Эдвард Сноуден: Permanent Record (Young Readers Edition): How One Man Exposed the Truth about Government Spying and Digital Security

These unfailingly kind and generous people came through with charitable grace. The solidarity they showed me was not political. It was human, and I will be forever in their debt. They didn’t care who I was, or what dangers they might face by helping me, only that there was a person in need. They knew all too well what it meant to be forced into a mad escape from mortal threat, having survived ordeals far in excess of anything I’d dealt with and hopefully ever will. They let an exhausted stranger into their homes—and when they saw my face on TV, they didn’t falter. Instead, they smiled and took the opportunity to reassure me of their hospitality.

Though their resources were limited—Supun, Nadeeka, Vanessa, and two little girls lived in a crumbling, cramped apartment smaller than my room at the Mira—they shared everything they had with me, and they shared it unstintingly, refusing my offers to reimburse them for the cost of taking me in so emphatically that I had to hide money in the room to get them to accept it. They fed me, they let me bathe, they let me sleep, and they protected me. I will never be able to explain what it meant to be given so much by those with so little, to be accepted by them without judgment as I perched in corners like a stray street cat, skimming the Wi-Fi of distant hotels with a special antenna that delighted the children.

Their welcome and friendship was a gift, for the world to even have such people is a gift, and so it pains me that, all these years later, the cases of Ajith, Supun, Nadeeka, and Nadeeka’s daughter are still pending. The admiration I feel for these folks is matched only by the resentment I feel toward the bureaucrats in Hong Kong, who continue to deny them the basic dignity of asylum. What gives me hope, however, is that Vanessa and her daughter received asylum in Canada. I look forward to the day when I can visit all of my old Hong Kong friends in their new homes, wherever those may be, and we can make happier memories together in freedom.

On June 14, the US government charged me under the Espionage Act in a sealed complaint, and on June 21 they formally requested my extradition, which, under international law, means the US asked Hong Kong to return me to the States so that I could be put on trial. It was my thirtieth birthday.

Just as the US State Department sent its request, my lawyers received a reply to my appeal for assistance from the UN High Commissioner for Refugees: There was nothing that could be done for me. The Hong Kong government would not provide me international protection on its territory. In other words, Hong Kong was telling me to go home and deal with the UN from prison. I wasn’t just on my own—I was unwelcome. If I was going to leave freely, I had to leave now. I wiped my four laptops completely clean and destroyed the cryptographic key, which meant that I could no longer access any of the documents even if compelled. Then I packed the few clothes I had and headed out.

For a coastal country at the northwestern edge of South America, half a globe away from Hong Kong, Ecuador is in the middle of everything. Most of my fellow North Americans would correctly say that it’s a small country. Ecuador, at least in 2013, had a hard-earned belief in the institution of political asylum—the right of a person to live in a foreign country if they have had to leave their own country for political reasons. My Hong Kong lawyers agreed that, given the circumstances, Ecuador seemed to be the most likely country to defend my right to political asylum.

With my government having decided to charge me under the Espionage Act, I stood accused of a political crime, meaning a crime whose victim is the state itself rather than a person. Under international humanitarian law, whistleblowers should be protected against extradition—from being forcibly sent back to the country accusing them of a crime—almost everywhere. In practice, though, this is rarely the case. The most common advice my team received was for me to avoid any route that crossed the airspace of any countries with a record of cooperation with the US military.

The moment the news broke that an American had unmasked a global system of mass surveillance, Sarah Harrison, a journalist and editor for WikiLeaks, had immediately flown to Hong Kong. WikiLeaks is a nonprofit organization that publishes classified information, including news leaks, from anonymous sources on its website. Through Sarah’s experience with WikiLeaks, she was poised to offer me the world’s best asylum advice. It didn’t hurt that she also had family connections with the legal community in Hong Kong.

Laura informed me of Sarah’s presence in Hong Kong only a day or so before she communicated with me on an encrypted channel, which itself was only a day or two before I actually met her in person. Sarah managed to procure a document that would provide me safe passage to Ecuador—it was a UN-recognized one-way travel document typically issued to refugees crossing borders. It had been issued on an emergency basis, and the moment it was in hand, Sarah hired a van to take us to the airport.

That’s how I met her—in motion. I’d like to say that I started off our acquaintance by offering my thanks, but instead the first thing I said was “When was the last time you slept?” Sarah looked just as ragged and disheveled as I did. She stared out the window, as if trying to recall the answer, but then just shook her head: “I don’t know.”

We were traveling to Quito, Ecuador, via Moscow, Russia, via Havana, Cuba, via Caracas, Venezuela, for a simple reason: It was the only safe route available. There were no direct flights to Quito from Hong Kong, and all of the other connecting flights traveled through US airspace. I was concerned about the massive layover in Russia—we’d have almost twenty hours before the Havana flight departed.

I wore my hat down over my eyes to avoid being recognized, and Sarah did the seeing for me. She took my arm and led me to the gate, where we waited until boarding. This was the last moment for her to back out, and I told her so. “You don’t have to do this,” I said.

“Do what?”

“Protect me like this.”

Sarah stiffened. “Let’s get one thing clear,” she said as we boarded. “I’m not protecting you. No one can protect you. What I’m here for is to make it harder for anyone to interfere. To make sure everyone’s on their best behavior.”

“So you’re my witness,” I said.

She gave a slight wry smile. “Someone has to be the last person to ever see you alive. It might as well be me.”

Though the three points where I’d thought we were most likely to get stopped were now behind us (check-in, passport control, and the gate), I didn’t feel safe on the plane. I didn’t want to get complacent. I took the window seat, and Sarah sat next to me to screen me from the other passengers across the row. After what felt like an eternity, the cabin doors were shut, the sky bridge pulled away, and finally, we were moving.

But just before the plane rolled from the tarmac onto the runway, it halted sharply. I was nervous. Pressing the brim of my hat up against the glass, I strained to catch the sound of sirens or the flashing of blue lights. It felt like I was playing the waiting game all over again—it was a wait that wouldn’t end. Until, suddenly, the plane rolled into motion again and took a turn, and I realized that we were just far back in the line for takeoff.

My spirits rose with the wheels, but it was hard to believe I was out of the fire. Once we were airborne, I loosened my grip from my thighs and felt an urge to take my lucky Rubik’s Cube out of my bag. But I knew I couldn’t, because nothing would make me more conspicuous now that tales of my Rubik’s Cube had spread far and wide. Instead, I sat back, pulled my hat down again, and kept my half-open eyes on the map on the seat-back screen just in front of me, tracking the pixelated route across China, Mongolia, and Russia.