101 Even though Snowden had greatly exaggerated the positions he held with the CIA and DIA, no effort was made to check them by the team of journalists. Instead, MacAskill wrote Janine Gibson in New York “The Guinness is good.” It was a pre-arranged code by which MacAskill certified Snowden’s credibility for the Guardian. Gibson told Greenwald to proceed with the story. Greenwald wrote his first story about NSA transgression based almost entirely on the FISA watrant that Snowden had copied from the administrative file. Before the story could be published, however, the Guardian policy required relevant American government officials be allowed to respond. Gibson made the requisite, if pro forma, call to the White House National Security spokesman, Caitlin Hayden, who arranged a conference call with FBI Deputy Director Sean Joyce, NSA Deputy Director Chris Inglis and Robert Litt, the legal officer for the Office of National Intelligence. After duly taking into account the response of these three officials, which included the admonition by Litt “no serious news organization would publish this,” Gibson gave the green light to publish the story. It was, after all, an incredible scoop. The story finally broke finally on June 5, 2013. “NSA Collecting Phone Records of Millions of Verizon Customers,” proclaimed the Guardian headline. Under Greenwald’s byline, it said: “Exclusive: Top Secret Court Order Requesting Verizon To Hand Over Call Data Shows The Scale of Domestic Surveillance Under Obama.” Along with it was the FISA warrant to Verizon. The PRISM story broke hours later in the Washington Post. Written by Gellman and Poitras, it claimed that the NSA and FBI were tapping directly into the central servers of nine leading U.S, Internet companies which were knowingly participating on the operation. The latter allegation turned out to be not entirely true, since all the Internet companies cited in the story denied that they had knowingly participated. But the damage had b