This taught her “one of the great lessons of adulthood,” she wrote: “that most of the institutions and endeavors we regard as ironclad-from parenting to politics-are actually held together with chewing gum and duct tape.” She described this reality as both terrifying-“because it exposes the precariousness of the existing order”-and liberating, “because it encourages the individual to act, to defy the ominous mythology of competence and control.” “It was bewildering, like having a front-row seat to a play performed in a language I didn’t understand.” For the public to find out about this high-tech, high-stakes, international issue, she and a few others had to serve as physical links in a fragile human chain. “I’d never been so close to something I knew so little about,” Bruder wrote. Our hope in telling this story is that it brings some huge, abstract issues down to earth.īruder and Maharidge opened up about their involvement in the NSA leaks in the May 2017 cover story for Harper’s magazine, titled “Snowden’s Box.” Snowden, who has since found asylum in Moscow, is condemned by some as a traitor and honored by others as a defender of citizens’ rights to privacy. Starting in June 2013, Poitras and other journalists broke the story around the world. The box turned out to contain instructions and data from Edward Snowden, the former Central Intelligence Agency employee and government contractor who had decided it was time to reveal thousands of classified documents related to the National Security Agency’s many global surveillance programs. And out leaked one of the biggest news stories of the decade. Maharidge, in turn, handed it over to documentary filmmaker Laura Poitras, who finally opened it.

What was actually inside? It was a secret, kept even from her.Īs she had been instructed months earlier, Bruder took the box, unopened, to the Manhattan apartment of Dale Maharidge, a close friend from her days at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. She knew that the sender’s name and return address, as well as the label that said the box held architectural materials, were likely false. On May 14, 2013, Jessica Bruder ’00 came home to her Brooklyn apartment to find a box in front of her door.

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