Matt Locke: So, first of all Alan, huge thanks for coming along. This is the end of a really fascinating year for The Guardian during your long stewardship as Editor. What we’re talking about today is one of the most fascinating stories that’s happened in journalism in the last few years, and we’re really glad that you’re here and able to give us an inside view of what it felt like to be part of that story.

I would like to start from the beginning, I’ve been reading the book by Luke Harding that the Guardian published about the Snowden story, and I’m interested about what it felt like when you first heard about Snowden. Where were you when you first heard the story? Was it from Janine Gibson in the US? How did it first come to your attention?

Alan Rusbridger: Can I go back a year before that? Because these things generally don’t happen by accident. They don’t fall into your lap.

There was some decisions we had taken about what the Guardian should be, and one of the decisions was about where a newspaper sits in this world of all this information. A feeling that what was happening outside of the newspaper was so interesting and important and these new voices that were emerging were so irresistible that we had to be open to that.

We had hired Glenn Greenwald about a year earlier and Glenn was a kind of new breed of person who wasn’t just a journalist. He came from this background, he’d been a lawyer, he’d been activist, he was an advocate, he had his own blog, he had 1 million followers, so he was all kinds of things, and he was rather obsessive, you know? In the way you can be on the Internet, but sometimes not so much in print.

So, the story really begins with hiring him, and that’s important because you can’t imagine the New York Times ever hiring Glenn Greenwald. The fact that we had to decided to take The Guardian down this route, which could include people like Glenn. If you read what Glenn was writing for about a year before June 2013, it’s highly knowledgeable, it’s quite scholarly, he has footnotes and stuff like that. He includes responses, he goes in and he talks to the people who respond to him and he’s obsessive, you know? He’s very, very interested in civil liberties, privacy, security and surveillance. So, that makes him quite unusual compared with a newspaper with a lot of traditional journalists. So, that’s the background against which I get a phone call from one day from Janine, who is our editor in America.

She was running the Guardian US who had hired Glenn, and a point about Guardian US is that there is no newspaper, they just think digitally. She rang up and said that Glenn had been contacted by somebody who appears to work for the NSA and appears to be genuine. He’s in Hong Kong and he says he’s got a lot of secrets.

ML: Post-Wikileaks, and the work that the Guardian did before with the Chelsea Manning leaks, were you getting a lot of these kinds of calls? How hard was it to pick out the signal from the noise?

AR: Not a lot, because, you know, they’re few and far between. I mean every day there are letters from, I would say, troubled people. But Glenn had had enough to and fro with Snowden to believe that there was something genuinely here. The thing that I was very keen to do was to have a Guardian reporter in the hotel room too. That wasn’t necessarily an easy negotiation because Snowden had come to us through Glenn and Laura Poitras, and getting a mainstream reporter in the hotel bedroom too, we had to overcome all kinds of suspicions and anxieties around that.

ML: What was your initial response to Janine when she contacted you about the story?

AR: Well, the first thing was just the logistical thing — she sent Ewen MacAskill, who is a 60-something, and in trying and explain him to American audiences I describe him as a Scottish Presbyterian, which he isn’t really, but it painted somebody who was not easily impressed, he’s rather dour and completely straightforward, been on the road all his life, has done five of the most senior jobs in British journalism. So, he was not going to go and be easily impressed by a 29-year-old kid who said he had thousands of documents.

ML: At that time you didn’t know he was a 29-year-old kid.

AR: Didn’t know who he was, but I just wanted somebody I knew, because I didn’t know Glenn. I admired his work but I didn’t know him, so I just thought — if we were going to take this kind of risk on something which could be explosive, I wanted to be sure about it.

ML: So, Ewen then sent you a text to confirm the source was good?

AR: Yes. It’s worth reading Luke’s book, it’s a very racy read, and I think being inside that hotel room in Hong Kong must have been extraordinary, because it was like the stuff of Hollywood films, it was an agent on the run. Time is ticking away, because how long do they have before the NSA notice he’s missing and they can’t find him? So, there was a time pressure on them in that room, Snowden’s money was running out, he wanted to get something to print quickly. We were still at this stage thinking, ‘Well, is he genuine? Why is he doing this?’, all the questions that a journalist would ask, and trying to make sense of highly complex material. There was this tension that you often have in journalism between the urgency of the situation and the editing instinct to sometimes slow things down.

ML: So, what was the atmosphere like amongst your editorial team?

AR: Well, at that point I was in London, Janine was in New York and things were happening in Hong Kong. This became one of the things that we had to cope with over the next seven months, which was that we were really dealing with the hand that Edward Snowden had dealt us. So, you know, you might’ve wished for things to be different and to be more in control, but the reality was that he had come to people, he had come to Greenwald, he had gone to a guy called Bart Gellman, who works for the Washington Post, and he’d come to Laura Poitras, who was a filmmaker. As it happened, geographically, that meant action taking place over London, Hong Kong, New York, Rio, where Glenn lives, Germany, where Laura lives. So, it was across four countries, three different continents, in a world in which you assume everyone’s listening to everything. So, the editing of this story was extremely complex because you had these geographical distances and no obvious means of communication.

ML: Your team had to very, very quickly learn spy craft, they had to learn how to communicate in ways that were private and secure.

AR: Yes — if there are journalists in the room and you haven’t thought about this much, I urge you to think about it. We hadn’t thought about it enough and we still haven’t, but this problem — which I think is one of the questions that comes out of the Snowden material of journalistic sources and how you communicate and deal, safely, with sources and information — is one that we all have, collectively, to crack. At the time Snowden appeared to be good at it, the one thing we discovered was they couldn’t find him in Hong Kong, so whatever he was doing, he was good enough to avoid the NSA finding where he was.

ML: They’d just started approaching his girlfriend at that time, wondering where he was.

AR: Yes, I haven’t got the exact chronology but there was about five to eight days in which we had to work on the first stories before all hell broke loose.

ML: So, then the decision was made to publish the first story, which was about Verizon, one of the biggest American phone networks. You then flew to the States and Janine had a series of very interesting conversations with the Whitehouse and the US government about the decision to publish that story.

AR: Yes, this is the interesting thing, this is the difference between working in this country and America. We’d come across this through Wikileaks so, in a sense, Wikileaks was an interesting dry run, because we had worked with the New York Times. One of the interesting things about the way the New York Times worked over Wikileaks was that they went to the Whitehouse in advance of, I think, every story. To me that was a bit shocking, to begin with.

ML: They went for approval?

AR: No, approval’s the wrong word, but they had a conversation in which they said we’d got this stuff, we’re intending to publish it, how will this relationship work? The easy thing about doing that in America is that since the Pentagon papers Supreme Court judgement in 1971 it is inconceivable that the state would intervene to stop publication, that just couldn’t happen.

Here in the UK, the opposite is true. You assume that somebody will go to a judge and stop publication. We’d had that over Trafigura, the toxic dumpers, and Barclays bank. It just makes a conversation with government difficult, and by and large I think it’s useful to have a conversation with the other side, because this is difficult, sensitive material. Approval is exactly the wrong word, but you do want to, sort of, test it.

ML: What was that response like when those first stories published? You had an incredibly tense atmosphere in the Guardian US office and then the decision is made to go live with the story. What did it feel like to be there when that story was breaking?

AR: Well, because of these conflicting time pressures, I jumped on a plane in the evening to fly to New York, knowing that by the time I landed they would’ve published the first story. I got into the office about midnight and the story had been up for a few hours. Well, it was extraordinary, no one has ever published stories of this kind about the NSA. No one has ever had this quantity of secret material before and so there were shockwaves generating out of the Guardian office, and obviously the outside world had no idea what was to come.

ML: A shockwave is a great analogy for the response you got, first of all, from the media, from your peers. How did other news sources and news organisations react to the story?

AR: Well, again, different from country to country. In America everybody has followed up these stories, everybody has treated this as an incredibly serious story that everybody wants to write about, I mean just everybody.

Any of you who have been to America in the last six months will know this has been a huge story on the front page repeatedly of all the major newspapers, and across all the broadcasters. The same is true in most European countries. I think they were a bit puzzled that it was The Guardian — who the hell is The Guardian and why are they breaking this story? There was a bit of amor propio from papers like the New York Times, thinking, ‘Why haven’t we got that story? What on earth has happened that Snowden went to them?’ Because actually it’s almost part of the constitution that you go to the New York Times with these stories. How did that happen?

There was a bit of healthy tension between us and the Washington Post because the Washington Post, I think, had been sitting on some of these documents for some time, but had been a bit more measured about their pace. So, it’s not to say there wasn’t competition, but everybody was writing about it. So, it was immediately a very serious, animated debate. Actually the only country that hasn’t been like that has been Britain.

ML: That’s a nice segue into talking about how the different governments responded. I’m really teeing you up to tell the story about GCHQ. What kind of conversations did you start having with the government and with GCHQ once the stories broke?

AR: For a few days there was no response. And then, I haven’t got the dates in my mind, but roundabout mid-June we published this story about G20, which involved GCHQ and, at that point, our own government got a bit interested in a way they hadn’t been terribly interested about the NSA. I think about four days after the G20 story we had the first visit from the Cabinet Secretary, which was, you know, it was a useful discussion, it wasn’t very threatening at that stage. They didn’t like what we were doing, they didn’t think we should be doing it, but we had a discussion about the next story that we were going to be publishing that would affect GCHQ, which was the Tempora story, which was about the phone companies. It was civilised at that point.

ML: And then how did it shift into the slightly bizarre security theatre?

AR: So, over the Tempora story we had a negotiation in which, rightly or wrongly, we left some things out. So, it was, kind of, “We won’t come and shut you down at midnight tonight if we can have a sensible conversation.”

ML: Was that an implied threat or a serious threat?

AR: No, it was all very gentlemanly.

ML: “You wouldn’t want anything nasty to happen to this newspaper.”

AR: That kind of thing, and because, I mean if you’re in my shoes and, you know, as I said, there are a couple of times in the last five years when an entire story has been injuncted. Working in London means a judge can say, “Stop writing about this story and, by the way, we want all that material back.” So, you are, sort of, playing off this balance between publication and the threat of losing everything.

Anyway, so we published that story and then for about two or maybe three weeks heard nothing more. Then there was another meeting with the Cabinet Secretary. There were no raised voices, but the tone had changed. Of course I understand that this was very secret material and it was in nobody’s interest that we were going to lose it accidentally. So, I said, “If your worry is that you think this could be vulnerable, why don’t you come back and advise us on security measures?”

He said, “I’ll think about that over the weekend, but could you think about handing it back or destroying it?” The next week came and by the following week the mood had changed again and they didn’t want to talk about the first bit, they just wanted to talk about the second bit.

ML: The destroying it?

AR: The destroying it.

ML: So, that led to them coming to your office, the spooks from GCHQ themselves.

AR: Yes. I wanted them to be explicit about what their intention was. So, I said, “Are you saying, explicitly, that you will take action if we don’t do this?” Because I thought we just need to be frank about this, because I don’t want to live with a maybe we will, maybe we won’t, and they said, “Yes, we will, we will take action.”

Some people can’t understand why we went along with the destruction. If the near certain alternative was that we would then have this enormous court battle and, see what the judges have just said about David Miranda, that was probably the way that a judge was going to think about this — that this was bad stuff and shouldn’t be written about.

Did I want to risk the prospect of a multi-million pound battle during which we wouldn’t be able to publish? The Washington Post would publish, and Snowden could take the stuff elsewhere. Or was it more in my interest to explain to the Cabinet Secretary, “You realise we can just report this out of New York? This is not going to stop us.”

I assume he understood, because he’s a smart guy, but he still wanted us to destroy the computers. Then we learned that there were these GCHQ guys who had been not quite living in a van, but were just round the corner. They said, “Well, we’ll send the guys in” and then we had a logistical chat, which went on for 48 hours, about how you destroy a computer.

ML: How did they destroy it?

AR: It’s more difficult than you think, because you think you wipe it clean or you hit it with a hammer or you put superglue in the USB drive, or you do all of the above. But that wasn’t good enough for them, and so they went into the basement with two of my colleagues on the Saturday morning and dismantled however many computers it was and sat there saying, “That bit there, and that bit there, and get your power drill and get your angle grinder and rip this up and smash that up.” Then they had this massive degausser, which, for good luck, they ran over the whole lot. There’s a box full of completely destroyed machines in the Guardian office at the moment.

ML: That’s quite a trophy. So, to take the story into the future, how much of the story is left? It was an incredible wealth of material and it feels like you’re barely scratching the surface in terms of publication. Is there still a lot of the story to tell?

AR: Well, I think you all know that at some point this multi-billionaire who also lived on Hawaii, Pierre Omidyar, who was the founder of eBay, came along and he so loved what the Guardian was doing, he decided to build his own website to do the same thing and hired Glenn and hired Laura. If you look at what they are doing, Glenn will go on publishing the material he has in a way that he wants to with Omidyar. So, there’s that branching off that happened in a completely unexpected way, because you can’t predict that a multi-billionaire’s going to suddenly hop into view.

ML: These days it seems they do quite regularly.

AR: They do a lot nowadays, yes, not, so far, to us, unfortunately. Well, no, we have sold Autotrader.

We have sat down with the New York Times, we set rules around this stuff, rightly or wrongly, and, you know, there are some people on the right who think I’m a terrible person and ought to be thrown in the Tower of London for what we have published. There are some people on the Internet who think I’m a terrible person because there’s lots of stuff that we haven’t published, but I think what we have done is to do what Snowden wanted us to do.

You have to respect your source and I don’t think Snowden was giving us this material and saying, “Why don’t you blow all these secrets of the secret service and why don’t you write about what they’re up to in Afghanistan?” So we set limits, we said we’re not going to just treat this like a bran tub of brilliant stories for the next five years. Rightly or wrongly, that’s what we decided and I think we’ve pretty much stuck by those rules and that was the agreement with the New York Times too.

Surprising things happen, so if you can imagine a very large database of material and how you would search through that, you would probably all do roughly what we did, which was to build a search engine across it and start searching for keywords. The thing is you get a certain kind of story from that, and then something else happens, like Der Spiegel publishing the Angela Merkel story.

Then you think, “Oh, that’s interesting, we haven’t really gone searching for whether they were bugging,” so then you start looking for that kind of story. Then somebody comes across this story about how they were building trapdoors and the cryptology of the web itself, which was a very specialised story, which the original reporters in the room hadn’t looked for because, frankly, they were too old.

What we did originally was to get absolutely wonderful reporters like David Lee and Nick Hopkins and Nick Davis. Because they’re just the best reporters in business, but, you know, David Lee and Nick Davis would be the first people to say they don’t really understand the Internet. Then James Ball came in, who’s a brilliant young Guardian reporter, and then an even younger one, Jeff Larson, from ProPublica — these two really geeky guys sit there and they spot stories that Nick and Ewen and David just wouldn’t have spotted, because it was about the cryptology of Internet security. So, that’s a long way of saying at the moment we haven’t got a, sort of, huge queue of stories waiting to come down the slipway, but that’s not to say that we won’t think of a different way of looking at this material that would yield something else.

ML: What’s fascinating about both Wikileaks and Snowden is they’re a kind of news story and a kind of way of telling stories that would’ve been impossible to imagine twenty or 30 years ago. Stories that are essentially hidden in large databases of information and are told by using digital networks. What are the kind of things that you’ve learnt about the way journalism is changing because of the way that these stories are being discovered now, and the kind of collaboration you’ve had to work with — the role of networks in leading a story, rather than physical print?

AR: Where do you begin? How long have we got? On one of my plane journeys to America over the autumn I was reading this really interesting book about the Pentagon papers, which was the biggest leak up until now. Somebody leaked 70,000 pages of material about the Vietnam War to the New York Times. The US government, under Nixon, did try to injunct it, and that was the big Supreme Court case that decided against censorship. In those days it was, you know, photocopiers and it all went via the New York Times or the Washington Post.

One of the things today that the government is trying to wrangle with, and we were, is that information is so slippery, it’s uncontainable, it’s uncontrollable. That was one aspect of it, the whole Glenn bit that I’ve already spoken about, that there are these new players who operate to different kinds of rules. It was an interesting mixture of the old and the new — I think if it had just been Glenn, the whole thing would’ve been crushed.

I think there is something about the robustness of a big media organisation that can stand behind the reporting and I think Glenn — I hope Glenn would say this — that Glenn, without the editing process that he went through, it would’ve been a different kind of story.

The final bit is that I hope the government really, secretly — they would never say this — but I hope they understand that actually having the Guardian involved was a good thing. Because if you try and be really repressive towards players like the Guardian, what’s going to happen next time — and there will be a next time because they obviously haven’t worked out how to keep this stuff secret — then next time I think it will just be published directly onto the Internet in a much more raw form

So, I think the kind of things that a good newspaper does, in terms of editing and storytelling, allied to this new world, is a really interesting combination, which no one can really tell where it’s going to go. But I think the last six months have been really extraordinary in showing how journalism is changing.