Hi, this is Lindsay Graham, host of American Scandal.

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A listener note, this episode previously aired in 2022.

It's June 3, 2013, early in the evening in Hong Kong, and Edward Snowden is standing by a window in a hotel room staring out at the city.

The sun is setting over the horizon, and down below, traffic has begun to grow snarled, with cars honking and pedestrians swarming through the streets.

Snowden turns away from the chaotic city life and gazes across his small hotel room,

which has grown messy and chaotic in its own ways.

On the other side of the room, the documentary filmmaker Laura Poitris is packing up her

camera gear, spread all across the floor littering the ground.

Next to her, Glenn Greenwald, reporter for the Guardian, is hunched over his laptop, typing

rapidly, only pausing to take a bite of something from room service.

Snowden just stands there. He's exhausted. At this point, there's not much more he can do.

All day he's been sitting with Greenwald, getting interviewed on camera.

The two have been discussing why Snowden smuggled out top-secret documents from the NSA

and leaked them to these two journalists.

Overall, Snowden thought he did a good job.

He explained that citizens deserved to know the truth about their government,

that the NSA's

surveillance of regular Americans is a threat to their freedom and democracy.

...