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also by edward jay epstein
The Annals of Unsolved Crime
Three Days in May: Sex, Surveillance, and DSK
The Hollywood Economist: The Hidden Financial Reality Behind the Movies
The Big Picture: The New Logic of Money and Power in Hollywood
Dossier: The Secret History of Armand Hammer
Deception: The Invisible War Between the KGB and the CIA
The Rise and Fall of Diamonds: The Shattering of a Brilliant Illusion
Cartel
Legend: The Secret World of Lee Harvey Oswald
Agency of Fear: Opiates and Political Power in America
Between Fact and Fiction: The Problem of Journalism
News from Nowhere: Television and the News
Counterplot
Inquest: The Warren Commission and the Establishment of Truth
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HOW AMERICA
LOST ITS SECRETS
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HOW AMERICA
LOST ITS SECRETS
Edward Snowden, the Man and the Theft
Edward Jay Epstein
alfred a. knopf | new york | 2017
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this is a borzoi book
published by alfred a. knopf
Copyright © 2017 by E. J. E. Publications, Ltd.
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf,
a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York,
and distributed in Canada by Random House of Canada,
a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto.
www.aaknopf.com
Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon
are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.
Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data [to come]
Jacket photograph by TK
Jacket design by TK
Manufactured in the United States of America
First Edition
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This book is dedicated to the memory of a wise teacher,
James Q. Wilson (1931–2012)
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There are certain persons who . . . have a perfect right
to commit breaches of morality and crimes, and . . .
the law is not for them.
—fyodor dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment
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Contents
Prologue Snowden’s Trail: Hong Kong, 2014 000
part one SNOWDEN’S ARC
chapter 1 Tinker 15
chapter 2 Secret Agent 22
chapter 3 Contractor 28
chapter 4 Thief 38
chapter 5 Crossing the Rubicon 44
chapter 6 Hacktivist 49
chapter 7 String Puller 59
chapter 8 Raider of the Inner Sanctum 73
chapter 9 Escape Artist 80
chapter 10 Whistle- blower 88
chapter 11 Enter Assange 98
chapter 12 Fugitive 104
part two THE INTELLIGENCE CRISIS
chapter 13 The Great Divide 113
chapter 14 The Crime Scene Investigation 133
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x | Contents
chapter 15 Did Snowden Act Alone? 146
chapter 16 The Question of When 156
chapter 17 The Keys to the Kingdom Are Missing 168
chapter 18 The Unheeded Warning 185
part three THE GAME OF NATIONS
chapter 19 The Rise of the NSA 195
chapter 20 The NSA’s Back Door 207
chapter 21 The Russians Are Coming 217
chapter 22 The Chinese Puzzle 231
chapter 23 A Single Point of Failure 238
part four MOSCOW CALLING
chapter 24 Off to Moscow 247
chapter 25 Through the Looking Glass 254
chapter 26 The Handler 261
part five CONCLUSIONS: WALKING THE CAT BACK
chapter 27 Snowden’s Choices 271
chapter 28 The Espionage Source 281
chapter 29 The “War on Terror” After Snowden 287
Epilogue The Snowden Effect 295
Acknowledgments 301
Notes 303
Selected Bibliography 325
Index 329
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HOW AMERICA
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Prologue
Snowden’s Trail: Hong Kong, 2014
The national security agency, or, as it is now commonly
called, the NSA, was created on October 24, 1952, in such a tight
cocoon of secrecy that even the presidential order creating it was
classified top secret. When journalists asked questions about this
new agency, Washington officials jokingly told them that the initials
NSA stood for “No Such Agency.” The reason for this extraordinary
stealth is that the NSA is involved in a very sensitive enterprise.
Its job is to intercept, decode, and analyze foreign electronic communications
transmitted around the globe over copper wires, fiberoptic
cable, satellite, microwave relays, cell phone towers, wireless
transmissions, and the Internet for specified intelligence purposes. In
intelligence jargon, its product is called COMINT, which stands for
communications intelligence. Because this form of intelligence gathering
is most effective when the NSA’s targets are unaware of the
state- of- the- art tools the NSA uses to break into their computers
and telecommunications channels to first intercept and then decrypt
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their secret messages, the NSA goes to extraordinary lengths to keep
them secret. Draconian laws protect this secrecy.
In the first week of June 2013, the NSA learned that there had
been a massive breach. Thousands of secret files bearing on communications
intelligence had been stolen from a heavily guarded
regional base in Oahu, Hawaii.
The suspect was Edward Snowden, a twenty- nine- year- old civilian
analyst at that base, who had fled to Hong Kong before the
breach was discovered. According to a three- count criminal complaint
filed by federal prosecutors in the Eastern District of Virginia,
Snowden had stolen government property and violated the
Espionage Act by the unauthorized and willful communication of
national defense information to an unauthorized person. He also
likely violated the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act by entering computer
systems illicitly.
This was not a whodunit mystery. On June 9, 2013, in an extraordinary
twelve- minute video made in a cramped hotel room in Hong
Kong, Snowden identified himself as the person who had taken the
NSA documents. Watching the video, the world saw a shy, awkward,
and sympathetic- looking man wearing a rumpled shirt, rimless
glasses, and a computer- geek haircut, passionately speaking out
against what he termed the NSA’s violations of the law and, in a
shaky voice, expressing his willingness to suffer the consequences
for exposing them.
Snowden had an innocent, idealistic, principled look about him,
and the world was ready to congratulate him for revealing the NSA’s
alleged illegal collection of data inside the United States. But in fact,
Snowden had stolen a great deal more than documents relating to
domestic surveillance. He had also stolen secret documents from the
NSA, the CIA, the Department of Defense, and the British cipher
service revealing the sources and methods they employed in their
monitoring of adversaries, which was their job.
By the time the theft had been discovered, in the first week of
June 2013, it was impossible for the FBI, a grand jury, or any other
U.S. agency to question him because he had fled the country. His
first stop, Hong Kong, the economically autonomous city of 7.2 million,
is a special administrative region of mainland China. Under the
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Prologue | 5
terms of the 1997 transfer of sovereignty from Great Britain, China
is responsible for Hong Kong’s defense and foreign policy, including
intelligence services. He then proceeded to Russia, which has no
extradition treaty with the United States. Russia granted him asylum,
making it unlikely that U.S. authorities would ever have the
opportunity to question him.
Snowden’s escape left in its wake an incredibly important unsolved
mystery: How had a young analyst in training at the NSA succeeded
in penetrating all the layers of NSA security to pull off the largest
theft of secret documents in the history of American intelligence?
Did he act alone? What happened to the documents? Was his arrival
in Russia part of the plan?
Because I had written several books on the vulnerability of intelligence
services, this was a mystery— a “howdunit,” if you like— that
immediately intrigued me. Even if Snowden had acted for the most
salutary of reasons, the unauthorized transfer of state secrets from
the United States to an adversary country is, by almost any definition,
a form of espionage.
I decided to begin my investigation of this case in Hong Kong,
because it was the place to which Snowden first fled after leaving
Hawaii. Snowden had planned the trip for at least four weeks,
according to the mandatory travel plan he had filed at the NSA.
When I spoke to my sources in the intelligence community, they
could not explain Snowden’s choice. It would not necessarily protect
him from the reach of U.S. law, because Hong Kong had an active
extradition treaty with the United States. Just a few months earlier,
Hong Kong had made headlines by honoring America’s request to
extradite Trent Martin, a fugitive wanted for insider trading.
Nor was Hong Kong particularly convenient to Hawaii. There
were no nonstop flights there from Honolulu in May 2013. Snowden
flew eight hours to Narita International Airport in Japan, where he
waited almost three hours. He then flew five hours to Hong Kong.
Snowden could have flown to countries that do not have extradition
treaties with America in far less time.
Adding to this mystery, at the time he departed Honolulu,
Snowden had not yet arranged for any journalists to meet him in
Hong Kong, and as far as U.S. intelligence could determine, he had
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no known appointments there. Even so, Snowden carried to Hong
Kong digital copies he had made of the top secret NSA documents.
As General Michael Hayden, who served as the head of both the
NSA and the CIA, told me, “It’s very mysterious why Snowden
chose Hong Kong.” We can assume he had a compelling enough reason
for him to take the risk that he would be arrested there by Hong
Kong police after U.S. authorities invoked the detention provision
of its extradition treaty. It was of course possible that Snowden had
traveled there to see someone he believed could protect him.
I arrived in Hong Kong on May 20, 2014— exactly one year after
Snowden had arrived there aboard a Japan Airlines flight. I checked
in to the Mira hotel in the Tsim Sha Tsui shopping district of Kowloon,
a ten- minute ferry ride away from Hong Kong Island, where
most of the foreign consulates are located.
I chose the Mira because it was the five- star hotel in which
Snowden had stayed and where he had made the celebrated video
admitting his role in taking the NSA documents. I asked at the front
desk for room 1014, the same one that Snowden had occupied in
2013, because I wanted easy access to the hotel’s service and security
personnel responsible for the room who might have had contact
with Snowden a year earlier. Unfortunately, that room was occupied,
but I was given a nearby room that served my purpose.
Snowden had told Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras, the
Guardian reporters he met in Hong Kong, that he had hidden out
at the Mira hotel since his arrival in Hong Kong because he feared
that the CIA might capture him. My first surprise was that Snowden
had not arrived at the Mira until eleven days after he arrived in
Hong Kong. As I learned from the hotel staff, Snowden had registered
there under his real name and used his own passport and credit
card to secure the room, an odd choice if he was hiding out. He had
checked in to the hotel not on May 20, as he had told the reporters,
but on June 1, 2013. He checked out on June 10.
Wherever Snowden stayed from May 20 to June 1, he apparently
considered it a safe enough place from which to send Greenwald a
“welcome package,” as he called it, of twenty top secret NSA docu-
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ments on May 25. He had now not only downloaded documents but
also violated the oath he had signed when he took his job by providing
them to an unauthorized party. During this period, Snowden
also contacted Barton Gellman, on behalf of The Washington Post,
via e- mail. Indeed, while he was staying someplace other than the
place he claimed to be staying, he made almost all the arrangements
for his journalistic coming- out. He was in contact with at least one
foreign mission during this period, according to what he wrote to
Gellman on May 24. In that e- mail, concerning when and how his
story was to be published by The Washington Post, Snowden asked
Gellman to include some text that would help Snowden with his
dealings with this mission. But which country was he approaching?
In an effort to establish Snowden’s whereabouts during these “missing”
eleven days, which, among other things, could shed light on
why he first came to Hong Kong, I called Keith Bradsher, a prizewinning
journalist who had been the New York Times bureau chief in
Hong Kong in 2013. He had written a well- researched report about
Snowden’s arrival there. He proposed we meet at the Foreign Correspondents’
Club.
Bradsher told me that he had known Albert Ho, who had been
retained as Snowden’s lawyer, for more than a decade. He had interviewed
him many times, because he was a leader of a political movement
in Hong Kong. Bradsher said that a few days after Snowden
had revealed himself on June 9, he met with Ho and questioned him
about Snowden’s unknown whereabouts.
Ho told Bradsher that all of Snowden’s logistics had been arranged
for him by an intermediary, whom Ho called a “carer.” Ho said that
Snowden had been in contact with the “carer” prior to his arrival in
Hong Kong on May 20. According to Ho, it was this person who had
arranged accommodations for Snowden on his arrival and afterward.
If so, it seemed to me that this person might be able to shed light
on whom, if anyone, Snowden saw in his first eleven days in Hong
Kong. Even if this person might have been unaware of the reasons
for Snowden’s trip to Hong Kong when he made the arrangements
for him, he was still the best lead I had to learning why Snowden
had come to Hong Kong. Bradsher told me that he pressed Ho for
details about this mystery person over the course of several meet-
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ings but Ho would not identify him beyond saying that he was a
“well- connected resident” of Hong Kong.
I called Ho’s law office in Hong Kong. He politely declined to be
interviewed by me, saying he had said all he was going to say about
the Snowden case. I was able, though, to make an appointment with
Robert Tibbo, a Canadian- born barrister specializing in civil liberties
cases. Tibbo had worked closely with Ho on the Snowden case.
I met Tibbo in the tearoom at the Mandarin Oriental hotel on
Hong Kong Island. Tibbo, in his early fifties, was tall, with a round
face and thinning hair. He talked freely about his remarkable career.
After earning a degree in chemical engineering from McGill University
and working in Asia as an engineer for a decade, he went to law
school in New Zealand and became a barrister in Hong Kong specializing
in cases involving the legal status of refugees.
Over a leisurely tea, Tibbo made it clear that he had played a far
more active role than Ho in the Snowden case. He had even personally
escorted Snowden from the Mira hotel to a safe house on
June 10. He did not dispute what Ho had told Bradsher. When I asked
him if he could give me the name of the “carer,” he said that he was
bound by a lawyer- client privilege that prevented him from providing
me with any details that might reveal the identity of the person
who had made arrangements for Snowden. When I asked the date
that he was officially retained by Snowden, he said that Snowden
had signed an agreement hiring him and Ho’s law firm as his legal
adviser on June 10, 2013 (which was a matter of public record).
“I understand that,” I said, “but I am inquiring about something
that had happened before you became his legal adviser.” He shook
his head, as if getting rid of a pesky fly, and said that his oath precluded
him from saying anything at all that might do damage to
the credibility of his client. “Not even where he was staying in May
in Hong Kong?” I persisted. He leaned forward and, after a brief
hesitation, said, jokingly I assumed, that he would not divulge that
information, “even if you held a gun to my head.” We met two more
times, but true to his word Tibbo would not say if he even knew the
identity of the “carer.”
Meanwhile, Joyce Xu, a very resourceful Chinese journalist who
was assisting me in Hong Kong, had filed the equivalent of a Freedom
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of Information request with the Hong Kong Security Bureau asking
for information about Snowden’s movements in May. Thomas
Ng, the secretary for security, turned down the request, adding that
Hong Kong authorities do not keep records of hotel registrations. I
had run into a dead end with the Hong Kong authorities on the issue
of Snowden’s “carer” and Snowden’s whereabouts for those eleven
crucial days.
At this point, I got some much- needed help from an old friend on
the Obama White House staff. Before I had left New York, I asked
him if he could find someone at the consulate in Hong Kong who
might brief me on the Snowden case. I didn’t hear from him until
just a few days before I was due to return to New York. He put me
in touch with a former employee of the Hong Kong consulate, who
he said was “fully informed” about the efforts of the U.S. mission to
locate Snowden in Hong Kong. This person was still living in Hong
Kong, and he agreed to meet with me on condition that I did not
mention either his name or his specific job in the U.S. mission in
Hong Kong. The venue was the terrace lounge of the American Club
in Exchange Square in central Hong Kong, a posh club mainly for
expatriate Americans. It was on the forty- eighth floor, with a spectacular
view of Victoria Harbor. Once there, I had no problem finding
my source, identifying him by the description he had given me.
He was sitting alone at a discreet table in the corner.
After we ordered drinks, he told me in a soft voice about the American
reaction to Snowden’s revelations in Hong Kong. “All hell broke
loose,” he said, describing the atmosphere at the U.S. mission after
Snowden’s video was posted on The Guardian’s website on June 9.
I asked about an assertion that Snowden had made concerning the
U.S. consulate in that extraordinary video. Snowden had said that he
could be seized at any moment by a CIA rendition team based at the
U.S. consulate “just down the road” from the Mira hotel.
“Was that true?” I asked.
He rolled his eyes and said, “Snowden has a pretty wild imagination.
For one thing, the U.S. consulate is not down the road from the
Mira in Kowloon; it is here on Hong Kong Island. And there was no
CIA rendition team in Hong Kong.”
My next question concerned a second period during which
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Snowden’s whereabouts are clouded— the period between the time
he left the Mira hotel on June 10 and the day he left Hong Kong for
Russia on June 23. When I asked my consulate source whether the
U.S. mission took any action to track Snowden during these thirteen
days, he explained that the FBI had long maintained a contingent
of “legal attachés” based at the consulate to pursue many possible
violations of U.S. law including video piracy. In addition, the CIA
and the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) had retained a handful of
“China watchers” under diplomatic cover in Hong Kong. This group
constituted the “intelligence mission,” as he referred to it. It had
developed informal relations with the Hong Kong police that, along
with the NSA’s electronic capabilities abroad, allowed it to track
Snowden’s movements after he had outed himself on the video.
Because Snowden, his lawyers, and the journalists in his entourage
frequently used their cell phones to text one another, it was fairly
easy for the U.S. intelligence mission to follow Snowden’s trail after
he left the Mira hotel. He said that the Hong Kong police also knew
where he was during this period. My source further suggested that
the massive Chinese intelligence contingent in Hong Kong also
knew, because it had close relations with the Hong Kong police.
“So everyone knew Snowden’s whereabouts as he moved every
few days from apartment to apartment,” I interjected. He answered
that it was no secret to anyone except the media and the public. “Of
course we knew,” he said, adding that there were also photographs
of Snowden entering the office building that housed the Russian
consulate. I mentioned that there was a report in a Russian newspaper
that Snowden had visited the Russian consulate in late June in
connection with the flight he later took to Moscow. “All we know is
he entered the building,” he answered, with a shrug.
That Russian consulate visit did not come as a complete surprise
to U.S. intelligence. After Snowden left the Mira, his interactions
with the Russian and Chinese intelligence services in Hong Kong
had been closely monitored by “secret means,” a term that in that
context likely indicated electronic surveillance. A former top intelligence
executive in Washington, D.C., subsequently confirmed this
monitoring to me. All of Snowden’s stealth in exiting from the Mira
hotel, which included wearing a baseball cap and dark glasses, thus
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proved ineffective in hiding him from U.S. intelligence and presumably
other intelligence services seeking the treasure trove of documents
he had taken from the NSA.
As for his next destination, I could find no evidence that Snowden
had made any arrangements during his monthlong stay in Hong
Kong to go to any Latin American country. Before he went public
on June 9, he could have easily gotten a visa in Hong Kong with his
still- valid passport to go to almost any country in the world, including
Cuba (for which a U.S. passport was not necessary), Bolivia, and
Ecuador. Yet he did not apply for visas during this time period. Even
as late as June 8, after meetings with Greenwald and Poitras, his
name had still not been revealed, no criminal complaint had been
issued against him, and there was no Interpol red alert for his detention.
He could have walked out of the Mira hotel, caught a taxi to
the Hong Kong airport, and gone on Swiss International Air Lines
via Zurich to any country in South America or to Iceland. But, as
in the oft- cited Sherlock Holmes clue of the dog that did not bark,
Snowden’s inaction in not obtaining visas during this thirty- day
period suggests that he had no plans to go anyplace but where he
went: Moscow.
However, the mystery that most concerned me was not where
Snowden was housed in the interim between when he went public
and when he went to Moscow. It was where, and in whose care,
Snowden had been before he checked into the Mira on June 1. When
I asked my source about this period, he said that as far as he knew,
neither the FBI nor the Hong Kong police could find a trace of him
during the period between May 20, when he passed through Hong
Kong customs, and June 1, when he first used his credit card and
passport to check into the Mira hotel. Other than those transactions,
they could not find any credit card charges, ATM withdrawals,
telephone calls, hotel registrations, subway pass purchases, or other
clues to Snowden’s activities. As far as a paper trail was concerned,
Snowden was a ghost during this period.
“Could an American just vanish in Hong Kong for eleven days?”
I asked.
“Apparently, he did just that,” my source replied.
Snowden’s whereabouts during these eleven days was not a mys-
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tery I was going to solve on this first trip to Hong Kong. I needed to
know more about his activities before he got there. After all, Snowden
was not, as he himself pointed out from Moscow, an “angel descending
from the heavens.” He had been working for the U.S. government
for the previous seven years. During that period, he had been
part of America’s secret intelligence regime and held a clearance for
sensitive compartmented information, or SCI. Such SCI material is
considered so sensitive that it must be handled within formal access
control systems established by the director of national intelligence.
Nor did Snowden’s breach begin with his handing over classified
documents to the Guardian reporters in Hong Kong in June 2013 or,
for that matter, in the eleven days prior to his meeting with journalists.
He had, as the NSA quickly determined, begun illicitly copying
documents in the summer of 2012. Such a dangerous enterprise is
not born of a sudden impulse. It was, as his actions suggested, nurtured
over many months. Even if he had managed to elude American
intelligence from late May to early June 2013, he could not hide all
the history that led to his decision to come to Hong Kong. There
had to be an envelope of circumstances surrounding it, including
Snowden’s motivation, associates, movements, finances, and activities
prior to his fleeing to Hong Kong. What was missing was not
just Snowden’s first eleven days in Hong Kong but the context of
the alleged crime.
I first needed to find out who Edward Snowden was.
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part one
SNOWDEN’S ARC
I woke this morning with a new name. I had had a vision.
A dream vision. A vision righteous and true. Before me I saw
Gamers, Gamers shrouded in the glory of their true names.
Step forth, and assume your name in the pantheon. It’s
always been there, your avatar’s true name. It slips through
your subconscious, reveals itself under your posts, and
flashed visibly in that moment of unrestrained spite; in the
indulgent teabag. You’ve felt it, known it, recognized it.
Now realize it.
I woke this morning with a new name. That name is
Wolfking.
Wolfking Awesomefox.
—edward snowden, Geneva, June 12, 2008
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chapter 1
Tinker
It’s like the boiling frog. You get exposed to a little bit of evil,
a little bit of rule- breaking, a little bit of dishonesty . . . you can
come to justify it.
— edward snowden, Moscow, 2014
Edward joseph snowden was born on June 21, 1983, in Elizabeth
City, North Carolina. His parents were Lon Snowden and
Elizabeth “Wendy” Barrett. According to their marriage records,
they wed when they were both eighteen in 1979. The following year
they had a daughter, Jessica.
Lon Snowden, like his father before him, served in the U.S. Coast
Guard. He was stationed at its main aviation base, where his fatherin-
law, Edward Joseph Barrett, was an officer and rising star of the
Coast Guard. While Edward Snowden was still a child, his maternal
grandfather would become not only an admiral but also head of the
Coast Guard’s entire aviation service.
When Lon was transferred to a Coast Guard base near Baltimore
in 1992, he bought a two- story house in Crofton, Maryland, a residential
community very close to the NSA’s headquarters building
at Fort Meade. Edward, who was nine, and Jessica, who was twelve,
were enrolled in local public schools in Crofton.
Jessica was a top student. After she obtained her degree at the
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University of Maryland, she went on to law school, graduating with
honors. Unlike his sister, Edward Snowden experienced a string of
failures in his education. In 1998, after only one year of classes, he
dropped out of Arundel High School; according to school records,
he stopped attending classes at the age of fifteen. He later attributed
his absence from school to a medical problem, mononucleosis, but
according to Robert Mosier, a spokesman for Anne Arundel County
public schools, there is no record of any illness. Brad Gunson, who
knew Snowden before he dropped out of high school, recalled in an
interview with The Washington Post only that he had a high- pitched
voice, liked magic cards, and played fantasy video games.
Instead of completing a formal education, Snowden went his own
way. Still in his teens, he became the product of a broken home. His
parents were entangled in messy divorce proceedings until he was
seventeen. By this time, Jessica had her own apartment. When his
parents separated, Snowden’s mother bought a two- bedroom condominium
in Ellicott City, Maryland. She moved Edward, along with
his two cats, into the condominium, while she remained in the family
house awaiting its sale. According to a condominium neighbor,
Joyce Kinsey, Snowden stayed home alone almost all the time. From
what she could observe, he spent long hours in front of a computer
screen.
At the age of eighteen, while other teens his age went to college,
Snowden was still living by himself, now devoting a large part of his
time to playing fantasy games on the Internet. Posting under the
alias TheTrueHooHa on a website called Ars Technica, he showed
himself to be a passionate gamer. He was especially drawn to anime,
a graphically violent style of Japanese animation. These anime
games had by 2002 achieved a fanatic following in both Japan and
the United States. He claimed special skills at Tekken, a martial arts
fighting game. He even went to anime conventions in the Washington,
D.C., area. When he became a webmaster for Ryuhana Press,
a website running these anime- based games, he described himself
somewhat fancifully as a thirty- seven- year- old father of two children.
The only truth in his description was that he was born on “the
longest day of the year” (June 21).
He wrote Internet posts under his TrueHooHa alias about how he
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used weight lifting and intensive training to precision shape his body.
He bragged to his online followers that he had reduced his “body fat
percentage to between 9.5% and 10.5%” (which was less than half
of the average for his age). He wrote that he wore “cool” purple sunglasses,
practiced martial arts, and was a fan of Japanese cuisine. He
described himself at one point, as if advertising his virtues, as having
a “head of vibrant, shimmering blond hair (with volume).”
He appeared somewhat restless with his solitary life in his almost
daily postings. He expressed a longing to go to Japan. “I’ve always
dreamed of being able to ‘make it’ in Japan. I’ve taken Japanese for
a year and a half,” he wrote in 2002. Despite his claim of learning
Japanese, there is no record of his taking any courses in Japanese.
But it was perhaps part of his yearning. In pursuit of an employment
opportunity in Japan, he posted, “I’d love a cushy gov job over
there.” Eventually, he gave up on the idea of relocating himself to
Japan because, as he explained in a post, he would have to put his cats
in quarantine for six months.
Snowden’s father meanwhile moved to Pennsylvania with his
new wife- to- be. This left Snowden with only one male family member
in the area, his maternal grandfather, Admiral Barrett, who was
now in the top echelon of U.S. intelligence working at the Pentagon.
Barrett was there when a plane piloted by terrorists crashed into it
on 9/11. He emerged unscathed.
Snowden sought to join the Special Forces through the 18X program,
a U.S. Army Reserve program created in 2003 that allowed
individuals who had not served in the military or completed their
education to train to be a Special Forces recruit. He listed his religion
on the application as Buddhist because, as he explained in a sardonic
post on Ars Technica, “agnostic is strangely absent” from the form.
He enlisted in the army reserves on May 7, 2004, according to
U.S. Army records. He reported for a ten- week basic training at Fort
Benning, Georgia, which was standard for all enlistees in the infantry.
In August, he began a three- week course in parachute jumping
but did not complete that training. As Snowden put it in his Internet
postings, he “washed out.” He was discharged on September 29,
2004, ending his nineteen- week military career. Snowden would
later claim on the Internet that he returned to civilian life because
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he had broken both legs. An army spokesman could not confirm that
Snowden injured his legs or that he was in fact dropped from the
program for medical reasons.
Under his TrueHooHa alias, Snowden wrote that “they [the army]
held on to me until the doctors cleared me to be discharged, and then
after being cleared they held onto me for another month just for
shits and giggles.” He attributed this treatment in the army, as he
would later attribute his problems in the CIA and the NSA, to the
inferior intelligence of his superiors. He wrote in his post, “Psych
problems = dishonorable discharge depending on how much they
hate you. Lots of alleged homos were in the hold unit, too, but they
only got a general discharge at best.”
If he had broken his legs, it was not evident to Joyce Kinsey, his
next- door neighbor, who told me that she never saw Snowden on
crutches when he returned to his mother’s condominium in September
2004. Army records show that he did not receive a medical
discharge. He received an “administrative discharge.” Unlike a medical
discharge, which is given because a soldier has sustained injuries
that prevent him from performing his duties, an administrative discharge
is a “morally neutral” form of separation given to a soldier
when he or she is deemed for nonmedical reasons inappropriate for
military service. Snowden preferred to cite a medical explanation for
his severance, just as he had claimed a medical reason for dropping
out of high school (and would later claim he needed medical treatment
for epilepsy at the NSA).
When he returned home from Fort Benning, Georgia, he was
twenty- one. He remained unemployed for several months before
taking a job as a security guard at the University of Maryland’s Center
for Advanced Study of Language, where he was given his first
security clearance. Snowden had to take a polygraph exam to get
the job. According to his Ars Technica postings, he worked the night
shift from six in the evening to six in the morning. He had higher
ambitions than being a campus security guard.
He wanted to become a male model. He did not seem overly concerned
about his privacy, posting pictures of himself on the Internet
“mooning” for the camera. He also posted provocative modeling pictures
of himself on the Ars Technica website. He commented on his
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own beefcake- style pictures, “So sexxxy it hurts” and “I like my girlish
figure that attracts girls.” He approached a model agency called
Model Mayhem, which recommended a photographer. He had some
concern about that photographer because he, as Snowden wrote in
a post, “shoots mostly guys.” Snowden said he was “a little worried
he might, you know, try to pull my pants off and choke me to death
with them, but he turned out to be legit and is a pretty damn good
model photographer.” He posted the photographs on the Internet.
The lack of any paid job offers dashed Snowden’s hopes for a modeling
career.
Around this time, he began dating Lindsay Mills, an extremely
attractive nineteen- year- old art student at the Maryland Institute
College of Art. Jonathan Mills, Lindsay’s father, was an applications
developer at the Oracle Corporation. According to him, Snowden
met his daughter on an Internet dating site. Snowden and Mills had
much in common. They both had divorced parents who gave them a
great deal of latitude in conducting their personal lives. Both of them
were keenly interested in perfecting their bodies through exercise
and diet regimes. Mills’s only paid employment over the next eight
years would be as a fitness and yoga instructor in Maryland. When
they first met, they both had ambitions to be models, and neither of
them had inhibitions about posing provocatively for photographers.
They both also had a desire to travel to exotic places, including cities
in Asia. Mills had spent four month in Guilin, China, before meeting
Snowden.
As bleak as his prospects as a high-school dropout might have
seemed, Snowden had an unexpected stroke of good fortune in the
spring of 2006. The CIA offered him a $66,000- a- year job as a CIA
communications officer. “I don’t have a degree of ANY type. In fact,
I don’t even have a high school diploma,” Snowden boasted in May
2006 on the website Ars Technica under his alias. He added, with
only a slight exaggeration, “I make 70K.”
How did Snowden get the job? The CIA’s minimum requirements
in 2006 for a job in its clandestine division included a bachelor’s or
master’s degree and a strong academic record, with a preferred GPA
of 3.0 or better.
The CIA needed technical workers in 2006. But even if Snowden
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applied only in this capacity, which entailed a five- year employment
agreement, the minimum requirement for an intelligence technology
job was an associate’s degree awarded by a two- year community
college in electronics and communications, engineering technology,
computer network systems, or electronics engineering technology.
Candidates had to have had a final GPA of at least 3.0 on a 4.0 scale
from a fully accredited technical school or university. Snowden, as
we’ve seen, did not meet these standards. If a candidate lacks these
qualifications, the CIA can make an exception only if he or she has
at least two years’ civilian or military work experience in the telecommunications
and/or automated information systems field that is
comparable to one of the requisite degree fields. Snowden in no way
qualified in this way either.
Under extraordinary circumstances, even the minimum requirements
might be waived if the applicant had a distinguished military
career and an honorable discharge. Snowden, however, did not
complete his military training at Fort Benning and received only an
administrative discharge.
The CIA, to be sure, had needed computer- savvy recruits to service
its expanding array of computer systems since 1990. By 2006,
however, there was no shortage of fully qualified applicants for IT
jobs who met the CIA’s minimum standards. Most of them had university
course records, work experience at IT companies, computer
science training certificates from technical schools, and other such
credentials. The CIA, like the NSA, also obtained technicians with
special skills for IT jobs from outside contractors. So it had no need
for employing a twenty- two- year- old dropout who did not meet its
requisites. According to Tyler Drumheller, a former CIA station chief
in Europe, the only plausible way that Snowden, with no qualifications,
was allowed to jump the queue was that “he had some pull.”
In 2006, Snowden’s grandfather, who had attained the rank of
rear admiral, was certainly well connected in the intelligence world.
After twenty years’ service in the Coast Guard, Barrett had joined
an interagency task force in 1998, which included top executives
from the CIA, the FBI, and the Drug Enforcement Administration.
It had been set up to monitor any gaps in the U.S. embargo on Cuba,
and Barrett, as one of its leaders, was in constant liaison with the
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CIA. By 2004, he had joined the FBI as the section head of its aviation
and special operations. In this capacity, he supervised the joint
CIA- FBI interrogation of the prisoners in the Guantánamo base in
Cuba, which involved him in the rendition program for terrorists.
Barrett could certainly have played a role in furthering his only
grandson’s employment. The CIA, however, has not disclosed any
information about who, if anyone, recommended Snowden. All that
is known is that in 2006 the CIA waived its minimum requirements
for him.
Later Snowden pointed out from Moscow that in 2006 the federal
government employed his entire family. His father was serving
in the Coast Guard; his mother was an administrative clerk for the
federal court in Maryland; his sister was a research director at the
Federal Judicial Center; and Admiral Barrett was still a top executive
at the FBI. In a sense, Snowden had entered the family business.
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chapter 2
Secret Agent
Sure, a whistleblower could use these [NSA computer vulnerabilities],
but so could a spy.
— edward snowden, Moscow, 2014
The sudden transformation of Snowden in 2006 from a
night watchman on a university campus to an employee for
the CIA provided him with a powerful new identity and one much
closer to the avatars he adopted for his fantasy games. It was burnished
so deeply in his self- image that he cited it eight years later,
in exaggerated fashion, in Moscow. When Brian Williams, then an
NBC anchorman, began an hour- long television interview with
Snowden in 2014 by saying, “It seems to me spies probably look a
lot more like Ed Snowden and a lot less like James Bond these days,”
Snowden approvingly smiled and told him, “I was trained as a spy
in sort of the traditional sense of the word.” Snowden further confirmed
his interviewer’s point, stating, “I lived and worked undercover
overseas— pretending to work in a job that I’m not [in]— and
even being assigned a name that was not mine.”
In reality, Snowden’s employment at the CIA was far more prosaic.
When he joined the CIA, he did not have the required experience
in maintaining secret communication systems, so the CIA sent
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him to its information technology school for six months to train as
a communications officer, not a spy. After completing his training,
he was dispatched to the CIA station in Geneva. He worked there
for the next two years as one of dozens of information technologists
servicing the CIA’s communication channels in Switzerland. He was
stationed there, according to Swiss registry records, under his own
name from March 2007 to February 2009. He was identified as a U.S.
State Department employee in Geneva because Switzerland does
not allow any intelligence officers to operate in its country. Officially,
he was attached to the permanent U.S. mission to the United
Nations, which employed hundreds of U.S. government functionaries
in Switzerland. It was a thin cover; the Swiss government was
aware that the CIA maintained its base in Geneva and posted its
employees at the U.S. mission.
Although Snowden would claim in a video he made in Hong
Kong that he had served as a “senior adviser for the Central Intelligence
Agency,” he was merely a telecommunications support officer,
or TSO in CIA parlance, which was a junior- level job at the CIA.
He worked as part of a team of information technologists under the
supervision of senior CIA officers, according to a former CIA officer
in Geneva. The job of these TSOs was to protect the security of the
CIA’s computer systems through which the CIA station in Geneva
sent and received its secret communications.
As far as is known, Snowden made very few friends at the eighthundred-
person mission. The only person to have publicly reported
knowing him in Geneva during this period is Mavanee Anderson, a
young and attractive summer intern at the U.S. mission from May
to August 2007. She described befriending Snowden, who, according
to her, said that he was in the CIA and also demonstrated to her his
martial arts skills. She later recalled in interviews that he was “a bit”
prone to brooding and voiced growing dissatisfaction with the CIA.
The job in Geneva did have its benefits, however. It provided him
with a generous housing and travel allowance. In many ways, it was
the “cushy government job” he had said he was seeking in his Internet
posts. He rented a four- room apartment and had his girlfriend,
Lindsay Mills, now twenty- one, join him there.
According to his posts on the Ars Technica website, he took full
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advantage of his compensation to live the high life. He gambled on
financial developments by buying and selling options, which are
contracts that allow speculators to bet on the directions of the market
without buying the actual stocks, bonds, or commodities. He also
bought a BMW sports car on which, he wrote, he disabled the speed
control so he could exceed the legal limit. He described in his posts
racing motorcycles in Italy and traveling around Germany with an
Estonian rock star (whom he did not further identify). He also continued
his avatar life in Internet gaming; the alias he chose for that
was Wolfking Awesomefox. He also indulged in a fantasy gun sport
called Airsoft, a variation of paintball, in which participants used
realistic- looking pistols to splatter each other with paint.
Snowden’s good fortune came to an abrupt end in 2008. He suffered
a massive loss in his options speculations. He wrote in a post
that he had “lost $20,000 in October [2008] alone,” a sum that represented
almost a third of his annual salary. He blamed the U.S. financial
system, posting on Ars Technica that Ben Bernanke, the Federal
Reserve chairman, was a “cockbag.” He also bet against any further
rise in the stock market index, asking a user with whom he was chatting
on the Internet in December 2008 to “pray” for a collapse of
stock prices. When his correspondent asked him why he wanted him
to pray for a decline, Snowden responded, “Because then I’ll be filthy
fucking rich.” But Snowden lost this bet.
Snowden lashed out at others on the Internet over these setbacks.
He termed those who questioned his financial judgment “fucking
retards.” As with other setbacks, he blamed them on government officials
in Ars Technica posts. Because the CIA was engaged in 2008 in
highly sensitive operations to gather banking data in Switzerland—
one of which Snowden later disclosed to The Guardian— any Internet
discussion by a CIA employee of financial losses could serve as a
beacon to an adversary intelligence service on the prowl for a source.
If any party was looking for disgruntled U.S. employees, Snowden’s
Internet chatter about bad choices in gambling could have aroused
its interest.
That Snowden used his TrueHooHa alias for these Internet postings
would not prevent a sophisticated espionage organization from
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Secret Agent | 25
quickly uncovering his true identity. He was listed by his true name
on the roster of the U.S. mission to the UN. By consulting personnel
records, one would further discover that he did not actually work for
the State Department. Because it was no secret that the U.S. mission
in Geneva housed the CIA station for all of Switzerland, any outsider
would think it probable that this brittle gambler who played
the options market worked for the CIA.
Even though it cannot be precluded that Snowden was spotted
in Geneva by another intelligence service, there is no evidence, at
least that I know of, to suggest that he was approached by one. Nor
is there reason to believe that if he had been contacted by a foreign
service in 2008, he would have responded positively. Despite
his indiscreet posting about his outside activities, he apparently still
respected the boundaries of secrecy that had been clearly defined in
the oath he had taken at the CIA. For example, after The New York
Times published an article revealing secret American intelligence
activities in Iran on January 11, 2009, Snowden railed against the
newspaper on the Internet under his TrueHooHa alias. He wrote,
“This shit is classified for a reason. . . . It’s because this shit won’t
work if Iran knows what we are doing.” He clearly recognized that
revealing intelligence sources was extremely damaging. As for the
Times, he said, “Hopefully they’ll finally go bankrupt this year.”
When another Internet user asked him if it was unethical to release
national security secrets, he answered, “YEEEEEEEEEES.”
As with every CIA officer, Snowden had to undergo a two- year
evaluation and take a routine polygraph test. It was then, in December
2008, that his superior at the CIA placed a “derog” in his file, the
CIA’s shorthand for a derogatory comment, in an unfavorable evaluation.
The reason remains somewhat murky. According to a New
York Times story by the veteran intelligence reporter Eric Schmitt,
Snowden’s superior had suspected that Snowden “was trying to
break into classified computer files to which he was not authorized
to have access.” Schmitt evidently had well- placed sources in the
CIA. He said that he interviewed two senior American officials who
were familiar with the case. According to what they told Schmitt, the
CIA superior had decided to “send Snowden home.” Officially, how-
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ever, according to a reply by a CIA public affairs officer to the Times,
Snowden had not been fired or accused of attempting to “break into
classified computer files to which he did not have authorized access.”
A former CIA officer who had also been at the U.S. mission
in Geneva explained the discrepancy to me. He said that the spin
the CIA put on the story was “necessary containment.” After the
Snowden breach occurred in June 2013, the CIA had a problem that
could, as he put it, “blow up in its face.” If Snowden had been fired
but allowed to keep his security clearance in 2009, the CIA’s incompetence
could be partly blamed for the NSA’s subsequent employment
of him. If he had broken into a computer to which he was not
authorized, he should have been fired if not arrested.
What this spin glossed over, according to this former CIA officer,
is the part about Snowden’s behavior that concerned his superior.
Technically, Snowden, as a CIA communications officer, was authorized
to use the computer system. The problem was that Snowden
had deliberately misused it by adding code to it. This code could have
compromised the security of the CIA’s “live system.” So while what
the CIA public affairs officer quoted in the Times story said was correct,
it clouded the issue.
During his time in Geneva, Snowden had received no promotions
or commendations for his work. He was threatened with a punitive
investigation unless he agreed to quietly resign from the CIA. “It
was not a stellar career,” Drumheller, the former CIA station chief,
told me in 2014.
Snowden blamed his career- ending “derog” on an “e- mail spat”
with a superior. From Moscow, he wrote to James Risen of the Times
that his superior officer ordered him not “to rock the boat.” Further,
he complained that the technical team at the CIA station in Geneva
had “brushed him off,” even though he had a legitimate grievance.
When he complained about a flaw in the computer system, he said
that his superior took vengeance on him. He said he added the code
to the system to prove he was right. He attributed the “derog” in
his file to the incompetence, blindness, and errors of his superiors.
According to Snowden, he was a victim. This would not be the last
time he faulted superiors for their supposed incompetence. He would
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Secret Agent | 27
later say that the NSA experts who examined the documents that he
had stolen were “totally incapable.”
In any case, in February 2009, Snowden not only had a careerdamaging
“derog” in his file but faced an internal investigation of
his suspicious computer activities. According to Drumheller, such an
internal investigation would not be undertaken lightly or because of
an “e- mail spat.” He said that such an investigation was “a big deal”
involving the CIA Office of Security in Washington and possibly the
FBI. It would also result in the temporary suspension of Snowden’s
security clearance. This left Snowden with little real choice. If he
wanted to avoid that investigation, he had to resign from the CIA,
which he did in February 2009. That was the end of the security
investigation.
He was clearly bitter, posting on Ars Technica on January 10,
2009, “Obama just appointed a fucking POLITICIAN to run the
CIA!” (He was referring to Leon Panetta, President Clinton’s former
chief of staff.) Snowden attributed the origins of his antipathy to
U.S. intelligence to his 2007– 9 experiences in the CIA. He later told
Vanity Fair that the 2009 incident in the CIA convinced him that
working “through the system would lead only to reprisals.”
Snowden, if not yet a ticking time bomb, was certainly a disgruntled
intelligence worker before he ever got to the NSA.
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chapter 3
Contractor
Private contractors don’t clear employees. The government does.
— admiral michael mcconnell,
former vice- chairman, Booz Allen Hamilton
Snowden, aged twenty- five, returned from Europe and moved
into his mother’s condo. Not only was he unemployed now, having
resigned from the CIA, but his financial state had been hurt
by the huge losses he had suffered playing the options market in
Geneva and by the fact that he did not qualify for any CIA benefits.
His vision of himself as a secret agent, the unstoppable Wolfking
Awesomefox, might have also suffered. According to the narrative
he later supplied to The Guardian, he had become deeply concerned
about the immoral way in which the CIA conducted its intelligence
operations in Switzerland.
“Much of what I saw in Geneva really disillusioned me about how
my government functions and what its impact is in the world. I realized
that I was part of something that was doing far more harm than
good,” Snowden told The Guardian. By way of example, he said he
learned that the CIA had gotten a Swiss banker drunk enough to be
arrested when he drove so the CIA could compromise him. Snowden,
who did not drink himself, was appalled at this ploy. Despite his
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Contractor | 29
growing antagonism toward the U.S. government, he had not given
up on, if not becoming a secret agent, working in the netherworld of
secret intelligence.
There was still a back door through which he could reenter the
spy world. Private corporations hired civilian technicians to work
for spy agencies as independent contractors. By 2009, the CIA, the
NSA, and other U.S. intelligence services had outsourced much of
the job of maintaining and upgrading their computer systems to
these private companies. They supplied the NSA with most of its
system administrators and other information technology workers.
This arrangement allowed the NSA to effectively bypass budget
limits and other restrictions limiting how many NSA technicians
it could recruit. Instead of being on the NSA’s own payroll, these
people nominally worked for, and received their paychecks from,
private employers. In fact, many of these outside contractors worked
full- time for the NSA.
Snowden applied in April 2009 to one of these private companies,
a subsidiary of the Dell computer company. To diversify out of
manufacturing computers, Dell had recently gone into the business
of managing government computer systems for the NSA and other
intelligence services. As a leading specialist in the field of corporate
cyber security, Dell had no problem obtaining sizable contracts from
the NSA’s Technology Directorate. In 2008, the NSA had in effect
outsourced to Dell the task of reorganizing the backup systems at its
regional bases. Dell had to find thousands of independent contractors
to work at these bases. In 2009, it was seeking to fill positions
at the NSA’s regional base in Japan, and Snowden applied. Relocating
would be no issue for him because he had a longtime interest in
going to Japan.
He had little problem obtaining the job. He had a single compelling
qualification: like all other CIA officers, he had been given a
top secret clearance. For an outside contractor such as Dell, such a
security clearance was pure gold. If a potential recruit lacked it, Dell
needed to wait for a time- consuming background check that would
have to be conducted before it could deploy him or her at the NSA.
If a recruit already had the clearance, as Snowden did, he could begin
working immediately.
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Snowden still had his security clearance, despite his highly problematic
exit from the CIA, because the agency had instituted a policy
a few years earlier that allowed voluntarily retiring CIA officers to
keep their clearance for two years after they left. This “free pass,” as
one former CIA officer called the two- year grace period, had been
intended to make it easier for retiring officers to find jobs in parts of
the defense industry. This accommodation, in turn, made it easier for
the CIA to downsize to meet its budget.
Not only did Snowden retain his clearance, but unlike when he
had applied for his job at the CIA in 2006, he could now list on his
résumé two years of experience in information technology and
cyber security at the CIA. Dell could check only a single fact: that
Snowden was employed at the CIA between 2006 and 2009. His CIA
file, which contained the “derog,” was not available to Dell or any
other private company because of government privacy regulations.
Even though the CIA had “security concerns” about Snowden, it
could not convey them to either Dell or the NSA without violating
the privacy rules. “So the guy with whom the CIA had concerns left
the Agency and joined the ranks of the many contractors working
in the intelligence community [IC] before CIA could inform the rest
of the IC about its worries,” Michael Morell, then CIA deputy director,
explained. “He even got a pay raise.”
Obviously, this was a glitch in the security system. As a result of
it, though, Snowden entered the secret world of the NSA only five
months after being forced out of the CIA.
For the next forty- five months, Dell assigned him various IT tasks
at the NSA. In June 2009, he was sent to Japan to work in the NSA
complex at the U.S. Yokota Air Base, which is about two hours by car
from downtown Tokyo. He moved into a small one- bedroom apartment
in Fussa, just outside the sprawling base.
His initial job for Dell was teaching cyber security to army and air
force personnel. In this capacity, he instructed U.S. military officers
stationed at the base in how to shield their computers from hackers.
Such security training had been required for military personnel
dealing with classified material after several successful break- ins
to U.S. military networks by China, Russia, and other adversary
nations. It was not a challenging or interesting job.
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But Snowden found diversions in Japan. In July 2009, Lindsay
Mills joined him there. She had become an amateur photographer,
specializing in arty self- portraits. She also saw herself as a global
tourist, writing in her blog after arriving in Japan that she had traveled
to seventeen countries. Like Snowden, she also deemed herself,
tongue in cheek, a “super hero.” In this sense, her Internet avatar
was a match for Snowden’s Wolfking Awesomefox.
In Japan, Mills and Snowden spent time with another American
couple, Jennie and Joseph Chamberlin, who also worked at the
Yokota base. Jennie, a sergeant in the public affairs section of the U.S.
Air Force, had been at art college with Mills and called herself in her
blog the Little Red Ninja. Joseph Chamberlin was a decorated U.S.
Navy pilot who now flew highly sensitive intelligence- gathering
missions from the Yokota base. Jennie described Lindsay in her blog
as her “super- model friend.” The two couples also went on expeditions
in Japan together. As far as is known, the Chamberlins were
the only Americans at the base with whom Snowden socialized. On
August 17, 2009, the foursome attempted to walk up Mount Fuji,
but they got lost en route and wound up in the Mount Fuji gift
shop. Jennie described the misadventure in her blog: “Our adventure
started off a little rocky with our attempts to find the interstate.
Alas, our iconic mountain was obscured by cloud. A short stop at
the Mt. Fuji combination soba noodle stand/gift shop was enough to
whet our appetite for the further exploration that is to come.” Photographs
taken that day show Snowden wearing Hawaiian shorts
and a black tank top emblazoned with an eagle and the letters USA.
They also show Mills wearing safari shorts, a brown sweater, and
what appears to be an engagement ring. “Ed was looking rather rednecky,”
Lindsay commented on one photograph. Snowden described
her, in turn, as “nerdy.” They never made it to the top of Mount Fuji.
Snowden also sought to advance himself by getting credit toward
a college certificate by enrolling in a summer online course at the
University of Maryland’s Asia program, which had a regional campus
on the Yokota base. Known as UMUC, it had a contract with
the government to provide military personnel with such educational
opportunities. Snowden would later claim that he was taking
courses for a graduate degree in computer sciences, but William
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Stevens, the assistant registrar of UMUC, who I spoke to at the base
in 2016, told me that the program in 2009 did not provide graduate
courses in computer sciences. According to the program’s record,
while Snowden had enrolled as a student in the summer of 2009, he
received neither any credits nor a certificate.
In October 2009, Dell assigned Snowden a job in which he had
direct access to the NSA’s computers. He was now a system administrator,
which is essentially a tech- savvy repairman. Dell was working
on a backup system code- named EPICSHELTER. For this contract,
Dell was transferring large chunks of data from the NSA’s main
computers in Maryland to backup drives in Japan so that the system
could be quickly restored if there was a communications interruption.
Because most of the classified data was in its encrypted form, it
had little value to any outside party. Snowden’s job was to maintain
the proper functioning of computers, but as a system administrator
he also had privileges to call up unencrypted files. He sat in front of a
computer screen all day looking for any problems in the transferring
of files to backup servers.
The work was highly repetitive and exceedingly dull. Snowden
found time to search for anomalies in the system, and he claimed
to have spotted a major flaw in the security system in late 2009. He
discovered that a rogue system administrator in Japan could steal
secret data without anyone else’s realizing that it had been stolen.
Snowden brought that to the attention of his superiors, as he later
said.
The emergence of a rogue system administrator was not that farfetched
in 2009. Hacktivists such as Julian Assange had adopted the
battle cry “Sysadmins of the world, unite.” Instead of asking them
to “throw off their chains,” as Marx did, he asked them to send classified
documents about secret government activity to the WikiLeaks
site. Snowden, as a “sys admin,” was aware he had the power to do
so. He recalled in Moscow in 2014, “I actually recommended they
[the NSA] move to two- man control for administrative access back
in 2009.” To make his point even clearer, he added, “A whistleblower
could use these things, but so could a spy.” Not without irony,
Snowden became that rogue system administrator some three years
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later. In fact, he later used the very vulnerability he pointed out to
steal NSA documents at Dell.
In September 2009, still on the Dell payroll, Snowden made a tenday
trip to India. He later said he was on an official visit “working
at the US embassy.” Hotel records show that he arrived at the Hyatt
Regency in New Delhi on September 2 from Japan and at 3:30 p.m.
on September 3 checked into the Koenig Inn, an annex to Koenig
Solutions, a school that gave crash courses on programming and
computer hacking. According to Rohit Aggarwal, head of the school,
Snowden stayed there until September 10 while taking classes
with a private instructor. It cost $2,000 in tuition and fees, which
Snowden prepaid from Japan with his personal credit card. Even
though Snowden later said he only took courses in “programming,”
the school’s records show that during that week he took intensive
courses in sophisticated hacking techniques. The course was titled
“Ethical Hacking,” but that was a euphemism for teaching the techniques
of illicit hacking. The course provided tutoring on hackers’
tools such as SpyEye and Zeus, which are used to circumvent security
procedures. It also demonstrated how these hacking tools could
be customized by criminals and spies to break into files, plant surveillance
programs, impersonate system administrators, assume the
privileges of system administrators in a network, and capture the
passwords of others. On September 11, Snowden, according to hotel
records, left India for Japan. While the stated purpose of the hacking
training was to allow security consultants to detect intruders, it also
prepared Snowden to be, if he chose to be, an intruder in the NSA
system.
One problem with working as a contractor is that the standard
two- year contracts are not necessarily renewed. Nor is there much
possibility for advancement for IT workers. As one contractor
told me, “It is a dead- end job with great pay.” In the fall of 2010,
Snowden’s contract in Japan with Dell was nearing an end.
Dell offered Snowden, and he accepted, a new position in the
United States. He rented a modest suburban house shaded by a
sakura cherry tree in a suburb of Annapolis, Maryland. Lindsay
Mills meanwhile was attending a two- week fitness training course at
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a retreat that qualified her to be a yoga instructor. She had been living
on and off with Snowden during the previous two years abroad,
including while he worked at the CIA in Switzerland and the NSA in
Japan, and now she moved in with Snowden again. The twenty- fiveyear-
old Mills posted on Instagram, “Finally in our first US place
together.” She also put pictures online of him in bed with her, affectionately
referring to him in her posts as a “computer crusader.”
He worked on problem solving for corporate clients at Dell headquarters
in Annapolis. In preparation for his new corporate role,
Snowden shaved off his facial hair and, with Lindsay’s help, bought a
Ralph Lauren suit. His corporate clients were assisting the NSA, the
CIA, and the DIA. Consequently, Snowden dealt with a wide range of
intelligence officers and gave presentations on the vulnerabilities in
computer security at the DIA- sponsored Joint Counterintelligence
seminar. In February 2011, he attended a black tie Valentine’s Day
gala sponsored by corporate members of the Armed Forces Communication
and Electronics Association. The guest speaker was Michael
Hayden, who had headed the CIA when Snowden was abruptly
forced out two years earlier. Nevertheless, Snowden joined the cue
to have his photo taken with the former director, a perk of the charity
event.
These dealings in no way mitigated his resentment of the intelligence
establishment. What began at the CIA in 2009 as objections
to what he saw as the incompetence of his superiors grew into wellarticulated
disapproval of the way the U.S. government conducted
its intelligence. He found NSA surveillance particularly worrisome,
later telling The Guardian, “They [the NSA] are intent on making
every conversation and every form of behavior in the world known
to them.” He claimed after defecting to Moscow that he had voiced
his concerns about what he considered illicit surveillance to ten NSA
officials, “none of whom took any action to address them.” The NSA
can find no record of these complaints, but if Snowden had indeed
complained to these officials while working for Dell, his superiors
at Dell either didn’t notice or didn’t care that they had a very disgruntled
employee on their hands.
Snowden also made no secret on the Internet of his anger at the
U.S. government and the corporations that served it. He railed on
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the Ars Technica site against the complicity of private corporations,
such as Dell, that assisted the NSA. In his online posts in 2010,
Snowden expressed loathing for the assistance that corporate America
was providing the intelligence community. “It really concerns
me how little this sort of corporate behavior bothers those outside of
technology circles,” he wrote under his TrueHooHa alias. He said he
feared that America was already on “a slippery slope,” and he suggested,
perhaps adumbrating his own later actions, that this corporate
assistance to U.S. intelligence “was entirely within our control
to stop.”
What the “computer crusader” expressed in these angry Internet
postings was an almost obsessive concern over individuals’ freely
submitting to government authority. “Society really seems to have
developed an unquestioning obedience towards spooky types,” he
wrote on Ars Technica without mentioning that he himself worked
for a corporation that assisted spy agencies. He asked rhetorically
on this public forum whether the sinister slide toward a surveillance
state “sneaked in undetected because of pervasive government
secrecy.”
The outright contempt he expressed toward this “government
secrecy” did not prevent him from seeking even more secret work
at Dell for the intelligence services. In February 2011, after his CIA
security clearance ran out, he applied to renew it. The new clearance
now required a new background check and filling out the government’s
127- page Standard Form 86.
Since 1996, background investigations for the NSA, like much of
the computer work at the NSA, had been outsourced to a private
company. It had proceeded from the effort of the Clinton administration
to cut the size of government by privatizing tasks that could
be more efficiently done by for- profit companies. U.S. Investigations
Services, or USIS, as it is now called, which won the contract
for background checks, was initially owned by the private equity
fund Carlyle Group, which later sold it to another financial group,
Providence Equity Partners. For the private equity and hedge funds,
profits were the measure of success. To increase its profits from the
contract with the NSA, USIS had to move more quickly in concluding
background checks because it did not get paid more for extensive
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investigation. In 2006, the government learned these background
checks were often prematurely ended. In Snowden’s case, because
the CIA did not share its files with a private concern, USIS did not
have access to Snowden’s CIA files, and it therefore did not learn
about the threatened security investigation. Nor did it learn from
the Internet, where he always employed an alias, that he was a disgruntled
employee. So Snowden’s new clearance was approved in
the summer of 2011, allowing him to continue working for Dell on
secret intelligence projects.
Meanwhile, in August 2011, Mills began her own blog titled
L’s Journey. In it, she described herself as “a world- traveling poledancing
super hero.” Many of her posted pictures were provocative
poses of herself in her underwear and various states of undress. She
wrote, “I’ve always wanted to be splashed on the cover of magazines,
with my best air- brushed look.” Her wish would be gratified two
years later in a way she likely did not anticipate.
For his part, Snowden seemed happy to encourage her fantasy
about being a superhero. He even gave her a Star Trek– inspired head
visor. Despite all the concerns he voiced about privacy, he did not
seem to mind her provocative posts. On the contrary, he took photographs
of her, telling her at one point that her photographs were
not “sexy” enough.
Snowden was soon offered a new position by Dell at the NSA’s
Kunia regional base in Hawaii. Dell, which was in the process of
expanding its government consulting business, wanted him to be a
system administrator on the NSA’s backup system. The NSA needed
this system before it could upgrade new security protocols that
would audit suspicious activity in real time. In Hawaii, as in Japan,
system administrators still worked alone. Snowden knew from his
experience in Japan that this solo work in an unaudited workplace
provided an opportunity for a system administrator to steal documents.
So he might also have realized that as a solo system administrator
in Hawaii, he would have this opportunity. Whether this
was on his mind or not, on March 15, 2012, he accepted this offer.
Dell agreed to pay all his relocation expenses and provide him with
a housing allowance.
He found a 1,559- square- foot house in Oahu, located at 94- 1044
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Eleu Street in the middle- class suburb of Waipahu. It was part of
the Royal Kunia development, which contained three hundred
similar- looking homes. According to Albi Matco, the manager of the
community association for the development, many of the residents
worked at military facilities in the area. The corner house Snowden
rented was comfortable enough, with three bedrooms, a walk- in
closet, a living room with a high ceiling, and a single- car garage, but
in no way lavish. It did not even have a backyard. He moved in on
April 2, 2012, which entailed a brief separation from his girlfriend,
Mills, who had committed herself to attending a girlfriend’s wedding
the following month. After he left for his new assignment, she wrote
on Instagram, “Sex toy party and then saying goodbye to my man—
well not goodbye so much as see you in two months.”
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chapter 4
Thief
We begin by coveting what we see every day.
— hannibal lecter, The Silence of the Lambs
In hawaii in 2012, Snowden was living a very comfortable life.
He was earning just over $120,000 a year from Dell. His housing
allowance covered the rent and the lease on his car. He worked
five days a week at the NSA base. The commute, as I timed it, took
only ten minutes. Driving past a sign marked “Restricted Area: Keep
Out,” and the security booth where NSA guards checked his credentials,
he left his car in the outdoor lot for the Kunia Regional
Security Operations Center. (When I drove into the base in 2016,
I was detained nearly two hours at the security booth before being
turned back.)
Snowden worked in a three-story reinforced concrete building
called “the tunnel,” even though it was above the ground. It had
been built during World War II to serve as an aircraft assembly
plant. During the war, it was entirely covered with earth and shrubbery
to proof it against Japanese bomber attacks. In 1980, the NSA
converted it to its regional base in Hawaii for its intelligence gather-
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ing. Its lack of windows and the dirt covering gave it the appearance,
when I viewed it in 2016, of an oblong-shaped anthill. Workers, both
military and civilian, entered through an exterior staircase in the
center of the mound. Even though it is above the ground, it is known
as the tunnel. Snowden said in describing the atmosphere, “You’re in
a vaulted space. Everybody has sort of similar clearances, everybody
knows everybody. It’s a small world.” He said that to relieve the
tediousness of the work, every two months or so his fellow workers
would circulate a picture of a naked person that showed up on
their screens as part of the NSA’s surveillance of foreign suspects. He
explained, “You’ve got young enlisted guys, 18 to 22 years old [who
have] suddenly been thrust into a position of extraordinary responsibility
where they now have access to all of your private records. In
the course of their daily work they stumble across . . . an intimate
nude photo of someone in a sexually compromising position.”
He knew that copying any files, including photographs, was a violation
of NSA rules. But he did not report this illicit activity to the
NSA, even though he later claimed that it occurred regularly. He
joked in his Moscow interview with The Guardian that some of the
nudes were “extremely attractive” and that viewing them was, as he
put it, “the fringe benefits of surveillance positions.”
Snowden identified with the Libertarian Party, and at the NSA
he made no effort to conceal his political support of its causes. He
became an active partisan of Congressman Ron Paul, the leading figure
in the party in 2012. “He’s so dreamy,” Snowden posted on the
Ars Technica site in March 2009 (just after he registered to vote in
North Carolina, though he no longer lived there). Paul was running
in the 2012 Republican presidential primaries, and Snowden made
a contribution of $500 to his election committee. Snowden’s attraction
to Paul’s libertarian ideology was not that surprising. At the
core of Paul’s worldview was a deep hostility to the intrusion of the
government into private lives. Snowden shared this hostility, as was
clear from his Internet postings. Like other Libertarians, Snowden
believed that citizens should not be “shackled” by federal law. He
later addressed from Moscow via an Internet hookup a libertarian
gathering at which Ron Paul also spoke. “Law is a lot like medi-
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cine,” he said. “When you have too much it can be fatal.” Like Paul,
Snowden ardently opposed any form of gun control, as did Lindsay
Mills in her online postings.
Like other Libertarians, Snowden, a contractor for the government,
saw the government as an adversary. “The [American] government,”
he later said, “assumed upon itself, in secret, new executive powers
without any public awareness or any public consent and used them
against the citizenry of its own country to increase its own power,
to increase its own awareness.” Most relevant to his future activities
at the NSA, Snowden wholeheartedly agreed with Paul’s position
on the dangers inherent in government surveillance of U.S. citizens.
Paul described the CIA, the organization that had forced Snowden
out, as nothing short of a “secret government” and said that “in a
true Republic, there is no place for an organization like the CIA.” He
also railed against NSA surveillance.
As is clear from Snowden’s Internet postings, he, like Ron Paul,
had doubts about the competence of the intelligence agencies of the
U.S. government. Snowden’s own disillusionment about the government
might have begun with his rejection and perceived mistreatment
by the Special Forces of the U.S. Army. It was almost certainly
reinforced by his ouster from the CIA. He later told The Guardian
that he was disillusioned as early as 2007 when he learned about the
CIA’s methods in compromising Swiss citizens. His critical view of
the U.S. government only hardened during the years he worked at
the NSA. He described his NSA superiors as “grossly incompetent,”
as he later explained to a journalist from Wired magazine in Moscow.
At the NSA, he said employees were kept in line by “fear and
a false image of patriotism.” He said that he saw his fellow workers
cowed into “obedience to authority” and his superiors induced to
break the law. He became particularly concerned with what he called
the “secret powers” of the NSA. He saw them as “tremendously
dangerous.” By this time, Snowden was fully aware that the NSA
conducted domestic surveillance because he had used his privileges
as a system administrator in 2012 to read the NSA inspector general’s
report on a 2009 surveillance program.
Nevertheless, Snowden continued to work at the NSA, where he
was, as he put it, “making a ton of money.” Mills joined him in his
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“paradise” in June 2012, shortly before his twenty- ninth birthday.
Just before leaving Annapolis for Hawaii, Mills posted a seminude
picture of herself on her blog, L’s Journey. In it, her face was covered
with a blanket. The caption under it read, “Trying to avoid the
changes coming my way.” In Honolulu, she found “E.,” as she called
Snowden in her blog, “elusive.” She found that he preferred to stay
at home and avoided meeting other people to the point that her
friends “were not quite sure that E. existed.” Lindsay’s fellow performers
in the Waikiki Acrobatic Troupe told me in 2016 that they
rarely, if ever, saw Snowden at the practice sessions. Andrew Towl,
a juggler with the group, did briefly meet Snowden once. It was on
a hike with Lindsay in Oahu. Towl said he asked Snowden what he
was doing in Hawaii and Snowden answered tersely, “I work with
computers,” and continued walking. Even though Mills had dated
Snowden for eight years, most of her other friends, except for Jennie
and Joe Chamberlin in Japan, had not met him. Next door neighbors
I spoke to caught brief glimpses of him entering or leaving his
house but did not engage him in a conversation as Snowden tended
to avoid eye contact. If he had other social interactions in Hawaii, no
one he met came forward and spoke of meeting him, even after he
became world famous.
Two days after his twenty- ninth birthday dinner on June 21, Mills
described him playfully as a “goof.” She wrote in her blog, “The
universe is telling me something and I’m pretty sure it’s saying get
out, Fuck you Hawaii.” In early July, she summed up her shaky situation
with Snowden in another blog, writing, “I moved to Hawaii
to continue my relationship with E. [but] it has been an emotional
roller coaster since I stepped off the plane.” She diverted herself by
organizing a pole- dancing studio in the four- hundred- square- foot
garage of the house. She also found her own friends in physical fitness
and dance groups. She joined a New Age yoga studio called
Physical Phatness, as well as a local acrobatic performance group,
and, on Friday nights, pole danced at the Mercury lounge in downtown
Honolulu. Unlike Snowden, she enjoyed socializing, writing in
her blog, “We lovingly crammed a large group into a small corner
of a delicious Japanese restaurant and filled our bellies with sushi,
tempura, and good conversation.”
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That same July, Snowden had other things on his mind, including
an attempt to advance himself. Although his position at Dell as
a system administrator was a well- compensated one, especially for
a twenty- nine- year- old with no formal education, it carried little
prestige. He sat from 9:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. in a windowless room
watching a bank of monitors in the so- called tunnel. Many of those
who worked with him were, as he described them, “eighteen year old
soldiers.” Presumably, they had little interest in discussing with him
the weightier issues of the world. Working as an outside contractor
was also a dead- end job that hardly matched the vision he had of
himself in his Internet postings. In real life, in a cubicle in the NSA,
he was decidedly not the Wolfking Awesomefox heroic image he had
of himself in his dream vision.
Snowden now decided to apply for a position in the NSA itself.
He apparently believed that if he scored high enough on its entrance
exam, the NSA would invite him to join it as a Senior Executive
Service officer, or SES, which was the civilian equivalent in rank and
pay to a flag officer in the U.S. armed forces. “I’m still amazed that
a twenty-eight-year-old thought he could get an SES position,” a
civilian contractor working for the NSA during the same period told
me, “Snowden had a very overinflated view of his self-worth.” To
enhance his chances of getting the SES job, Snowden in the summer
of 2012 illicitly hacked into the NSA’s administrative files and stole
the answers to the NSA exam. As the NSA’s subsequent postmortem
would determine, it was the first known document that Snowden
took without authorization at the NSA.
It was not the first time, however, that he had used his hacking
skills to attempt to advance himself. At the CIA in 2009, as he later
said in Moscow, he had added text to his annual CIA evaluation in
what he termed “a non- malicious way” to prove a point. His CIA
superior took a much darker view of that incident when the hack
was detected, calling for an investigation. It was the threat of that
investigation that, it will be recalled, in effect ended Snowden’s CIA
career. At the NSA, his intrusion was not detected for almost a year.
“He stole the [NSA] test with the answers, and he took the test and
he aced it,” the former NSA director Michael McConnell recounted
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in a 2013 interview. “He then walked into the NSA and said you
should hire me because I am this good on the test.”
The reason why he attempted to gain entry into the upper ranks
of the NSA in the late summer of 2012 is less clear. If his Internet
posting and libertarian riffs are an indication of his state of mind
then, he was hostile to the surveillance activities of the NSA. If so, it
made little sense that he would seek a permanent career there. If this
is considered in light of the career move he made six months later
(in March 2013), which, as he himself admits, was for the express
purpose of getting at tightly held documents stored on computers
that were not available to him in his job at Dell, then he might have
been seeking wider access in 2012 for a more nefarious purpose than
an NSA job.
In any case, despite the near- perfect scores, the NSA did not offer
him a Senior Executive Service job. “It was totally unrealistic for
Snowden to expect to get an SES position,” a former senior NSA
officer told me. Snowden’s ambitions might have been disappointed
in this instance, but it did not prevent him from later claiming that
he had been a senior adviser to the CIA and also a senior adviser to
the Defense Intelligence Agency.
Instead of an SES position, the NSA offered him a lowly G- 13 job
as an information technology worker, which was not an improvement
on his job at Dell. He took this slight as evidence of the NSA’s
incompetence, subsequently joking to a reporter in Moscow that his
ability to steal the test answers should have been seen as a qualification
for the NSA job. In September 2012, he turned down the NSA
offer. If he was to advance himself now, he had to find a new way.
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chapter 5
Crossing the Rubicon
What I came to feel is that a regime that is described as a national
security agency has stopped representing the public interest and
has instead begun to protect and promote state security interests.
— edward snowden, Moscow, 2014
Soon after Snowden failed to get an SES job at the NSA in September
2012, he intensified his rogue activities. As we’ve seen,
part of Snowden’s job as a system administrator under contract to
Dell was transferring files held at Fort Meade to backup computers
in Hawaii. He “was moving copies of that data there for them,” said
Deputy Director Ledgett, “which was perfect cover for stealing the
[NSA] data” through the fall and winter of 2012. The security measures
at the Hawaii base presented no obstacles to him because, as
a system administrator, he had privileges that allowed him to copy
documents that had not been encrypted. Indeed, it was part of the
process of building the backup system. The flaw he had pointed to
in Japan, in which system administrators working solo could safely
steal files, also existed in Hawaii, as we know. This time, however,
instead of bringing it to the attention of the NSA, he used it to steal
files.
Snowden could be confident that his thefts of documents would
go undetected. Real- time auditing of the movement of documents,
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Crossing the Rubicon | 45
which was done at NSA headquarters in Fort Meade and most of the
NSA’s regional facilities, had not yet been installed at the Hawaii
base, because a lack of bandwidth prevented the safe upgrading of
the software. This auditing software was scheduled to be installed
after the backup system was completed in 2013. The Kunia base was
one of the last NSA bases that did not monitor suspicious transfers
of files on a real- time basis. Snowden was aware of this deficiency;
he later pointed out in his interview in Wired that the NSA base
where he worked did not have an “audit” mechanism. This security
gap allowed Snowden, using his system administrator’s credentials,
to copy classified data to a thumb drive without anyone’s being able
to trace the copied data back to him. According to the NSA’s subsequent
damage assessment, he stole many thousands of pages while
working for Dell in 2012 before he contacted journalists. Ledgett
subsequently reported that the NSA analysis of the fifty- eight thousand
documents that were given by Snowden to journalists in June
2013 showed that most of them were taken while he was still working
at Dell.
This theft was made even more serious by the interconnection
of NSA computers with those of other intelligence agencies. Prior
to the 9/11 attacks in 2001, “stovepiping” had protected NSA data
on its computers from networks used by other intelligence services.
After the 9/11 Commission concluded that part of the reason U.S.
intelligence agencies were unable to “connect the dots” in advance of
the attack was related to this practice, the NSA stripped away a large
part of its stovepiping. As a result, the NSANet, which Snowden
had access to at Dell in 2012, became a shared network with “common
access points,” as the former NSA director Michael Hayden
described them to me, which made them the equivalent of “reading
rooms” in a library. They served as a means for NSA workers to
exchange ideas about the problems they were encountering on various
projects for the intelligence community. In maintaining them,
system administrators, or “system admins,” like Snowden, acted as
the “librarians.” If a system administrator copied data from this network,
no one knew.
For Snowden, the NSANet, which included CIA and Defense
Department documents, provided a rich hunting ground in the fall
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and winter of 2012. Many of the documents he took off the NSANet
revealed operations not only of the NSA but also of the CIA and the
Pentagon. By taking them, he had come to a Rubicon from which
there would be no return. He later explained in an e- mail to Vanity
Fair from Moscow, “I crossed that line.”
As far as is known, Snowden was not sharing documents with any
other party prior to May 2013. He was not even yet in contact with
Poitras, Greenwald, or any other journalists. Presumably, Snowden
was collecting them on drives— despite the risks that possessing
such a collection of secrets might entail— for some future use.
Why would Snowden jeopardize his career and, if caught, his freedom
by undertaking this illicit enterprise? He might by now have
had strong ideological objections to the NSA’s global surveillance. As
he said later in Moscow, “We’re subverting our security standards
for the sake of surveillance.” Ordinarily, though, even ideologically
opposed employees don’t steal state secrets and risk imprisonment.
If they are disgruntled, they seek employment elsewhere. Certainly,
Snowden, with his three years’ experience working for Dell, would
have little problem finding a job as an IT worker in the booming
civilian sector of computer technology. Instead, he sought to widen
his access to NSA documents. This behavior suggests that he might
have had another agenda. One possible clue to it is the first document
he took: the NSA exam. The answers to the questions in it
represented to him a form of tactical power. Those answers could
empower him to obtain a more important job in the NSA itself that
would allow him to burrow deeper into the executive structure of
the agency. Holding such a job would unlock the door to documents
containing the NSA’s sources stored in areas not available to Dell
contractors like himself.
His later actions demonstrated that he equated the possession of
such secrets with personal power. For example, after he arrived in
Moscow in 2013, he bragged to James Risen of the Times that he
had access to secrets that gave him great leverage over the NSA. He
told him specifically his access to “full lists” of the NSA’s agents and
operations in adversary countries could, if revealed, close down the
NSA’s capabilities to gather information in them.
Such a fascination with the power of government- held secrets
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Crossing the Rubicon | 47
has always been a core concern of radical Libertarians. In his 1956
book, The Torment of Secrecy: The Background and Consequences of
American Security Policies, the sociologist Edward Shils brilliantly
dissects the fascination with secrecy among individuals who fear that
government agencies will use covert machinations against them. In
Shils’s concept, this counterculture is “tormented” by the government’s
possession of knowledge unavailable to them. Members of
this culture tend to believe that the agencies that hold these secrets,
such as the FBI, the CIA, and the NSA, can control their lives; they
also believe that obtaining such secrets will give individuals power
over government.
Snowden himself was concerned with a coming “dark future,”
which he later described as follows: “[The elites] know everything
about us and we know nothing about them— because they are secret,
they are privileged, and they are a separate class . . . the elite class,
the political class, the resource class— we don’t know where they
live, we don’t know what they do, we don’t know who their friends
are. They have the ability to know all that about us. This is the direction
of the future but I think there are changing possibilities in this.”
To change the “dark future,” someone would have to know the
secrets of the “elites.” Snowden saw himself as one of the few individuals
in a position to seize state secrets from those elites. He had
a SCI (sensitive compartmented information) clearance, a pass into
an NSA regional base, and the privileges of a system administrator.
This position allowed him to steal state secrets and whatever power
that went with them. And if he moved to a position that gave him
greater access, he would, in this view, amass even greater power.
Whatever his actual agenda in 2012, we know that he tested possible
reactions to a leak exposing NSA surveillance in the United
States. He asked fellow workers at the NSA base in 2012, according
to his own account, “What do you think the public would do if this
[secret data] was on the front page?” He asked this question at a time
when a large number of State Department and U.S. Army classified
documents had been posted on Julian Assange’s WikiLeaks website.
These WikiLeaks revelations made, as Snowden knew they would,
front- page headlines. His “question” was only rhetorical. No covert
NSA document had ever been published in the press as of 2012. One
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reason why NSA documents remained secrets, as all intelligence
workers at Dell were told when they signed their oath to protect
NSA secrets, was that the unauthorized release of communications
intelligence documents would violate U.S. espionage laws. Even so,
there was no shortage of activists overseas, such as Assange, who
would be willing to publish NSA documents revealing its global surveillance
activities. Cyberpunks, as these activists called themselves,
tended to be hostile to the NSA because they believed (correctly)
that it monitored their activities on the Internet. This anti- NSA
view was well represented at the Chaos Computer Club convention
in Berlin in 2012. In addressing these cyberpunks, Assange and his
followers at WikiLeaks declared that the main enemy in cyberspace
was the NSA. The NSA documents Snowden had taken were far
more explosive than anything Assange had posted to date because
they contained NSA intelligence source material.
In the late fall of 2012, Snowden further tested his newly found
powers. Using an alias, he reached out to some of the leading hacktivists.
It opened a door for him to the darker side of cyberspace.
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chapter 6
Hacktivist
When you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss gazes into you.
— friedrich nietzsche
By the time that Snowden had begun hacking into NSA files
in 2012, the alienated hacktivist battling to unlock the secrets
of evil corporations and governments had become a stock hero of
popular culture. For example, in the international best- selling Girl
with the Dragon Tattoo Trilogy by Stieg Larsson, the heroine, a
self- educated hacker in her twenties named Lisbeth Salander, steals
incriminating documents from computers that provide the journalist
Mikael Blomkvist with scoops that save from bankruptcy the progressive
magazine he edits. The journalists at the magazine accept
her sociopathic behavior, which includes embezzling millions of dollars,
extortion, maiming, and murder, because her hacking exposes
crimes and abuses of power. In the real- world universe, hacktivists
also use their skills to attempt to redress perceived abuses of power.
For example, in December 2010, the group Anonymous, whose
members, called Anons, often wear Guy Fawkes masks resembling
those worn in the 2006 movie V for Vendetta, launched a successful
denial- of- service attack called Operation Avenge Assange. It was
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aimed at paralyzing companies, including PayPal and MasterCard,
that refused to process donations for WikiLeaks, which these Anons
believed were stifling the freedom of the Internet. Because hacktivists
often use illicit means to redress their grievances, such as denialof-
service attacks, theft of passwords, and hacking into computers,
they must conceal their true identities to avoid the retribution of
the FBI and other law enforcement agencies. This requires them to
operate on the dark side of cyberspace, which has become known as
the dark net. Fortunately for hacktivists, the dark net is accessible to
anyone.
It is a place frequented by those who want to avoid laws, regulations,
and government surveillance. Its denizens include cyber saboteurs,
industrial spies, purveyors of illegal contraband, spammers,
pranksters, identity thieves, video pirates, bullies, slanderers, drug
dealers, child pornographers, money launderers, contract killers,
inside traders, anarchists, terrorists, and the intelligence services of
many countries.
Sue Halpern, writing about it in The New York Review of Books,
noted, “My own forays to the dark Net include visits to sites offering
counterfeit drivers’ licenses, methamphetamine, a template for