| ® | 280 | HOW AMERICA LOST ITS SECRETS tion treaties with the United States. Yet, instead, he flew to Hong Kong, which had an extradition agreement that had been enforced throughout the past decade with Hong Kong courts ordering the arrest of almost every fugitive charged by U.S. authorities. He could expect that when the United States filed a criminal complaint, Hong Kong authorities would seize him and the alleged stolen property of the U.S. government in his possession. Even if he were released on bail and successfully defeated extradition in a Hong Kong court, the Hong Kong authorities would almost certainly retain all the NSA and GCHQ files he had gone to such lengths to steal. His reason, as he told Greenwald, was that China could provide him with physical protection from any countermeasures by U.S. intelligence agencies such as “American agents... breaking down the door” of the hotel room and seizing him. China also had sway over Hong Kong’s security activities. Hong Kong was therefore merely a protected stopover en route to his next destination. If he had gone directly to Moscow and provided the same journalists with the same documents at a press conference © in Moscow, his status as a whistle-blower might have been viewed re) with less sympathy in the media. Even The Guardian, for example, might have been reluctant to publish a Moscow-based story reveal- ing British and American communications intelligence secrets. The Third Decision The third choice Snowden made, and the choice that most effectively defined him to the public, was to reveal himself as the man behind the leak in a video in Hong Kong. He not only identified himself as the person who stole the government documents published by The Guardian and The Washington Post but also incriminated himself further on camera by allowing Poitras to film him actually disclosing the NSA’s secret operations to Greenwald. By disclosing classified data to Greenwald, an unauthorized person, he intentionally burne