al press, have been hunting for him. At the height of the search, reporters recruited Twitter followers to see if they could successfully identify the lighting and other hotel furnishings shown in the video in which he went public. They did: the $ 330-a-night Mira Hotel, on Nathan Road, the busy main shopping drag in Kowloon district.it was only a matter of time before he was found, Snowden checked out at lunchtime on Monday. It is thought he is now in a safe house.happens now? The US is on the verge of pressing criminal charges against him and that would lead to extradition proceedings, with a view to bringing him back to the US for trial and eventually jail.America is planning to jail for life Bradley Manning, who was behind the +2010 WikiLeaks release of tens of thousands of state department memos, what retribution lies in store for Snowden, who is guilty of leaking on a much bigger scale? The documents Manning released were merely classified raquo ;. Snowden s were not only Top Secret raquo ;, but circulation was extremely limited.an American, the traditional home for the kind of story Snowden was planning to reveal would have been the New York Times. But during extensive interviews last week with a Guardian team, he recalled how dismayed he had been to discover the Times had a great scoop in election year +2004 - that the Bush administration, post 9/11, allowed the NSA to snoop on US citizens without warrants - but had sat on it for a year before publishing.said this was a turning point for him, confirming his belief that traditional media outlets could not be trusted. He looked around for alternative journalists, those who were both anti-establishment and at home with blogging and other social media. The member of this generation that he most trusted was the Guardian commentator Glenn Greenwald. January, Snowden reached out to a documentary filmmaker and journalist, Laura Poitras, and they began to correspond. In mid-February, he sent an email to Greenwald, who lives in Brazil, suggesting he might want to set up a method for receiving and sending encrypted emails. He even made a YouTube video for Greenwald, to take him step-by-step through the process of encryption. Greenwald did not know the identity of the person offering the leaks and was unsure if they were genuine. He took no action. In March, in New York, he received a call from Poitras, who convinced him that he needed to take this more seriously.and Snowden set up a secure communications system and the first of the documents arrived, dealing with the NSA s secret Prism programme, which gathers up information from the world s leading technology companies.flew to New York to talk to Guardian editors on 31 May; the next day, he and Poitras flew to Hong Kong. Greenwald nor Poitras even knew what Snowden looked like. He had some elaborate scheme to meet, Greenwald said. Snowden told him to go to a specific location on the third floor of the hotel and ask loudly for directions to a restaurant. Greenwald assumed Snowden was lurking in the background, listening in.went to a room that, Greenwald recalled, contained a large fake alligator. Snowden made himself known. He had told Greenwald that I would know it was him because he would be carrying a Rubik s Cube .Greenwald and Poitras were shocked the first time they saw the 29-year-old. Greenwald said: had expected a 60-year-old grizzled veteran, someone in the higher echelons of the intelligence service. I thought: This is going to be a wasted trip. Laquo; an hour of listening to Snowden, Greenwald changed his mind. I completely believed him, he said.interviews were conducted in Snowden s room, which overlooked Kowloon Park. Snowden and the journalists, complete with camera equipment, crammed into the tiny space. He had been there for two weeks, having meals sent up. He did not have much with him: some clothes, a book, four computers, that Rubik s Cube. He was becoming worried about the costs and especially the chance that his credit cards would be blocked.though he was well-versed in surveillance techniques, he would not have been hard to find - having signed in under his own name, using his own credit cards.interviews, combined with the leaked documents, provided the Guardian with four scoops in quick succession, from the court order showing that the US government had forced the telecoms giant Verizon to hand over the phone records of millions of Americans, to the previously undisclosed programme, Prism.Prism story was also published independently by the Washington Post after Poitras, a freelance journalist, had earlier approached the investigative reporter Barton Gellman, who took the story to the paper. Once on the ground in Hong Kong, however, Poitras began working with the Guardian team.Sunday, the story shifted from the leaks to the leaker. Snowden had from the start decided against anonymity and Poitras filmed him being interviewed by Green...
