103 The journalist chosen was Lana Lam, a young Australian reporter working for the South China Morning Post. Tibbo had suggested Lam to Snowden. She had served as Tibbo’s outlet on previous news stories, and, as he told me, he found her to be a totally reliable journalist. He brought her to Poitras’ suite at the Sheraton in Kowloon (about eight blocks down Nathan Road from the Mira.) First, Lam had to agree to the conditions of the interview, which included submitting the story to Poitras for Snowden’s approval. Next, as Lam put it, Poitras “confiscated” her cell phone. Finally, after a ten minute wait, Poitras took her to another room and sat her before a black laptop. The laptop, which had a TOR sticker on it, had on its screen an on-line chat room where she was connected by Poitras to Snowden. “Hi Lana, thanks for coming for this,” Snowden said from his safe house. He told her that the NSA had intercepted data from at least 61,000 different computers in Hong Kong, China, and elsewhere. To expose what he called America’s “hypocrisy” in accusing China of cyber- espionage, he supplied her NSA documents for the South China Morning Post. “Last week the American government happily operated in the shadows with no respect for the consent of the governed, but no longer,” he said. "The United States government has committed a tremendous number of crimes against Hong Kong [and] the People’s Republic of China as well." Under Poitras’ close supervision, Lam was allowed to ask Snowden further questions about the NSA’s interception of communications in Hong Kong and China. He told her “I have had many opportunities to flee Hong Kong, but I would rather stay and fight the US government in the courts.” As mentioned earlier, Greenwald, Poitras and MacAskill did not concern themselves with the issue of the mechanics of the largest theft of top secret documents in the history of the United States. In entire filmed interview at the Mira Hotel, they did not ask their source how he