The next morning, Jesselyn Radack is in her K Street office early. She works as national security and human rights director for the Government Accountability Project, a kind of nonprofit clearinghouse for whistleblowers. Her program focuses on whistleblowers from the secret side of the government, which means she spends much of her time dealing with surveillance and torture. She’s been here six years, and the office is thoroughly lived-in. There’s a picture of her husband and three kids behind the desk, as well as a birthday card with two check marks: Kick Ass and Take Names. (Both are checked.) Orchids grow in the corner next to a trophy paddle from the Maine People’s Alliance, awarded for "her work in truth-telling." The secrecy of Radack’s work with Snowden requires two laptops beside each other: one standard Windows, and another running an encryption setup that she asks me not to describe in detail. There’s no Wi-Fi anywhere in the office; it’s too hard to secure. "I joke that I use drug dealer tactics," she says. That means burner phones, paying in cash, meeting in person. "It’s a terrible way to work as an attorney, but you have to."

Radack first adopted the precautions when she took on Snowden as a client. He was already in Moscow when they met. Snowden had recently fled Hong Kong, hoping to stay one step ahead of the US government. Julian Assange introduced them, figuring Snowden needed all the help he could get. Together with Ben Wizner from the ACLU, Radack has pushed Snowden’s asylum claims forward while pleading his case in the media. In the months since, Snowden has given statements to the European parliament, German Bundestag, at South by Southwest, and at the TED conference. "I thought it was very important to show that he was not just living some isolated life in Russia," Radack says. "It’s also to show that our Congress in the US has not deigned to hear from him."

"There’s a limit to the amount of incivility and inequality and inhumanity that each individual can tolerate."

It’s still not easy visiting Snowden, although Radack has made the trip twice now. The first visit came last October, with Drake and others in tow. The group was presenting him with the Sam Adams award, a prize established by former CIA officials "to reward intelligence officials who demonstrated a commitment to truth and integrity, no matter the consequences." Just getting there took a fair amount of tradecraft. A few months earlier, the Bolivian president’s plane had been forced to land on suspicions that he was smuggling Snowden out of the country. Some worried that, if the government knew who they were flying to meet, they would be stopped at the airport. Radack told her children they couldn’t use the word "Moscow" in the house, or tell anyone outside the family that she was even taking a trip.

Once the group arrived safely in Moscow, they ran into Russian surveillance. "We would go into a public part of the hotel and there would be people there, the same woman there the whole time, taking pictures," she says. "You know you’re being monitored." When she returned to the US, now publicly aligned with Snowden, Radack had to worry about the same monitoring at home. As the government puzzled over Snowden’s next move, his lawyer was an obvious surveillance target. "I try really hard not to be paranoid," she says. "I hope the government’s not surveilling me because I live a pretty staid life."

She no longer brings work home for fear of putting her family in danger, but on at least one occasion last year, work followed her home on its own. Leaving the house in the morning, she spotted a black van idling on the street outside. She walked up to its window and asked the men inside if they needed anything. They said they were there for her neighbor, but were stumped when she asked for the neighbor’s name. "It’s about intimidation," she says. "It doesn’t matter if they’re surveilling you all the time, as long as you think they might be."

Radack grew up in and around Washington, DC as a "typical first-child, parent-pleaser, perfect grades, do-gooder." She says she was attuned to life’s unfairness even then, and drawn early to a career where she could decide what was right and what was wrong. She was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in college, but it didn’t slow her down. ("I get fatigued physically by MS, but mentally I’m like brbrbrbr!" she told me, making a kind of caffeinated bird call.) She moved from Brown to Yale Law School, then to the Justice Department Honors program in 1995. "I always wanted to work there," she says. "I thought the government wears a white hat, you always get to be on the right side of every issue."

Six years later, that same enthusiasm for justice would drive her away from the department. In 2001, she got a call from the FBI about John Walker Lindh, the American citizen who had been captured fighting alongside the Taliban. The FBI wanted to know if they could interrogate him for information as they would a member of an enemy nation’s military detained during war. But Lindh is an American citizen, making the situation, and Radack’s response, more nuanced. Lindh’s parents had hired a lawyer in San Francisco to represent their son, but Lindh was still in Afghanistan, and no visitors were allowed on the base where he was being held. Radack said they could question him for intelligence purposes, but without his lawyer, anything he said would be inadmissible in court. He was interrogated anyway. As the case moved to trial, Attorney General John Ashcroft pushed to have him tried for treason with the possibility of death penalty upon conviction. More worrying, for Radack, the government was claiming Lindh had no lawyer, and using statements from the interrogation against him in court.

During the trial, the government was required to present all correspondence related to Lindh’s interrogation, an order that included Radack’s advisory emails discussing his lawyer. But when the lead prosecutor showed Radack the file to verify that it was complete, she saw that the bulk of her emails were missing. Suddenly, there was no record of her conversations, no record that the Justice Department had known Lindh had a lawyer. All she could think was that someone had deliberately kept them out of evidence — a serious crime that, under other circumstances, would get a prosecutor fired. Keenly aware of the stakes, Radack started to worry she would lose her job if she kept up the fight. Her MS meant she couldn’t afford any break in health insurance and she was newly pregnant with her second child.