Russia’s request), where he also celebrated his 30th birthday. On June 21, a Reuters story datelined in Reykjavik quoted Olafur Vignir Sigurvinsson, an Icelandic businessman with close ties to Wikileaks, as saying he had prepared a private aircraft to take Snowden directly from Hong Kong to Iceland for asylum.

Yet on June 23 Snowden was on a flight to Havana through Moscow.