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Mon, 04 Nov 2013 23:10

At eight-thirty on the morning of June 21st, Alan Rusbridger, the unflappable editor of the Guardian, Britain's liberal daily, was in his office, absorbing a lecture from Jeremy Heywood, the Cabinet Secretary to Prime Minister David Cameron. Accompanying Heywood was Craig Oliver, Cameron's director of communications. The deputy editor, Paul Johnson, joined them in Rusbridger's office, overlooking the Regent's Canal, which runs behind King's Cross station, in North London. According to Rusbridger, Heywood told him, in a steely voice, ''The Prime Minister, the Deputy Prime Minister, the Foreign Secretary, the Attorney General, and others in government are extremely concerned about what you're doing.''

Since June 5th, the Guardian had been publishing top-secret digital files provided by Edward Snowden, a former contract employee of the National Security Agency. In a series of articles, the paper revealed that the N.S.A., in the name of combatting terrorism, had monitored millions of phone calls and e-mails as well as the private deliberations of allied governments. It also revealed, again relying on Snowden's documents, that, four years earlier, the Government Communications Headquarters (G.C.H.Q.), Britain's counterpart to the N.S.A., had eavesdropped on the communications of other nations attending the G20 summit, in London.

Such articles have become a trademark of the Guardian. In 2009, it published the first in a torrent of stories revealing how Rupert Murdoch's British tabloids had bribed the police and hacked into the phones of celebrities, politicians, and the Royal Family. In 2010, the Guardian published a trove of WikiLeaks documents that disclosed confidential conversations among diplomats of the United States, Britain, and other governments, and exposed atrocities that were committed in Iraq and Afghanistan; in August, Bradley (now Chelsea) Manning, a private in the U.S. Army, was sentenced to up to thirty-five years in prison for his role in the leak.

Now Rusbridger was poised to publish a story about how the G.C.H.Q. not only collected vast quantities of e-mails, Facebook posts, phone calls, and Internet histories but shared these with the N.S.A. Heywood had learned about the most recent revelation when Guardian reporters called British authorities for comment; he warned Rusbridger that the Guardian was in possession of stolen government documents. ''We want them back,'' he said. Unlike the U.S., Britain has no First Amendment to guard the press against government censorship. Rusbridger worried that the government would get a court injunction to block the Guardian from publishing not only the G.C.H.Q. story but also future national-security stories. ''By publishing this, you're jeopardizing not only national security but our ability to catch pedophiles, drug dealers, child sex rings,'' Heywood said. ''You're an editor, but you have a responsibility as a citizen as well.'' (Cameron's office did not respond to requests for comment.)

Rusbridger replied that the files contained information that citizens in a democracy deserved to know, and he assured Heywood that he had scrubbed the documents so that no undercover officials were identified or put at risk. He had also taken steps to insure the story's publication. Days earlier, Rusbridger had sent a Federal Express package containing a thumbnail drive of selected Snowden documents to an intermediary in the U.S. The person was to pass on the package to Paul Steiger, the former editor of the Wall Street Journal and the founding editor of the online, nonprofit news site ProPublica; if the Guardian was muzzled, Steiger would publish the documents on ProPublica. Besides, Rusbridger reminded Heywood, the government's reach was limited: Glenn Greenwald, the Guardian blogger and columnist with whom Snowden had shared the documents, lived in Brazil, and was edited by Janine Gibson, a Guardian editor in New York.

''It was a little like watching two Queen's Counsel barristers in a head-to-head struggle, two very polished performers engaging each other,'' Johnson, the deputy editor, said. The Guardian has a reputation as a leftish publication that enjoys poking the establishment; its critics object that it allows commentary to occasionally slip into its headlines and news stories. Rusbridger, who is fifty-nine, has been its editor for eighteen years. He wears square, black-framed glasses and has a mop of dark hair that sprawls across his head and over his ears. He could pass for a librarian. ''His physical appearance doesn't tell you how tough he is,'' Nick Davies, the investigative reporter whose byline dominated the Murdoch and WikiLeaks stories, said.

After an hour, Rusbridger ushered Heywood and Oliver out with a thank-you. He had taken what he considered a cautious approach to publishing the Snowden revelations. He consulted Guardian lawyers. He called Davies back from vacation and summoned the longtime investigations editor, David Leigh, out of retirement for advice and to help analyze the documents. He sought the opinion of two associates: the centrist Guardian columnist Simon Jenkins and the liberal Observer columnist Henry Porter. ''He doesn't buckle,'' Porter, who is a close friend, said. ''He's extremely calm. He could easily head up any of the three intelligence agencies here.''

At 5:23 P.M., roughly eight hours after the encounter in his office, Rusbridger ordered the Guardian to post the G.C.H.Q. story on its Web site and then in its print edition. Although the British government had taken no further action, the mood in the Guardian's offices was anxious. As the stories based on Snowden's revelations were taking shape, Rusbridger had hired additional security for the building and established a secure office two floors above the newsroom, just down the corridor from the advertising department, to house the documents. When he flew to New York to work with his team there on the stories, ''he couldn't talk on the phone,'' his wife, Lindsay Mackie, said. ''He couldn't say what was going on.''

It has been the Guardian's biggest story so far. With eighty-four million monthly visitors, according to the Audit Bureau of Circulations, the Guardian Web site is now the third most popular English-language newspaper Web site in the world, behind London's Daily Mail, with its celebrity gossip and abundant cleavage, and the New York Times. But its print circulation, of a hundred and ninety thousand, is half what it was in 2002. The Guardian, which is supported by the Scott Trust, established nearly eighty years ago to subsidize an ''independent'' and ''liberal'' newspaper, has lost money for nine straight years. In the most recent fiscal year, the paper lost thirty-one million pounds (about fifty million dollars), an improvement over the forty-four million pounds it lost the year before.

Last year, Andrew Miller, the director of the trust and the C.E.O. of the Guardian Media Group, warned that the trust's money would be exhausted in three to five years if the losses were not dramatically reduced. To save the Guardian, Rusbridger has pushed to transform it into a global digital newspaper, aimed at engaged, anti-establishment readers and available entirely for free. In 2011, Guardian U.S., a digital-only edition, was expanded, followed this year by the launch of an Australian online edition. It's a grand experiment, he concedes: just how free can a free press be?

Rusbridger and Mackie live in a nineteenth-century house in Kentish Town, a gentrifying neighborhood in northwest London that was once home to Karl Marx and George Orwell. A pug named Angus and a cat named Retro roam the main floor, which features a long sitting room, a fireplace, and a magnificent Fazioli grand piano that Rusbridger practices on most mornings. This September, in the U.S., he published ''Play It Again: An Amateur Against the Impossible,'' a professional memoir that, amid his recounting of the Guardian's coverage of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange and Murdoch's News of the World, describes an eighteen-month-long effort he made to master a difficult Chopin piece, Ballade in G Minor. ''He's forensic,'' Lionel Barber, the editor of the Financial Times, says. ''He's got a very penetrating mind. It's very revealing that he learned to play the Chopin piece. It's the same thing: 'I am quite prepared to spend hours and hours to learn Chopin. I'm prepared to spend hours and hours to get the story.' ''

Rusbridger was born in 1953 in Lusaka, in what is now Zambia. He was the younger of two sons of H. G. Rusbridger, an Oxford-educated former missionary who was the Deputy Director of Education for the British colonial administration. His mother travelled to Africa as a nurse and later became an amateur artist. His father was ''very even-tempered, maybe placid,'' Rusbridger said. ''Is 'placid' pejorative? I mean 'placid' in a non-pejorative way. He was very straightforward, very solid.'' Mackie describes her husband similarly: ''He never comes home and kicks the cat.'' Emily Bell, a former Web editor at the Guardian, described Rusbridger as ''inscrutable'' and ''gnomic.'' David Leigh, who retired this year as the Guardian's investigations editor, and who is Rusbridger's brother-in-law, said, ''His style is to be blank. He speaks very quietly. He's like a duck: he appears to glide along the water, but the legs are paddling furiously.''

The family moved to London when Rusbridger was five. At fifteen, he read the four volumes of Orwell's collected writing, and he credits Orwell for his decision to pursue journalism. He attended a boys' boarding school in Surrey and was accepted to Magdalene College, Cambridge, where he studied English literature. In the summer of his first and second years, he worked as an intern at the Cambridge Evening News. In 1976, after graduation, he was offered a full-time reporting job there. He stayed for three years, until 1979, when the Guardian hired him as a general reporter, based in London.

Mackie, who is a few years older than Rusbridger, was also a reporter at the Guardian. Her sister was married to David Leigh, then an investigative reporter for the paper. Rusbridger approached Leigh and asked if Mackie was in a relationship.

''No,'' Leigh told him. ''Good luck.''

''This is a measure of Alan's careful approach to things,'' Leigh told me. ''He was reconnoitring before making his move.'' Mackie left the Guardian in 1981 to freelance for the paper; they married the following year.

Rusbridger's work impressed editors, and he was asked to write a daily diary column, in which he sometimes ridiculed the powerful; in 1985, he became a feature writer. In 1986, the Sunday Observer offered him the job of television critic. Nine months later, a new opportunity appeared. Robert Maxwell, the owner of the Daily Mirror and other newspaper and publishing ventures, decided to start the London Daily News; Rusbridger accepted a job as its Washington bureau chief, and he and his family'--the couple now had two young daughters'--moved to the U.S. ''It opened my eyes to American journalism,'' he said. ''I had never read the New York Times or the Washington Post. They had ethical debates, which we didn't have in the U.K. I liked the seriousness of the U.S. press.'' He credits his stint in Washington for his decision, some years later, to appoint an ombudsman and start a corrections page at the Guardian.

When the mercurial Maxwell closed the Daily News, six months later, Rusbridger welcomed an offer from the Guardian to return to London as a feature writer. In 1992, the editor, Peter Preston, offered him the editorship of a weekend supplement. Rusbridger introduced a mixture of life-style and other topics, including a narrative of a visit to a nudist colony. Rusbridger was dismissed by some as a middlebrow, but weekend circulation jumped. Preston then appointed Rusbridger to edit a new daily feature section, the G2. When Kurt Cobain died, the section ran an extensive account of his life and death. ''All the graybeards came and said, 'Why are we doing this?' '' he recalls. ''I said, 'Our daughters are crying. That's why we're doing this.' ''

The Guardian was founded in 1821 as the Manchester Guardian, a weekly owned by local merchants. In 1872, C. P. Scott became the editor and, eventually, the owner. During a fifty-seven-year reign, Scott steered the paper to the left. In 1936, his son set aside money and established the Scott Trust, ''to secure the financial and editorial independence of the Guardian in perpetuity: as a quality national newspaper without party affiliation; remaining faithful to liberal tradition.'' In 1959, the newspaper dropped ''Manchester'' from the masthead; five years later, it moved to London.

By 1993, the Guardian was a thriving six-day-a-week paper, and the trust decided to buy the Sunday Observer. The following year, Preston made Rusbridger the deputy editor. The board of the Scott Trust has final say in choosing the editor, but the tradition is for candidates to nominate themselves by writing a manifesto describing their vision for the paper, and to allow a staff vote. There were four candidates. The ballot results ratified the preference of Preston and the trust. In 1995, when Preston stepped down, Rusbridger became the editor.

In his manifesto, Rusbridger expressed his desire to change the image of the Guardian as a left-wing newspaper. ''I tried to make sure the reporting was straight,'' he told me, while weeding out the ''mix of reporting and opinion'' and the habit of ''telling people what to think.'' The editorial page would no longer automatically support the Labour Party. ''I saw opportunity and space in the middle left,'' Rusbridger said. The shift fit his own outlook. His friend Henry Porter says, ''His basic stance is skepticism.'' David Leigh thinks of his brother-in-law as ''genuinely moderate. From an American point of view, he is very left. From a British point of view, he is not.''

Rusbridger was intent on modernizing the Guardian'--hiring younger reporters, adding color to its black-and-white pages. Eventually, he decided to switch to new presses and publish the paper in the Berliner format, which is narrower and shorter than a broadsheet yet taller and wider than a tabloid; it is used by several other European papers, including Le Monde. Rusbridger believed that the new format would look fresh to readers; most of the U.K.'s twelve daily national newspapers were tabloids. The decision met with opposition within the paper and created an impression among some that Rusbridger was imperious. ''He delegates operationally to his journalists more than any editor I've seen,'' Ian Katz, a former deputy news editor*, said. ''But when it comes to big decisions he has a tendency to grip the reins tighter. The mood of most people was that we should go tabloid. We thought we'd do a better job than anyone else. There was this extraordinary moment when Alan said, 'This conversation is over. We're not going to go tabloid.' ''

The new presses cost eighty million pounds, and the expenditure was a costly mistake, Tony Gallagher, the editor of the Telegraph, told me. ''At best, the press is busy one and a half to two hours a day. It's silent because no one else prints in the Berliner format. There's no way that's a good investment.'' Rusbridger said, ''The option was to build presses or rent them. We had to go full color. I don't think there was any difference in costs.''

Meanwhile, Rusbridger was thinking about the Guardian's digital future. In 1994, a year before he became editor, he visited Silicon Valley. ''I came back and wrote a memo to Peter saying the Internet was the future,'' Rusbridger recalls. ''I told Peter this would change everything and we had to explore it.'' Emily Bell, the Observer's business editor at the time, remembers having dinner with Rusbridger and others during the Edinburgh TV festival in August, 1999, and telling him that changes he'd made to the paper's Web site were inadequate. She prodded him to move more aggressively into the online world, with more breaking news and analysis; in 2001, he placed her in charge of turning the Web site into a vibrant online paper.

Bell, who left the paper in 2010 to become the director of the Tow Center for Digital Journalism, at the Columbia Journalism School, says that she and Rusbridger agreed that they would not erect a pay wall for their online content. ''If the core purpose of the Scott Trust is to keep the Guardian going in perpetuity, there is no choice,'' Bell says. The Guardian has only sixty thousand subscribers, far fewer than the Times, the Wall Street Journal, or the Financial Times. It was competing with the BBC, which has the largest free Web site in the world. And its newspaper sales in the United Kingdom were falling. ''The Guardian really didn't stand a chance if it didn't do something with the digital future,'' Bell says.

Most important, Rusbridger wanted the newspaper to be known for investigative reporting. Under its previous editor, the Guardian had launched a few prominent investigations, including its coverage of Jonathan Aitken, a Tory Cabinet minister; the paper reported that Aitken had procured prostitutes and made business deals with wealthy Saudis and arms dealers, who showered him with gifts. Aitken denounced the allegations, sued the paper for publishing ''deliberate lies,'' and declared that he would ''cut out the cancer of bent and twisted journalism in our country with the simple sword of truth.''

After Rusbridger took over, and in the final stages of a libel trial, a Guardian reporter unearthed hotel bills that proved Aitken had concocted an elaborate series of fabrications; he had perjured himself, and was sent to jail. ''Jonathan Aitken seems to have impaled himself on the simple sword of truth,'' Rusbridger said at a press conference. Rusbridger had proved that ''he was in fact made of steel,'' Leigh said; the newsroom staff presented him with a stainless-steel sword.

Nick Davies works for the Guardian under a freelance contract and operates out of his home, just outside Brighton; he is sixty, with short-cropped white hair and a blunt manner. After graduating from Oxford, in 1974, Davies worked as a stable boy and a railway guard before joining the Guardian, in July of 1979. In 1984, he left for the Observer, and then to write books and to try other papers, before returning to the Guardian in 1989. The Guardian appealed to him because it is owned by a trust that is not driven by profits and it has a ''moral agenda,'' Davies says. ''Over and over again, the Guardian has been on what I would call the right side of the moral barricades in key moments.'' Davies cited the paper's exposure, in 2009, of corporations evading their tax liability. He insists that this liberal bias is reflected in ''the subjects we cover,'' not in the reporting. ''A moral agenda is not an excuse for distorting information to score points.''

In June of 2009, over lunch with Rusbridger, Davies recounted a story that had not received much press coverage. In 2006, a private investigator and a reporter at Murdoch's News of the World were arrested, and both later pleaded guilty to hacking into the phones of staff of the Royal Family. News International, under which Murdoch's four London newspapers operated, calmed a potential controversy by assuring Parliament that ''a full rigorous internal inquiry'' had determined that these were isolated acts. Davies told Rusbridger that he had learned this claim was untrue; the illegal activity was widespread. But digging deeper would entail taking on Murdoch, who dominated more than a third of national newspaper circulation in Britain, and who owned a controlling interest in BSkyB, a powerful satellite-broadcasting enterprise. Rusbridger told Davies to pursue the story. ''He has a really useful piece of equipment that most editors don't have, which is a spinal column,'' Davies says of Rusbridger.

Starting in July of 2009, Davies had filed a series of front-page stories exposing scandalous and criminal activity in and around the Murdoch empire: hush money to hacking victims; payoffs to police officials; and evidence that top editors had condoned the hacking. The stories initially attracted little attention. But Davies and the Guardian pursued the investigation; Scotland Yard was eventually compelled to reopen its case, and public outrage ensued. Senior Murdoch editors and executives resigned and others were arrested. Advertisers yanked ads from the News of the World, and Murdoch shut down the paper. ''It's now a billion dollars that's been wiped off News Corp shares,'' Rusbridger wrote in his memoir, describing the night he learned of the paper's closure. ''Emails until about 1:30 waiting for the adrenalin to subside. Realise it won't. Not for days. Or weeks.'' Murdoch offered a public apology, which Davies calls ''deeply phony.''

Davies believes that some of the most significant stories in a newspaper are buried in brief news items. In 2010, he reminded Rusbridger of a small story in the Guardian about the arrest of Bradley Manning for leaking thousands of government documents to WikiLeaks. ''That's an amazing story,'' Davies told Rusbridger. ''I'm going to persuade them to give me all the cables.'' Davies convinced WikiLeaks that it should share the documents with the Guardian, arguing that its publication of them would attract more notice than if they were published on the WikiLeaks Web site. On Davies's advice, Rusbridger took the unprecedented step of bringing in the New York Times as a partner. A British newspaper might be blocked from publishing, but an American outlet would have First Amendment protection.

WikiLeaks handed over hundreds of thousands of pages of documents. A Guardian team spent the summer digesting, scrubbing, and redacting them. Rusbridger was satisfied that the paper had eliminated any danger to the lives of U.S. intelligence officials or local people who co¶perated with them. He was still concerned that the release of government cables could undermine essential governance. ''Diplomacy relies on secrecy,'' he said. Nonetheless, after talking it through with colleagues, he decided to go ahead.

The Guardian's accounts included transcripts of U.S. officials condoning the use of torture by their Iraqi allies, and diplomats making public statements that contradicted cables they were sending to their governments. Rusbridger and the Guardian were criticized for the stories. Roger Alton, the executive editor of the London Times, told me that he would not have published the WikiLeaks documents ''in that form. I thought it was taking material and throwing it at the market without looking at what damage it caused. It came from an anti-American, Julian Assange.'' An editor of a London paper praised the Guardian for publishing the documents but said that it stayed ''a little too close to Assange.'' In his memoir, Rusbridger describes tense negotiations with Assange, an ''anarchist'' who could be paranoid one moment and lucidly ''strategic'' the next. ''He's both a collaborator and a source,'' Rusbridger writes, and his challenge as an editor was to persuade the deeply suspicious Assange to keep co¶perating. But in 2010, when Sweden began investigating allegations that Assange had raped and sexually assaulted two women, Davies and the Guardian were the first to reveal the details of the charges against him.

The Guardian's third major scoop owed nearly as much to Glenn Greenwald as to Edward Snowden. Greenwald, who is forty-six, graduated from N.Y.U. law school in 1994 and was recruited by a top corporate law firm, Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz. After eighteen months, Greenwald left. ''I'm not an institutional person,'' he told me. ''I was not looking to represent Goldman Sachs and big corporations.'' He recently told BuzzFeed, the news site, ''If I had to do that one more day, I was going to jump out the window. I knew that I didn't want to be representing rich people. I wanted to be suing them.''

He set up a private practice and took on pro-bono civil-liberties cases. In 2004, looking to make a change, he rented an apartment in Rio de Janeiro. On his second day, at the beach, he met David Miranda, a nineteen-year-old Brazilian. They became a couple and remained in Rio. In late 2005, Greenwald started blogging, focussing on the N.S.A. and the Bush Administration's surveillance policies, which he abhorred. He has written four books, on civil liberties and Washington politics, and in 2007 was hired as a columnist for the online publication Salon. In August of 2012, the Guardian invited him to be a part-time blogger and columnist. Greenwald readily describes himself as an activist and an analyst. In his blog posts, he has encouraged readers to participate in an anti-surveillance rally in Washington, D.C., and has denounced the ''rampant, Strangelove-like megalomania in the National Security State.''

In January of 2013, Snowden, who was working as a computer specialist for Booz Allen Hamilton, an N.S.A. contractor, made contact with the filmmaker Laura Poitras, who was working on a documentary about surveillance. She had already made two documentaries exploring the consequences of the American invasion of Iraq and the war on terror. Snowden reportedly was a fan of her work, and he sent her a series of anonymous e-mails that contained explicit information about what he said was police-state-style spying by the N.S.A. Poitras consulted, among others, Barton Gellman, a former national-security reporter for the Washington Post, whom she had met in 2010, when they were fellows at N.Y.U.'s Center on Law and Security. Poitras knew that Gellman, now a senior fellow at the Century Foundation, had written extensively about government surveillance programs. Snowden asked her to contact Greenwald, with whom she had earlier developed a friendship. Both men told Poitras that the e-mails she'd received from this unnamed source seemed legitimate.

Greenwald told me that Snowden initially sent him a small number of encrypted documents through Poitras. In May, Snowden offered to share extensive government documentation of what the N.S.A. was doing. That month, with the Guardian's approval, Greenwald and Poitras met with Snowden in Hong Kong. For reasons he will not discuss, Gellman, who also obtained documents from Snowden, chose not to go. Nevertheless, as Gellman later wrote in the Post, Snowden offered to share with Gellman ''the full text of a PowerPoint presentation describing PRISM, a top-secret surveillance program that gathered intelligence'' from Silicon Valley companies. Snowden asked that the Post publish ''the full text'' of the PowerPoint presentation within seventy-two hours. ''I told him we would not make any guarantee about what we published or when,'' Gellman told me.

Gellman and the Post produced some impressive N.S.A. exclusives, including the first account of PRISM, on which Poitras shared the byline. But Greenwald and the Guardian dominated coverage of the leaks. With stories of such complexity, a newspaper often delays publication while it meets with government officials, who try to persuade editors of the harm that would come from publication. The Guardian did seek comment from government officials about the revelations. But Greenwald, outraged by the content of the material, pushed to publish quickly. ''I was getting really frustrated,'' he told me. ''I was putting a lot of pressure on them and insinuating that I was going to go publish elsewhere.'' He helped produce five stories that ran on five consecutive days in June. ''I wanted people in Washington to have fear in their hearts over how this journalism was going to be done, over the unpredictability of it,'' he said. ''Of the fact that we were going to be completely unrestrained by the unwritten rules of American journalism. The only reason we stopped after five days was that even our allies were saying, 'Look, this is too much information. We can't keep up with what you're publishing.' ''

Gellman, a fifty-two-year-old Pulitzer Prize winner and former Rhodes Scholar, took a more deliberate approach. ''It's hard to overstate the complexity of the journalistic, national security, and legal considerations in this story,'' he told me in an e-mail. ''I never saw anything like it in a couple of decades of covering defense, intelligence, and foreign policy. On first reading, I understood maybe half of any given memo or slide deck in the materials I got from Snowden. These are internal documents, dense with jargon and acronyms and references to things that are common knowledge at Fort Meade,'' the headquarters of the N.S.A. Additional research and reporting was essential, Gellman wrote. The material also raised ''legitimate and quite serious national security concerns. Neither I nor the Post would be prepared to write a story without hearing out U.S. government experts on those concerns.''

Bill Keller, a former executive editor of the New York Times and now a columnist for the paper, described the Guardian coverage as ''a terrific story,'' adding, ''I wish the Times had had it.'' But he differed with the Guardian's decision to attach the co-byline of an opinion columnist to what are supposed to be news stories. ''If one of our columnists had come up with a story of that magnitude'--something that could not be contained in a column'--we would have turned it over to the newsroom reporting staff,'' Keller said. ''And we would say in the story, 'Nick Kristof obtained these documents.' But we would not have Nick Kristof write the story for the front page of the New York Times.'' Jill Abramson, the current editor, offered a hedged response: Greenwald ''hasn't had a byline in the Times, and I make it a practice of not making decisions based on situations I haven't yet confronted.''

Greenwald bristled when he heard Keller's remarks. ''That to me is a really good reason why people like Edward Snowden don't want to go to the New York Times,'' he said. ''This idea that if you ever express an opinion in your life about the news topic on which you're reporting, that somehow that makes you not a real journalist'--that you wouldn't be able to write the story.'' The test for good journalism, he said, should be not ''whether you have opinions but if your reporting is reliable.''

Greenwald's praise for Snowden has at times been unrestrained. In a July 8th column in the Guardian, he seemed to compare Snowden to ''the greatest whistleblowing hero of the prior generation,'' Daniel Ellsberg, the American military analyst who leaked the Pentagon Papers to the Times and other outlets. But unlike Ellsberg, who stayed in the U.S. and took his case to court, Snowden sought refuge in China and Russia, autocratic countries where dissidents and journalists are often imprisoned. U.S. officials have expressed concern that those governments may have copied Snowden's hard drives. The Obama Administration has called Snowden a traitor, and is intent on apprehending and trying him for treason. Keller questioned the ''lionizing tone'' of the Guardian's coverage. ''When Snowden then threw himself into the arms of the Chinese, and then the Russians, and reportedly reached out to Ecuador'--all these countries that are not exactly pillars of freedom'--it compromised the Guardian a little bit,'' Keller said.

Greenwald believes there was no way that Snowden could have stayed in the U.S. and taken his case to the public, as Ellsberg did. These days, he says, whistle-blowers are immediately incarcerated: ''They have no opportunity to be heard from.'' Greenwald doesn't believe that the Russians or the Chinese have the documents. He has spoken to Snowden nearly ''every day for the last four months,'' he said, with the exception of two weeks that Snowden spent in a Moscow airport. They communicate through ''highly encrypted chat technology.'' Greenwald, who is now writing a book on the subject, says that, even if Russian or Chinese authorities tried to confiscate Snowden's electronic equipment, ''not even the N.S.A. can break it if they tried for five years,'' because Snowden had so skillfully encrypted it.

The disclosures have ignited a public debate over the trade-offs between the government's need to insure security and its mandate to protect civil liberties. In July, a national poll taken by Quinnipiac University found that a majority of Americans think Snowden is a whistle-blower, not a traitor, and, while half the public thinks the N.S.A.'s surveillance policies ''keep Americans safe,'' half also believes that the N.S.A. intrudes on ''personal privacy.'' In July, by a narrow vote, the House of Representatives defeated an amendment to restrict the N.S.A.'s phone-tracking program.

Rusbridger referred to the room where the Guardian kept Snowden's documents as ''the bunker.'' The door was kept locked, and a guard was stationed outside twenty-four hours a day. Before entering, the handful of people allowed admittance were required to put their smartphones and any other personal electronic devices on a nearby table, in case British or American intelligence agencies were to remotely transform them into recording devices. White blinds covered floor-to-ceiling windows. There were whiteboards, and on five white Formica tables sat five new laptops, unconnected to the Internet or to any other network. The trove of documents from Snowden were kept on these computers, in encrypted file containers. Accessing each container required three passwords, and no individual knew more than one.

In early July, Rusbridger held a meeting in the bunker with Paul Johnson, the deputy editor, and Julian Borger, the diplomatic editor, to discuss the next steps in their coverage of the N.S.A. They knew that the Post and others were pursuing the story, too. The British government, concerned that the Guardian's documents might be stolen, was again pressuring Rusbridger to turn them over. That afternoon, Borger was set to fly to New York to meet with the staff at ProPublica, to discuss what they might publish jointly or, if the Guardian were censored, what ProPublica might publish alone. Rusbridger took notes in a lined black Moleskine notebook, of which he now has two hundred, each dated, and which he carries to most meetings to retain a record.

The next day, Rusbridger and Johnson met in the bunker with James Ball, a data editor whose byline has appeared on numerous N.S.A. stories. Ball, who is twenty-seven, previously worked for WikiLeaks and is prized at the Guardian for his deep understanding of computers. That afternoon, he would be flying to New York, and then on to Brazil. His decision to leave WikiLeaks for the Guardian had displeased some of his friends, he said. ''My colleagues thought I sold out.''

On July 12th, Rusbridger was visited again by Cabinet Secretary Heywood. According to Rusbridger, Heywood warned him, ''No newspaper is equipped to keep this secret. We want the documents back.'' Rusbridger patiently explained that there was more than a single set of documents. And even if the British and the American governments were able to muzzle the press, he said, there were bloggers like Glenn Greenwald who were beyond their reach. Heywood suggested that the government would seek a court injunction to block the Guardian from publishing more Snowden documents. As a precaution, Rusbridger spoke with Jill Abramson, at the Times; the two had worked on the WikiLeaks story when she was the Times's managing editor.

''Alan was not comfortable just talking on the phone,'' Abramson says, so she and the managing editor, Dean Baquet, flew to London, where they agreed that the papers would work together again. They would share the documents, agree on the subject matter of each story, but investigate separately. Either they would publish accounts of the documents on the same day or, if the Guardian were censored, the Times and ProPublica would publish.

On July 15th, Rusbridger received a call from Craig Oliver, Cameron's communications director, again insisting that the documents be returned. Rusbridger responded that the Guardian would continue to publish the material. Even if the Guardian was censored, he was confident that the Times would be free to publish. Abramson was less certain. ''I did worry about that,'' she told me. She felt that the Obama Administration was trying aggressively to criminalize leaks. In early August, the Times was working on a story about an intercepted terror threat when James R. Clapper, the Administration's director of intelligence, asked the paper's Washington bureau to withhold certain details. Clapper warned that, if the full version were made public, the Times ''would have blood on our hands,'' Abramson recalls. The paper complied with the request. But, to emphasize that the government could not expect the Times to withhold information that is in the public interest, she travelled to Washington to meet with Clapper. During the meeting, he urged her not to publish the Snowden material. ''The First Amendment is first for a reason,'' she told him. (A spokesman for Clapper disputed this account.)

On July 18th, Rusbridger received a call from Oliver Robbins, the U.K.'s deputy national-security adviser, alerting him that agents would be coming to the Guardian's offices to seize the hard drives containing the Snowden files. Rusbridger again explained that the files were also on encrypted computers outside England, but his reasoning did not sway Robbins. Rusbridger asked if, instead, his staff members could destroy the files themselves, and Robbins consented. That Saturday, Rusbridger told associates to take the five laptops from the bunker to the basement and to smash the hard drives and circuit boards in front of two agents from the G.C.H.Q.

On August 18th, David Miranda, Greenwald's partner, was detained by British security officials at Heathrow Airport while returning to Brazil. Miranda had spent a week with Poitras in Berlin and was serving as a courier between her and Greenwald. ''He was carrying material that she was working on that I needed for journalistic work that she and I were doing,'' Greenwald says. The authorities, invoking the Terrorism Act, questioned Miranda for nine hours; they confiscated his computer, cell phone, video-game consoles, DVDs, and U.S.B. sticks. Greenwald called the action ''despotic.''

The Guardian sent its lawyers to help extricate Miranda, who Rusbridger said was acting on behalf of a news outlet; he claimed that the British authorities were ''conflating terrorism and journalism.'' Reuters quoted Greenwald saying that British officials would be ''sorry'' for detaining his partner: ''I will be far more aggressive in my reporting from now on. . . . I have many documents on England's spy system.'' Asked what the implications for the British government might be, he said, ''I think they will be sorry for what they did.'' Greenwald later told me that he had been misquoted and that he never threatened the British government. ''I was stressed and angry and tired,'' he said. ''I was probably not as careful as I should have been.'' But he added, ''What I said was actually fine.''

On September 5th, another major front-page story, co-bylined by James Ball, Julian Borger, and Greenwald, and again based on Snowden's documents, was published. It disclosed that the N.S.A. and the G.C.H.Q. ''have successfully cracked much of the online encryption relied upon by hundreds of millions of people to protect the privacy of their personal data, online transmissions and emails.'' If so, the guarantees that Internet companies have given to consumers were compromised. Relying on the Guardian's Snowden documents, the Times and ProPublica simultaneously published a collaboratively written account. Publicly, Rusbridger has expressed alarm that, by leaving open a back door to monitor Internet communications, the U.S. and the U.K. may prompt less open governments, such as China and Iran, to move to a walled, state-operated Internet; the result would undermine the ideal of a worldwide, open communications system.

Greenwald told me that the Snowden material was far from exhausted. ''The majority of what is extremely newsworthy has yet to be published,'' he said. ''There's thousands and thousands of unbelievably revealing and fascinating documents. It's going to take a long time for everything to be reported that should be reported.''

The Guardian's coverage of Murdoch, WikiLeaks, and Snowden's files has brought acclaim and an international audience. Its online readership has tripled since 2009, and two-thirds of its readers are now located outside the U.K. That expansion is essential to the publication's financial strategy. ''We need to be global,'' Andrew Miller, the Guardian Media Group's C.E.O., told me. ''At the moment, I believe we could not survive in the U.K. with the oversupply'' of newspapers and the omnipresence of the BBC. That awareness has led the Scott Trust to embrace Rusbridger's strategy of pouring resources into a digital Guardian. ''We can either cut our way out,'' Rusbridger says he told the trust, ''or we can think, What is our future? There is no disagreement that print will shrink.'' By 2011, the trust had decided to invest more heavily in its online presence, starting with its U.S. effort.

The offices of Guardian U.S. occupy an entire floor of a loft in SoHo. There are nearly sixty staff members, half of whom are journalists. They report to Janine Gibson, the editor-in-chief, who presided over most of the team producing the paper's N.S.A. stories and has worked most closely with Greenwald. Gibson arrived in New York in July of 2011, after thirteen years at the paper; nine Guardian reporters were already in the U.S. The site has thrived. Today, a third of the Guardian's worldwide audience is American; after one N.S.A. story this summer, readership reached seven million daily visitors, and in June the U.S. site attracted more unique visitors'--twenty-seven million'--than its British counterpart.

Rusbridger visited the New York office in late June. The atmosphere earlier in the month, when the Guardian broke several N.S.A. stories, ''was amazing,'' he said. A few days later, Rusbridger was seated at a conference table in his London office with Tony Danker, the international director, discussing the Guardian's expansion in Australia and beyond. His desk was heaped with papers, books, and folders. Rusbridger told Danker that staff members were still adjusting to their broadened mandate. Employees think of the Guardian ''like a family newspaper,'' he said. ''There have been only ten editors of the Guardian since 1821. It's taken time for us to think of ourselves as a global newspaper.''

Danker, who previously worked for the consulting firm McKinsey & Co. and for the government of the Labour Prime Minister Gordon Brown, told me, ''I think we do things differently than others do.'' The Guardian, he added, is ''a newspaper of protest,'' ''an outsider brand'' with a ''liberal'' view of the world. ''My job now is to think, What's next internationally?'' He mentioned ''five or six places where we're actively looking,'' including India, which has a weak Internet infrastructure but a vast English-speaking population. Rusbridger was encouraged by the start of the Australian online edition, which went live in May with a staff of fewer than twenty. In just five days, Rusbridger said, its traffic eclipsed that of Murdoch's national newspaper, the Australian. ''We're being a digital disrupter,'' he said, smiling. ''We're doing to that market what the Huffington Post is trying to do to us.''

But the paper remains dependent on the Scott Trust. One day, I accompanied Rusbridger as he visited with Andrew Miller, who supervises the business side of the newspapers as well as the company's other holdings, which include a profitable online car-selling company, Auto Trader. Their conversation centered on the soon-to-be-released financial results for fiscal year 2012-13, which ended on March 31st. Miller said he was encouraged by the numbers: digital-ad revenues rose twenty-nine per cent, to fifty-six million pounds, an increase exceeding the decline in print revenue. The company was on track to reduce costs by twenty-five million pounds by March, 2016, including voluntary staff reductions. In fiscal 2012, Rusbridger volunteered to take a pay cut'--his second'--reducing his salary from four hundred and thirty-eight thousand pounds to three hundred and ninety-five thousand pounds this year; Miller also voluntarily cut his pay.

Rusbridger called the numbers from the recent fiscal year a ''huge improvement.'' Still, the Guardian lost more money this past year than it did in fiscal 2007-08. To run its print and online operations, the Guardian employs sixteen hundred people worldwide, including five hundred and eighty-three journalists and a hundred and fifty digital developers, designers, and engineers. ''The toughest critique of Alan is that he has not faced up to the Guardian's costs,'' a longtime executive at the paper said. The newsroom ''is too big for a digital newspaper.'' Miller admits that he does not foresee the newspaper earning a profit anytime soon. Rusbridger said, ''The aim is to have sustainable losses.'' Miller defines that as getting ''our losses down to the low teens in three to five years.'' But at some point, if the Guardian does not begin to make money, the trust's liquid assets, currently two hundred and fifty-four million pounds, would be depleted.

Jeff Jarvis, an Internet evangelist who teaches journalism at the City University of New York and who advises Rusbridger, says that eventually the Guardian will have to generate more revenue from its digital edition, abandon its print newspaper, or reduce the number of days it publishes. ''Every day they wait is dollars gone,'' he said. As for printing only on certain days, he says, ''Die Zeit, in Germany, is a good model. One day a week in print and the rest digital.''

Rusbridger can envisage a paperless Guardian in five to ten years. He also ''can imagine,'' he says, printing on only certain days. For the moment, with digital dollars composing only a quarter of the company's revenues, ''if you want to support the kind of journalism we do, you can't kiss goodbye seventy-five per cent of your revenues,'' he said. ''But all that will change.''

Eventually, Rusbridger predicts, between the Guardian's worldwide reach and a more aggressive effort to reach its younger, liberal, well-educated audience, ad dollars will pour in. ''It will work for us because of scale and innovation,'' Rusbridger told me. ''With a rigid pay wall, you end up with a small, (C)lite audience, with restricted access for everyone else. We want a large audience and international influence, and not just with (C)lites. That appears to be an attractive mission for advertisers.'' The Guardian doesn't need to be profitable, so long as its losses are reduced and the trust can continue to subsidize them with its other businesses.

In his memoir, Rusbridger describes how the Guardian's coverage of Assange and WikiLeaks helped him realize the extent to which his industry had changed: now anyone could become a publisher. ''It's the amateurising of journalism'--with all that's good and bad about that,'' he writes. The path forward lies in what he calls ''open journalism,'' meaning a newspaper that not only is free for anyone to read but invites readers to participate in the journalistic venture. The bet is that greater reader involvement will attract a bigger audience, and more advertising dollars. The editors regularly mine the reader comments for story ideas and potential contributors. Last summer, during the Olympics, a British-born coach for the Chinese swim team wrote an anonymous comment describing the pleasure of working for a country that invests lavishly in its athletes; Guardian editors invited him to write a blog post about it. Rusbridger has said there's no reason that the Guardian couldn't include theatre reviews from audience members in addition to those written by Michael Billington, who has been the paper's drama critic since 1971, and whom Rusbridger treasures.

Exactly how a newspaper should ''filter the good responses from the bad'' isn't clear, he concedes, but editors are supposed to be curators. I asked whether his notion of an ''open'' newspaper extended to investigative reporting and other news. Emphatically yes, he said. ''No other institution would have hired Glenn Greenwald.'' In 2009, the Guardian posted a link asking readers for help in analyzing complicated expense documents filed by various Members of Parliament. Twenty-three thousand readers sent in their analyses; the Guardian staff reviewed them and found that many of the readers had discovered fraudulent charges.

A newspaper becomes ''a platform as well as a publisher,'' Rusbridger told me. But he knows that time is limited, and concedes that a pay wall is not out of the question. The Guardian charges for its iPad and iPhone apps, Rusbridgers notes. ''We are not the Taliban of free,'' he said. ''We are not free fundamentalists.'' He went on, ''Is there an economic model for the kind of journalism we're doing? We're all trying our different routes to get there. No one can honestly say they've got the answer.''

As one of twelve board members of the Scott Trust, Rusbridger probably has more say in the matter than most editors do, and more immunity from the consequences: the trust's founding document states that an editor can be dismissed only ''in extreme circumstances.'' If the editor lays out an objective and the board disagrees, Liz Forgan, a former Guardian journalist and the chair of the trust, says, he gets his way: ''Alan is the editor and he has the last word.''

When Rusbridger was young, his mother pushed him to practice piano and clarinet three hours a day. Later, for several years, he served as the chair of the National Youth Orchestra of England; he also wrote a play about Beethoven. In his memoir, which is dedicated to his late mother, he describes missing those passionate challenges; music and the arts must be squeezed in amid his other obligations. He felt ''a mundane need to have moments off the hamster wheel of editing,'' he writes, an ''instinct to wall off a small part of my life for creative expression, for 'culture.' '' To tackle the Chopin piece, which he ultimately performed at the 1901 Arts Club, in central London, before an audience of friends and family, he hired music teachers, consulted acclaimed pianists, and practiced for hours'--and kept a diary. ''The kind of journalism I like always explains things,'' he writes. ''I started keeping notes and thought, this is what musicians do.''

Rusbridger doesn't know what he'll do when he leaves the Guardian. ''We've been talking about that,'' Lindsay Mackie says. ''It might be something to do with music and young people. Access to music, I think.'' But for now retirement isn't up for discussion. ''I have an agreement with Alan that we will give each other a year's notice,'' Forgan said. ''He has not done that.'' Rusbridger says, ''Each six months, it becomes a radically different job.'' He adds that he could see staying for a while'--''whatever 'a while' is. I'm enjoying it. The paper is on fire.'' '...

*Correction: In an earlier version of this article, Ian Katz was referred to, incorrectly, as the Guardian's former deputy news editor.