86 the emails identified himself as a privacy advocate, which was also how Greenwald often identified himself in his speeches. He also echoed other concerns Greenwald had publicly expressed including defending American privacy from government intrusions. Snowden promised the leaks he would supply would provide dramatic results. He asserted in his email that the “shock” of the documents he would give Greenwald would result in the public’s learning about the secret “mechanisms through which our privacy is violated.” According to Snowden’s assessment, following that initial uproar, they could achieve another objective in their common cause. “We can guarantee for all people equal protection against unreasonable search,” he wrote. In light of this convergence of views, it is not surprising that Greenwald was fully convinced of Citizen 4’s bona fides. He said to Poitras, “He’s real,” and he agreed to help break the story in the Guardian. After he said he was onboard the project, Poitras revealed to Greenwald that Citizen 4 would deliver an entire trove of secret documents to them in six to eight weeks. According to this timetable, the Greenwald’s scoop, and the “shock” Citizen 4 promised, would come in early to mid June 2013. At this point in late April, Snowden was in full control. Although his day job at Dell involved endlessly monitoring largely-meaningless encrypted numbers in the NSA tunnel, he had been able to get three major journalists to react favorably to his proposal. None of them knew his name, position, age, location or where he precisely where he worked. Nor did they know the means by which he planned to obtain the secrets that he dangled before them. They also did not know where, or even if, they would meet their source. Their total knowledge about him was the description he gave of himself: a “senior government employee in the intelligence community” (which, as they only later would find out, was untrue.) For his part, Greenwald speculated that he was