The last set of documents were copied three weeks ago in Hawaii. The perfect leak

In his dealings with the media, Edward Snowden played his hand like a pro.

Snowden, 29, was looking to disclose top-secret information about the National Security Agency’s surveillance programs to the world — and to do so he arranged a powerful one-two combination punch with the press that provided both mainstream credibility (Barton Gellman and The Washington Post) and someone who shared his ideological inclinations (Glenn Greenwald), according to media observers and whistleblower experts.


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As more and more agenda-driven outlets, reporters and bloggers hit the media scene, leakers such as Snowden find themselves with a wealth of potential options to get their information out. It’s a seismic shift from the old media landscape, when would-be leakers had only one clear path to ensuring widespread attention for their stories: a successful pitch to a handful of national newspapers or TV networks.

But the traditional national security media heavyweights — led by The New York Times and The Washington Post — still have outsize influence on stories about intelligence gathering and potential overreach by the government.

So at the end of the day, experts told POLITICO, Snowden found a way to pull off what was in effect the perfect leak. He established parallel tracks with the MSM — The Washington Post and The Guardian — and also found a member of the media who was sympathetic to his cause. Snowden’s material was given widespread exposure and credibility in the traditional press and at the same time had the hand of a friendly journalist on the wheel for at least part of the ride.

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“I think anyone who will leak something like this obviously knows that he or she is in a very vulnerable position and there could be criminal charges, so what you want to do is at least make sure there are parts of the equation you have some control over and you want to make sure that your story is going to be published,” said Paul Levinson, a professor of media and communications studies at Fordham University.

“That’s the motivation with going to someone like Glenn Greenwald for a story like this because you know that it’s going to be well-received, based on what he’s written in the past,” Levinson added. “And what’s the point of leaking the information if you’re concerned that it’s going to be chopped up and paraphrased and somehow the essence of the story might not get out there to the public? You want to go with who you have the best shot of getting the story that you want out to the public.”

Snowden was determined to get the documents out to the public — after all, he kept his options of media outlets open — but in Greenwald he had someone he was comfortable working with, shared his views about government surveillance and felt he could trust to display the material, experts noted.

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Three weeks ago, Snowden copied the last set of documents he was looking to disclose from the NSA office in Hawaii and headed to Hong Kong — and last week, The Guardian published its first explosive story on the NSA about the agency collecting Verizon phone records, followed by The Washington Post’s and The Guardian’s respective reports on PRISM a day later.

Greenwald says he was first in contact with Snowden in February, while Gellman, who wrote the Post’s PRISM story, says he had his first exchange with the leaker in May. According to Gellman’s account — which Greenwald disputes — Snowden only turned to Greenwald after the Post was unable to offer guarantees that the paper would publish all 41 PRISM slides within 72 hours. Greenwald, meanwhile, says he had been dealing with Snowden for several months before Gellman ever entered the picture. Documentary filmmaker Laura Poitras, who worked with both Greenwald and Gellman on the leak stories, told Salon she was first contacted in January, anonymously, by Snowden. Poitras, who was credited in The Guardian and the Post for her reporting, says she is working on a documentary on the story.

Snowden, however, doesn’t seem interested in the media back-and-forth.

“I really want the focus to be on these documents and the debate which I hope this will trigger among citizens around the globe about what kind of world we want to live in,” he told The Guardian. “My sole motive is to inform the public as to that which is done in their name and that which is done against them.”

What he was interested in, it seems, was having someone he trusted to work with in doling out the information, especially given the potential consequences. “I could not do this without accepting the risk of prison,” Snowden said in The Guardian. “You can’t come up against the world’s most powerful intelligence agencies and not accept the risk. If they want to get you, over time they will.”

Potential leakers such as Snowden are now likely to seek out someone who has publicly shown themselves to be ideologically sympathetic, University of Maryland journalism professor and former investigative reporter Mark Feldstein said. And Snowden knew Greenwald’s views on the issue of the government invasion of privacy, and sought him out. Greenwald said on Monday on CNN that Snowden told him he was the “first person in journalism that he thought about contacting and that he did contact.”

“The source is probably more likely to feel safe, more likely to feel that they’re speaking to someone who speaks their language and understands them,” Feldstein said. “It may be as simple as having more fluency in technology and computer skills, but also you know they’re ideological sympathetic.”

Neither Greenwald nor Gellman has returned requests for comment. But Greenwald gave some insight into his thinking last week, telling CNN, “there is a massive apparatus within the United States government that with complete secrecy has been building this enormous structure that has only one goal, and that is to destroy privacy and anonymity, not just in the United States but around the world. That is not hyperbole. That is their objective.” And Gellman on Monday told MSNBC “the problem here is there is a mass systemic quality to this surveillance, and we have to trust the U.S. government when it says we’re very careful to ensure that we’re not targeting Americans and we’re not using their information appropriately. There’s no check.”

Poitras, meanwhile, told Salon, “I think [Snowden] had a suspicion of mainstream media. And particularly what happened with The New York Times and the warrantless wiretapping story, which as we know was shelved for a year. So he expressed that to me but I think also in his choices of who he contacted.”

And Snowden showed his determination to get the story out, regardless of the byline, by arranging “parallel tracks” with both Greenwald and Gellman, said Steven Aftergood, the director of the Federation of American Scientists’ Project on Government Secrecy and a classified information policy analyst. The WikiLeaks case with Bradley Manning is instructive in examining how would-be leakers approach the press, he noted, pointing out that “traditional media can seem forbidding or unapproachable, as was Manning’s experience,” so he moved on from trying to work with traditional outlets and turned to Julian Assange.

Still, Assange teamed up with traditional outlets including The New York Times and The Guardian, providing the news organizations with government documents — in the end, Aftergood said, mainstream exposure is just as critical to the leaker as a sympathetic journalist or outlet.

“[Manning] couldn’t quite figure out how to connect with a real reporter, not for lacking of trying or wanting to, but he was not quite able to make it happen,” Aftergood said. “The nontraditional outlets are likely to be smaller, more intimate, more used to dealing with unconventional characters, and therefore more accessible. But there are clearly advantages in getting into the information stream of the mainstream press, for purposes of exposures or reaching the largest possible audience and so on.”

And in Greenwald, Snowden had an ideological soul mate concerned with civil liberties and national security issues — and someone with a huge reach.

As author and intelligence expert Thomas Powers said, leakers such as Snowden know the possible consequences of disclosing classified information and want to make sure their actions are “worthwhile” to them. If the consequences are going to be personally dire, the leaker in question would want “to make sure they are talking to someone whose principled interest is giving what they are getting to the public” and who has the tools to do just that.

“What you want is someone who knows something about the issue, who would understand what you are talking about, would have some understanding of the journalistic world and would know how to unfold and unwrap a story,” Powers said. “You need someone who’s sophisticated.”

By turning over the top-secret information to both The Guardian and the Post, Snowden went to media sources “he felt he could trust to treat the information fairly,” the Project on Government Oversight’s director of public policy Angela Canterbury said.

“It indicates that he had a strong interest in getting broad but fair and accurate media coverage,” she said.

Gellman last week told The Huffington Post he chose to write the piece for The Washington Post because it “felt more like a newspaper story than a magazine story” and he thought the Post had the infrastructure to pull it off.

As Snowden demonstrated, someone who wants to leak government information is now looking beyond the traditional press as their outlet and instead targeting members of the media who are on the same page ideologically with the ability to publish the information in a way they know will be sympathetic to their aims.

“All things being equal, but they rarely are, it’s better to go with a mainstream outlet, so the ideology of the vehicle doesn’t become a distraction from the crux of the story,” said Rem Rieder, a USA Today media columnist and the editor and senior vice president of the American Journalism Review. “But in this much more freewheeling era, the ideological slant of the news outlet and/or the reporter doesn’t seem as significant a potential problem as it may have been in the past — if the material is solid.”

And that’s exactly what matters, experts agree. Even in the changing media landscape with ideological outlets leaping onto the scene, the basic journalistic tenets remain the same — the material behind the leak has to be solid and true. Take The Daily Caller, for example, which ran with the allegations that Sen. Robert Menendez visited prostitutes in the Dominican Republic — a story the mainstream media ultimately rejected and the FBI found no evidence of, according to reports.

“In the Caller case, it turned out to be a bogus story, but if it hadn’t, it wouldn’t have mattered at all that it was The Daily Caller [instead of a traditional news outlet,]” Feldstein said. “And if it had been true, The Daily Caller would be much more elevated now because of breaking a big story like that. And if it turned out that these documents that Greenwald got were bogus or the information was false, then that would be similar to the Caller’s situation.”

“The key here is really the truth of it all. And if the truth holds out, then it almost doesn’t seem to matter like it used to if there is that ideological slant to the organization if the information can be verified,” he said.