US intelligence had some clues suggesting that Snowden’s path to Russia had been prepared for him in advance.  On September 3, 2013, Russia’s President Putin gave a lengthy interview on state-owned Channel 1 television in which he divulged that he personally had had advance knowledge of Snowden’s plan. “I will tell you something I have never said before,” Putin said. Snowden "first went to Hong Kong and got in touch with our diplomatic representatives” and that he was told then that an American "agent of special services" was seeking to come to Russia. Putin then decided that this agent would be “welcome, provided, however, that he stops any kind of activity that could damage Russian-US relations.”  Putin’s disclosure came as no surprise to the NSA investigation since the Russian pro-government newspaper Kommersant had reported that Snowden visited the Russian consulate in Hong Kong. 


      Putin’s authorization could certainly account for Aeroflot waiving its usual passport and visa check to allow Snowden to board its plane.   It also might explain the dispatch with which Russian officials whisked Snowden off the plane after it landed and into a waiting car at the Moscow airport.  It could even account for Snowden’s vanishing from public view for the next three weeks and the promulgation of the cover story that Snowden was unwillingly trapped at the airport by the U.S. government.  The reasons behind Putin’s move were less clear.


    By September 2013, the investigation was looking into a veritable abyss. Snowden’s culpability was no longer an issue. What was lacking from the video, or the 2-hour film made from it by Laura Poitras, was any specific information on how many documents he had copied, how he had obtained the passwords to the computers on which they were stored, the period of time involved in the theft, or how he had breached all the security measures of the NSA in Hawaii.  Nor would that data be forthcoming from Snowden, who may be the only witness to the crime, By June 23, 2013, he was in a safe haven in Moscow.    Even though the Grand Jury case against Snowden was cut and dry, it was also irrelevant because the US does not have an extradition treaty with Russia. 


The purpose of the intelligence investigation went far beyond determining Snowden’s guilt or innocence, however.  Its job was to find out how such a massive theft of documents could occur, how the perpetrator escaped, and, perhaps most urgent, who had obtained the stolen documents from Snowden.


    When Snowden first met Greenwald and Poitras in Hong Kong on June 3rd 2013, he displayed in his hand, as a recognition signal.  It was an unsolved Rubik’s Cube.  It may also be an appropriate metaphor for the unsolved elements in the Snowden enigma.   Even in his later interviews with journalists in Moscow, Snowden studiously avoided describing the means by which he breached the entire security regime of America’s most secret intelligence service.  He only told the journalists who came to Moscow to interview him, with a bit of pseudo-modesty, that he was not “an angel” who descended from heaven to carry out the theft.


    But the question of how Snowden stole these documents may be the most important part of the story.  The NSA, after all, furnishes communications intelligence to the President, his National Security advisers, and the Department of Defense that is supposedly derived from secret sources in adversary nations. If these adversary nations learn about the NSA’s sources, the information, if not worthless, cannot be fully trusted. The most basic mission of the NSA is to protect its sources. Yet, despite all its efforts, Snowden walked away with long lists of its sources.  In doing so, he amply demonstrated that a single civilian employee working for an outside contractor, even one not having the necessary passwords and other access privileges, could steal documents that betrayed these vital sources.  He also demonstrated that such a theft, which the NSA calculates exceeded one million documents, can go undetected for at least two weeks. If Snowden managed this feat on his own, as he claims in his Hong Kong video, it suggests that any other civilian employee with a perceived grievance against NSA practices or American foreign policy could also walk away with some of the most precious secrets held by US intelligence.  Such vulnerability extends to tens of thousands of civilian contract employees in positions similar to the one held by Snowden.  The lone disgruntled employee explanation is therefore hardly reassuring. If true, calls into question the entire multi-billion dollar enterprise of outsourcing the management of the NSA’s computer networks and other technical work to outside contractors. It also casts doubts on the post-9/11 decision by the intelligence community to strip away much of the NSA’s “stove-piping” that previously insulated the NSA’s most sensitive computers.  Without such “stove-piping,” any rogue civilian employee could bring down entire edifice of shared intelligence.


    Nor would a finding by the investigation that Snowden had acted in concert with others in breaching compartments at the NSA be any more reassuring.  Such collaboration among intelligence workers would reflect gravely on the mindset of the NSA.  Snowden described an atmosphere in which intelligence workers exchanged lewd photographs of foreign suspects. Did this violation of the NSA’s rules also involve abetting the theft of documents?  If so, the NSA would have to evaluate further vulnerabilities that might arise when it entrusts its secrets to technicians who do not share is values. A collaborative breach would signal an immense failure of the present concept of the counterintelligence regime in the NSA.


  From what I gathered from government officials who were familiar with the investigation, there was a concern that answering the “how” question could open up a Pandora Box of other issues concerning the very ability of the NSA to carry out its core mission of protecting the government’s intelligence secrets.  However it was organized, it was that clear that Snowden had played a major role in what amounted to a brilliant intelligence coup. 










    



PART TWO  
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 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, and recognized it. Now realize it.
I woke this morning with a new name. That name is … Wolfking Awesomefox”
      --Edward Snowden in Geneva, June 12, 2008.




CHAPTER THREE
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.”
                                     —Snowden in Moscow, 2014



      Edward John Snowden was born on June 21, 1983 in Elizabeth City, North Carolina.  His parents, Lon Snowden and Elizabeth “Wendy” Barrett, according to their marriage records, wed when they were both 18 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 father-in-law Edward John Barrett, was an officer and rising star of the Coast Guard. While Edward Snowden was still a child, his grandfather would become not only an admiral but the head of the Coast Guard’s entire aviation service.  Admiral Barrett would be the only grandfather, Edward Snowden would ever know.    His paternal grandfather died before he was born in a fatal car crash.  He had had a drinking problem and killed a woman in a prior car crash.) 

  When Lon was transferred to a Coast Guard base near Baltimore in 1992, the family moved to Maryland.  Lon bought a two-story house in Croften, Maryland, a residential community very close to the NSA’s headquarters building at Fort Meade. The two children, Edward, who was nine, and Jessica, who was 12, were enrolled in local public schools in Croften.

    Jessica was a top student. She graduated high school, completed both her courses at University of Maryland and went on to law school, where she graduated with honors.  Unlike his sister, 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 medical illness. Brad Gunson, who knew him 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.  Nor did Snowden receive home schooling or ever get a high school diploma. 

Instead, Snowden became the product of a broken home. His parents were entangled in a messy divorce fight until he was seventeen. By this time Jessica had her own apartment.  When his parents separated, Snowden’s mother, Wendy, bought a two-bedroom condominium in Elliott City, Maryland.  She moved Snowden, along with his two cats, into the condominium.  She remained in the family house while awaiting its sale.  According to his neighbor Joyce Kinsey, Snowden, alone, stayed home almost all the time.  From what she could observe, he spent long hours in front of a computer screen.

     At the age of 18, Snowden was still living by himself, while other teens his age went to college, Snowden now devoted a large part of his time playing fantasy games on the Internet. Posting under the alias “The TrueHooHa” on a web site 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 Takken, a martial arts fighting game.  He even went to Anime conventions in the Washington DC area.  When he became a webmaster for Ryuhana Press, a website running these anime-based games, he described himself somewhat fancifully as a 37-year old father of two children,  The only clearly true part of his description was that he was born on  “the longest day of the year” (June 21). 

  He also apparently valued changing his body. He wrote Internet posts under his TrueHooHa alias about how he used weightlifting 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 appeared somewhat restless with his solitary life in a Maryland suburb 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 posted in 2002.  Despite his claim of learning Japanese, there is no record of him taking any courses in Japanese.  But it perhaps part of his yearning.  He also 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).”   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 Edward J. Barrett.  Unlike Snowden’s virtual career on the Internet, where at one point Snowden invented for himself two fantasy children, Admiral Barrett became a real actor in the top echelon of US intelligence.  After the Coast Guard, he moved to the Pentagon. He was actually in the Pentagon when a plane piloted by terrorists crashed into it on 9-11.  He emerged unscathed and, by 2004, was a top official in the intelligence regime that operated the interrogation center at Guantanamo.  

Instead of seeking a job in Japan, Snowden sought to join the Special Forces through the 18X program.  It was an 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 10 week basic training at Fort Benning, Georgia.  That was standard course for all enlistees in the infantry.  In August, he began a three-week course in of parachute jumping but did not complete that training. US Army records show he did not complete the training requirements and received no commendations.     As Snowden put it in his Internet postings, he “washed out.”  He was discharged on September 29, 2004, ending his 19 week military career.  Snowden would later claim on the Internet that he returned to civilian life because he had injured himself by breaking both legs. An Army spokesman said, however, that he could not confirm that Snowden injured his legs or that he was in fact dropped from the program for medical reasons.   Under his alias TheTrueHooHa he 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 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.”  It is not entirely clear whether or not Snowden actually injured himself.  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. Whether or not he broke his legs, 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 her or she is deemed for non-medical reasons inappropriate for military service.  Snowden himself preferred to voice 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 on September 28, 2004, he was 21. Having failed in his attempt to join the Special Forces, he returned to his mother’s condominium in Elliott City, where he remained unemployed for several months.  He took a job as a security guard at the University of Maryland’s Center for Advanced Study of Language. According to his Ars Technica postings, he worked the night shift from six in the evening to six in the morning.   Because intelligence officers took its language courses, Snowden had to take a polygraph exam to get the job. After he passed it, he was hired and given his first security clearance   But he had higher ambitions than being a campus security guard, It was only a temporary stop gap for him.

         He had ambitions of becoming a male model.  He did not seem overly concerned about his privacy, posting pictures of himself “mooning” for the camera.  He also posted provocative modeling pictures of himself on the Ars Technica website.  He commented on his own beefcake-style pictures “So sexxxy it hurts” and “I like my girlish figure that attracts girls.”  He approached a model agency called Model Mania.  He had some concern about the photographer who “shoots mostly guys.” Snowden said in a post 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, commenting: “ I think I look pretty good in the shots, so it's kind of hard to get used to thinking of yourself in terms of being an element in a picture as opposed to just a picture of X." Despite his enthusiasm, the lack of any paid job offers dashed any hopes he had of a modeling career.

He also began dating Lindsay Mills around this time.  She was an extremely attractive 19-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, she met Snowden on an Internet dating site.  However they met, 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’ only paid employment over the next 8 years would be as a fitness and Yoga instructor in Maryland.  They both also 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 may have seemed, he had an unexpected stroke of good fortune in the spring of 2006.   The CIA, out-of-the-blue, offered Snowden 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 The TrueHooHa.  He added, with only a slight exaggeration, “I make 70K.”

   But 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.  Snowden had only completed one year of high school.  He had never attended college. He said himself that he had “no degree.”  So he had none of the requisite degrees for the job he got.

CIA deputy director Ledgett said the CIA needed technical workers in 2006.  But even if Snowden only applied in this capacity, which entailed a 5-year contract-term employment agreement, the minimum requirements for an intelligence technology job were a minimum of an Associates’ Degree awarded by a two-year Community college in Electronics and Communications Engineering Technology   Computer Network Systems, or Electronics Engineering Technology.  Candidates further must have a final GPA of at least 3.0 on a 4.0 scale from a fully accredited technical school or university.  Snowden did not meet these standards.  Lacking these qualifications, the CIA can make an exception only if a candidate had at least two years civilian or military work experience in the telecommunications and/or automated information systems field that are comparable to one of the requisite degree fields.  , Even here, Snowden in no way qualified. He did not have the education qualifications or two-year work experience anywhere.  In fact, his only paid work was as a security guard at a language school at the University of Maryland, and that job lasted less than one year.

    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, Georgia 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 they could provide the personnel office.  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 22-year old drop-out who did not meet its requisites.     According to the former CIA station chief, the only plausible way that Snowden, with no qualifications, was allowed to jump the queue was that “he had some pull.”

    In 2006, Snowden was not without family connections.  His grandfather, it will be recalled was Rear Admiral Barrett, who certainly was well-connected in the intelligence world. After 20 years service in the Coast Guard, Admiral Barrett joined an interagency task force in 1998, which included top executives from the CIA, FBI, and DEA.  It had been set up to monitor any gaps in the US embargo on Cuba and, as one of its leaders, Barrett was in constant liaison with the CIA.  Following the attack on the World Trade Center in NY in 2001, he 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 Guantanamo base in Cuba which involved him in the rendition program for terrorist.    As a top FBI executive in a liaison role with the CIA, he certainly had could have played a role in furthering his only grandson’s employment. The CIA, however, has not disclosed any information about whom, if anyone, recommended Snowden.  All that is known is that in 2006 the CIA waived its minimum requirements for Snowden.

However Snowden got his job at the CIA, it meant, as he pointed out from Moscow, that in 2006 his entire family was employed by the Federal government.  His father Lon in 2006 was serving in the Coastguard; his mother Wendy was the administrative clerk for the Federal Court in Maryland; his sister Jessica was a research director at the Federal Judicial Center; and his namesake grandfather, Admiral Barrett, was still a top executive at the FBI. In a sense, Snowden had now entered the family business.



Chronology2: The Snowden Thriller
                                 The Intelligence World, 2006-2014




June2006-Feb 2007            CIA
                                            Trainee, Langley, Virginia



March 2007- Feb 2009        CIA
                                             Communications officer. Geneva, Switzerland




 June 2009-Sept 2010            DELL/ NSA
                                               Security instructor, Yokoda. Japan



October 2010- March-2012     DELL/ NSA 
                                                 Computer platforms, Maryland–designing computer platforms



April 2012- March 2012           DELL/ NSA
                                                  System administrator, Oahu, Hawaii



M arch 2012– May 2013              BOOZ ALLEN HAMILTON/ NSA
                                                      Infrastructure analyst, Oahu, Hawaii

October 2013– Present                   Unidentified Cyber Security Firm

                                                        Unknown position, Moscow, Russia




CHAPTER FOUR
Secret Agent

 “Sure, a whistleblower could use these [computer vulnerabilities], but so could a spy.”

       --Edward Snowden in Moscow



The sudden transformation of Snowden in 2006 from a night watchman on a university campus to secret agent 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 in Moscow. When Brian Williams, then a NBC anchorman, began an hour-long NBC 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, sating “I lived and worked undercover overseas, pretending to work in a job that I'm not, and even being assigned a name that was not mine."  
      In reality, Snowden’s employment at the CIA was more prosaic.  When he joined the CIA in 2006, he did not have the required experience in maintaining secret communication systems.  So the CIA sent 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, Switzerland. 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 US State Department employee in Geneva because Switzerland does not allow any intelligence officers to operate in that country.  So officially he was attached to the permanent U.S. mission to the United Nations which employed hundreds of US government functionaries in Switzerland.  It was a thin cover, since the Swiss government was aware that the CIA maintained its base in Geneva and posted it employees at the US mission,  

      Although he would later claim in the 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 12 man 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 800-person mission.  The only person there to have publicly reported knowing him in Geneva during this period is Mavanee Anderson, a young and attractive summer intern at the US 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.   

   During his time in Geneva, he received no promotions or commendations for his work.  In December 2008, he received an unfavorable evaluation from his superior and a “derog,” the CIA’s shorthand for a derogatory comment. He was also threatened with a punitive investigation unless he agreed to quietly resign from the CIA. “It was not a stellar career,” Tyler Drumheller, former CIA station chief told me in 2014.

    The job in Geneva did have its benefits, however.  It provided him 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 21, join him there.  

    According to his posts on the Ars Technica web site, he took full advantage of his compensation to live the high life. He gambled on financial developments in the option markets, losing and making substantial sums of money. He also bought a BMW sports car.  While these BMW had a speed control to keep the car within the speed limit, he wrote that he illicitly disabled it so he could exceed this legal limit.  He described in his posts other pursuits, including racing motorcycles it Italy and traveling around Germany with an Estonian rock star (who he did not further identify.)   He also continued his fantasy life in Internet gaming.  The gaming alias he chose was “Wolfking Awesomefox.”  He even indulged in a fantasy gun sport called Airsoft, a variation of paint ball, in which participants used realistic looking pistols to splatter each other with paint.

        His 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 which represented a substantial part of the $66,000 a year CIA salary. He blamed the US 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 Ars Technica site 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.”  The stock market, however, continued to rise, and Snowden also lost this bet.

 Snowden lashed out at others on the Internet over these setbacks. He termed those who questioned his financial judgment as “fucking retards.”  As with other setbacks, he blamed them on government officials. He even advertised them in Ars Technica, a closely-watched Internet forum, while serving in the CIA.   Since 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 services on the prowl for a source.  If any party was looking for a disgruntled US employees, Snowden’s Internet chatter about bad choices in gambling could arouse its interest.  That Snowden used his TheTrueHooHa alias for these Internet posting would not prevent a sophisticated espionage organization, such as the Russian Intelligence service, from quickly uncovering that his true identity was Edward Snowden. Nor would it be difficult to place him at the CIA since, it will be recalled, he was listed by his true name on the roster of the US Mission to the UN.   By consulting personnel records it would further emerge that he did not actually work for the State Department.  Since it was no secret, at least to the Russian Intelligence services, that the US mission in Geneva housed the CIA station for all of Switzerland, it was 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 in 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 True HOOHA 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 New York 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.”

    Nevertheless, he had his career-ending problem at the CIA.  As with every CIA officer, he 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 the “derog” in his file.  The reason remains somewhat murky.  According to a New York Times story by 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, however, according to a CIA reply to the New York Times report, Snowden had not been fired or accused of attempting to “break into classified computer files to which he did not have authorized access.”  The discrepancy was explained to me by a former CIA officer who had also been at the US Mission in Geneva.  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 which could, as he put it, “blow up in its face.”  If Snowden had been fired but allowed to keep his secrecy clearance in 2009, the CIA’s incompetency could be partly blamed for the NSA’s subsequent employment of him. If he had broken into a computer 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 of 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 said was correct, it clouded the issue. 

     For his part, Snowden blamed his career-ending “derog” on an “e-mail spat” with a superior.  From Moscow, he wrote James Risen of the New York 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 complaint.  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 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 incompetency. He would later say that the NSA experts who examined the documents that he had stolen as “totally incapable.”    

In any case, in February 2009, Snowden not only had a career-damaging “derog” in his file but he faced an internal investigation of his suspicious computer activities.  According to Tyler Drumheller, the former CIA chief for Europe, such an internal investigation was not undertaken lightly or because of an “email 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 his secrecy clearance. This left Snowden with little choice. If he wanted avoid the investigation, he had to resign from the CIA, which he did.  That was the end of the security investigation.  He was clearly bitter about the CIA, 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 US intelligence to his 2007-2009 experiences in the CIA.  Snowden later told Vanity Fair that the 2009 incident in the CIA convinced him that working “through the system would lead only to reprisals.” "Much of what I saw in Geneva really disillusioned me about how my government functions and what its impact is in the world," he told the Guardian in June 2013. "I realized that I was part of something that was doing far more harm than good."    Snowden, if not yet a ticking time bomb, was certainly a disgruntled intelligence worker before he ever got to the NSA




CHAPTER FIVE
Contractor 

“Private contractors don’t clear employees. The government does.”-- 
                 Admiral Michael McConnell, Vice Chairman of Booz Allen Hamilton


  Snowden, age 26, returned from Europe and moved into his mother’s condo. He was not only unemployed now, having resigned the CIA without qualifying for any benefits, but his financial state had been hurt by the huge losses he had suffered playing the options market in Geneva.  His vision of himself as a secret agent, the unstoppable “Wolfking Awesomefox” may 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 arrested 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 growing antagonism towards the US government, he had not given up on, if not becoming a secret agent, working in the netherworld of secret intelligence.

    Although Snowden’s career had abruptly ended at the CIA, there still was a backdoor through which he could re-enter the spy world.  It was private corporations that hired civilian technicians to work for spy agencies as independent contractors.   By 2009, The CIA, NSA and other US 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 putting these workers on its own payroll, they 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, Dell SecureWorks.  It was   a subsidiary of the Dell computer company.  To diverse 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 for from the NSA’s Technology Directorate.  In 2008, the NSA had in effect outsourced to Dell the task of re-organizing its back-up systems at its regional bases.  Now Dell had to find thousands of independent contractors to work at these bases  In 2009, when Snowden applied,  Dell was seeking to fill positions at the NSA’s regional base in Japan. It first had to find technicians willing to go to Japan. Since Snowden had a long-time interest in going to Japan, he was more than willing to relocate to Japan.

    He had little problem obtaining the job.   Aside from his family connections, he had a single compelling qualification for the job—a top secret clearance. For an outside contractor such as Dell, such a security clearance was pure gold. If a potential recruit lacked a top secret clearance, before Dell could deploy him or her at the NSA, it needed a wait for the completion of a time-consuming background check.  If a recruit already had one, as Snowden did, he could begin working immediately.  

   The reason that Snowden still had his secrecy clearance, despite his highly-problematic exit from the CIA, was that the CIA had instituted a policy a few years earlier that allowed voluntarily-retiring CIA officers to keep their secrecy 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 that required secrecy clearance.  This accommodation, in turn, made it easier for the CIA to downsize to meet its budget. 

Not only did Snowden retain his security clearance, but unlike when he had applied for his job at the CIA in 2006, he now could list on his resume two years experience in information technology and cyber security at the CIA.  All Dell could check was a single fact:  Snowden was indeed 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.  Even though the CIA had “security concerns” about Snowden, as CIA Deputy Director Morell noted, it could not convey them to either Dell or the NSA.   “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 before CIA could inform the rest of the IC about its worries,” Morell explained. “He even got a pay raise.”    Obviously, this was a glitch in the security system but, as a result of it, Snowden entered the NSA by the back door only five months after being forced out of the CIA.     

    For the next 45 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 Yokota air base outside Tokyo. He moved into a small one bedroom apartment in the nearby town of Fussia.   His initial job for Dell was teaching cyber security to Army and Air Force personnel.  In this capacity, he instructed US 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 US military networks by China, Russia, and other adversary nations.  Although it finally brought him to Japan, it was not a challenging or interesting job.

But Snowden found diversions in Japan.  In July 2009, he was joined in Japan by Lindsay Mills.  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 had she travelled to 17 countries.  Like Snowden, she also deemed herself, tongue and 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 US Air force, had been at Art College with Mills, and called herself in her blog the “Little Red Ninja.” Her husband, Joseph Chamberlin was a decorated US Navy pilot who now flew highly-sensitive intelligence-gathering missions from the Yokota base.  When Lindsay Mills arrived she made contact with Jennie, who in the next few weeks showed her many of the sights of Tokyo.  Jennie described Lindsay in her blog as her “super-model friend.” The two couples also went on expeditions in Japan together. Joseph Chamberlin had a car and, as far as is known, he and his wife 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 to the tourist site.  Giving up on Mount Fuji, they wound up in the Mount Fuji gift shop.  Jennie described the misadventure in her Little Red Ninja 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.”  The photographs 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  (possibly to allay suspicions about her living with Snowden.)  “Ed was looking rather rednecky,” Lindsay commented on one the photograph.  Snowden described her, in turn, as “nerdy.”   Finally, after posing for photographs, they found the Suyama-guchi path.  But they never made it to the top. 

        Back in Tokyo, Snowden was still seeking to advance himself.  He attempted to get a college certificate by enrolling in a summer on-line course at the University of Maryland’s Asia program.   But, according to the program’s record, he did not succeed in receiving any credit or a certificate from the on-line University. 

Finally, in October 2009, Dell assigned Snowden a job in which he had direct access to the NSA’s computers. His new position was a system administrator, which is essentially a tech-savvy repairman. Dell was working on backup system code-named EPIC SHELTER.  For this contract, Dell was transferring large chunks of data from the NSA’s main computers in Maryland to back-up drives in Japan so if there was a communications interruption the system could be quickly restored.  Since 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 files to back-up 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. The flaw was that a system administrator in Japan worked as a singleton and could steal secret data without anyone else realizing that it had been stolen. It intrigued him enough for him to bring it to the attention of his superiors, as he later said. Snowden saw that a rogue system administrator like himself could use his computer privileges to download and steal documents in ways that would go unnoticed.  The emergence of a rogue system administrator was not that farfetched in 2009.   Hacktavists such as Julian Assange had adopted the battle cry: system administrators, or “syst admins 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 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 himself became that rogue system administrator some three years later at Dell. In fact, he later used the vulnerability he pointed out to steal NSA documents at Dell (before moving to Booz Allen.).

    In September 2009, Snowden made a ten day trip to India.  He later said he was on an official visit “working at the US embassy.”  He was still on the Dell payroll.  Hotel records show that he arrived at the Hyatt Regency hotel in New Delhi on September 2nd from Japan, and at 3:30 pm on September 3rd, checked into the Koenig Inn, a facility that was an annex to Koenig Solutions, a school that gave crash courses on programming and computer hacking.    According to Rohit Aggarwal, the head of the school, Snowden stayed there until September 10th while taking classes with a private instructor.   It cost $2,000 in tuition and fees, which Snowden prepaid from Japan with his own 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.  Although the course was entitled “ethical hacking” that was also a euphemism for teaching the techniques of illicit hacking. The course provided tutoring on hacker’s tools, such as “Spyeye” and “ZeuS,” that 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 11th, 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 chooses 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, making a contractor’s job essentially temporary employment. 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 SecureWorks came to an end.   Dell then offered Snowden a new position in the United States.

He now was assigned to work at Dell headquarters in Annapolis, Maryland. He rented a modest suburban house shaded by a Sakura cherry tree in suburb of Annapolis, Maryland.  Mills meanwhile was attending a two-week fitness training course at a Yoga camp that qualified her to be a yoga instructor. She then moved in with Snowden.  Even though she had been living on and off with Snowden during the past two years abroad, including while he worked at the CIA in Switzerland and the NSA in Japan, they had not shared a home in America up until now.   The now 25-year old Mills posted on Instagram “Finally in our first US place together.” She also put on line pictures of him in bed with her, who she now affectionately referred to in her posts as a “computer crusader.”  

   Dell meanwhile had him to work on problem- solving for its corporate clients.  In preparation for his corporate role, he shaved off this facial hair and, with Lindsay’s help, bought a Ralph Lauren suit.  These corporate clients were assisting the NSA, the CIA, and the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA). Consequently, Snowden dealt with a wide range of intelligence officers, and gave presentations on the vulnerabilities at computer security at the DIA-sponsored Joint Counter Intelligence seminar.

His dealings with these US intelligence officers 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 well-articulated disapproval of the way that the US 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 care that they had a very disgruntled employee on their hand.   He also made no secret of anger at the US government and the corporations that served it on the Internet.  He railed on the Ars Technica site against the complicity of private corporations, such as Dell, that assisted the NSA.  In his on-line 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 True Hoo-ha alias.  He said he feared that America was already on “a slippery slope,” and suggested, perhaps adumbrating his own later actions, that this corporate assistance to US intelligence “was entirely within our control to stop.”  What the “computer crusader,” as Mills had playfully called him in her Internet postings, 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, Dell that assisted spy agencies.  He asked rhetorically on this public forum whether the sinister slide towards a surveillance state “sneaked in undetected because of pervasive government secrecy?” 

     The outright contempt he expressed towards this “government secrecy” in no way prevented 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.  A new clearance required a new background check and filling out (again) 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 the government by privatizing tasks that could be more efficiently done by for profit companies. US Investigations Services, or USIS as it is now called, which won the contract for background checks, was initially owned by the hedge fund Carlyle Group who later sold it to another hedge fund, Providence Equity Partners.  For the 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 since it did not get paid more extensive investigation.  In 2006, the government learned USIS’s background checks were often prematurely ended.  In Snowden’s case, as USIS did not have access to Snowden’s CIA personnel files, it did not learn about the pending security investigation of him. Nor did it learn from the Internet 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 entitled “L’s Journey.” In it, she described herself as “a world-traveling pole-dancing super hero.”  By now, she was an accomplished photographer, specializing in taking self-portraits.  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 way she did not anticipate.

   For his part, Snowden seemed happy to encourage her fantasy about being a super hero. 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 meanwhile got offered by Dell a new position at an NSA 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 back-up 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 as singletons. As Snowden had seen when working in Japan this solo work in an unaudited workplace provided an opportunity for a system administrator like himself to steal documents.  So he may have also realized that as a solo system administrator in Hawaii, he would have this opportunity. 

In any case, on March 15, 2012, he accepted the offer. Dell agreed to pay all his relocation expenses and provide him with a housing allowance.  

 He found a 3-bedroom house in Hawaii on-line, and arranged to move there on April 2, 2012. 1t was located at 94-1044 Eleu Street in the upper-middle class suburb of Waipahu, only a few blocks from the Royal Kunia country club.  It had a master bedroom with a walk-in closet, a patio deck in back shielded from public view by a clump of palm trees and a large garage with an automatic door. The move to Hawaii entailed a brief separation from his girlfriend since Mills had committed her to attending her girlfriend’s wedding in May.  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 month/s.”  





CHAPTER SIX
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 from Dell just over $120,000 a year.  His housing allowance from Dell paid the rent on his 1,559 square-foot house.   He had also leased a sporty car.  Looking back at this period of life from Moscow, he said he had been “living in paradise.”

He went to work five times a week, a 15 minute trip drive through a lush landscape with sugar plantations.  After passing through security, he parked his car in a sprawling parking lot, and entered the underground part of the NSA base known as “the tunnel.”  He 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 pass around a naked picture that showed up on their screens.  He explained: “You've got young enlisted guys, 18 to 22 years old [who] 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.”  Snowden, as will be recalled, was no stranger to posting lewd photographs. Before he joined the CIA, he had posted pictures of himself mooning on the Internet.  He also knew that copying any files, including photographs, was a violation of NSA rules.  But he did not report this illicit activity at 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, “a sort of the fringe benefits of surveillance positions.” 

    Snowden also had an interest in American politics. He 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 Libertarian 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.)   Since Paul was running as a Presidential candidate in the 2012 Republican primaries, Snowden sent the Paul election committee a contribution of $500.  Snowden’s attraction to the Libertarian ideology of Ron Paul was not that surprising. At the core of Paul’s libertarianism was a deep hostility to the intrusion of the government into private lives.  Snowden shared this same hostility towards government authority, as was clear from his Internet postings.   Like other libertarians, Snowden believed that citizens should not be shackled by Federal law.  He later told a Libertarian gathering, at which Ron Paul also spoke, “Law is a lot like medicine.  When you have too much it can be fatal."   Paul also ardently opposed any form of gun control.  Not only did Snowden support this position in his Internet postings, but so did his girlfriend Lindsay Mills in her own on-line postings.

  Most relevant to his future activities at the NSA, Snowden whole-heartedly agreed with the position of Paul on the dangers inherent in government’s surveillance of US citizens. Paul described the CIA, the organization which had forced Snowden out, as nothing short of a “secret government” and 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, expressed doubts about the competency of the intelligence agencies of the U.S. government.  Snowden’s own disillusionment about the government may have begun with his rejection, and perceived mistreatment, by the Special Forces of the US 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.  He also told the New York Times after he arrived in Moscow that he came to realize while working in the CIA that any attempt redress these wrongs against him by working through the system would only lead to further punishment for him. His critical view of the US 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 that the NSA conducted domestic surveillance because he had used his privileges as a system administrator in 2012 to obtain the NSA’s 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 “paradise” in June 2012, shortly before his 29th birthday.  Just before leaving Annapolis, Maryland for Hawaii, Mills posted a semi-nude 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.”  At best, one of Lindsay’s friends in an acrobatic class caught a glimpse of Snowden picking her up one afternoon.   Even though Mill’s dated Snowden for eight years, most of her friends, with the exception of Jennie and Joe Chamberlin in Japan, had never met Snowden.  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 29th birthday dinner on June 21st, she 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 also found it odd that Snowden would work on his computer at home hooded under a blanket, as she would later tell the FBI.   She diverted herself by organizing a pole dancing studio in the 400 foot garage of the house. She also joined a New Age yoga studio called “Physical Phatness,” a local acrobatic performance group, and, on Friday nights, pole-danced at the Mercury lounge in downtown Honolulu.   

      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 29 year old with no formal education, it carried little prestige.  He sat from 9 AM to 5 PM in a windowless room watching a bank of monitors in the so-called “tunnel” at the NSA.  Many of those who worked 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 decidedly was not the “Wolfking Awesomefox” heroic image he had of himself in his dream vision.  

   Whatever his motive, he decided to apply for a position in the NSA itself.  He apparently believed that if he scored high enough in 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 US armed forces.  To achieve this SES job, Snowden used his privileges as a system administrator at Dell to hack into the NSA’s administrative files and steal the answers to the NSA exam. As the NSA’s subsequent post mortem would find out, it was the first known document that Snowden took at the NSA.  But it was not the first time he had used his hacking skills to attempt to advance himself.  At the CIA in 2009, as he late said in Moscow, he had added text to his annual 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 that, it will be recalled, ended Snowden’s CIA career. At the NSA his intrusion, however, was not detected for almost a year.   “He stole the [NSA] test with the answers, and he took the test and he aced it,” former NSA Director Michael McConnell recounted in a 2013 interview, “He then walked into to the NSA and said you should hire me because I am this good on the test.”   The issue of 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 in 2012, he was hostile to the surveillance activities of the NSA. If so, it made little sense he would seek a permanent career in the NSA. If this attempted career 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, he may have been seeking wider access in 2012 for a more nefarious purpose than a NSA job.     

In any case, despite the near-perfect high grades he scored, the NSA did not offer him a position in the senior executive service job.   While Snowden may have believed such results would elevate him, the NSA’s offer did not meet his expectations. “It was totally unrealistic for Snowden to expect to get a SES position,” a former senior NSA officer told me. Snowden ambitions may 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 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.




CHAPTER SEVEN
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, interviewed in Moscow 2014

       Soon after Snowden failed to get a SES job at the NSA, he intensified his rogue activities. At that time, Dell was tasked with building an enhanced backup system for the NSA in Hawaii.  Deputy Director Ledgett explained that part of Snowden’s job as a system administrator under contract to Dell was transferring files held at Fort Meade to back-up computers in Hawaii.  He “was moving copies of that data there for them, which was perfect cover for stealing the [NSA] data.”   Snowden took advantage of this cover. 

     Snowden expanded his own rogue operation, as Ledgett reconstructed the breach, through the fall and winter of 2012.  There was little risk of him getting caught.  The security measures at the Hawaii base presented no obstacles to him since, 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.  This time, however, instead of bringing it to the attention of the NSA, he used it to himself steal files. He could be confident that his 2012 thefts of documents would go undetected because the NSA’s base had not yet installed an auditing system.  Such real-time auditing of the movement of documents, 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 which did not monitor suspicious transfers of files on a real-time basis.  Snowden certainly was certainly aware of this deficiency.  He later pointed out in his interview in Wired magazine in Moscow 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 being able to trace the copied data back to him. And, according to the NSA’s subsequent damage assessment, he stole many thousands of pages while working for Dell in 2012 before he contacted journalists.  Deputy Director Ledgett subsequently reported that the NSA analysis the 58,000 documents that were given by Snowden to journalists in June 2013 showed that most of them were taken by Snowden while he was still working at Dell. 

This 2012 theft was made even more serious by the interconnection of NSA computers with those of other intelligence agencies.  It will be recalled that prior to the 9/11 attack in 2001, NSA data had been protected by “stove-piping” that separated NSA’ computers from networks used by other intelligence services.  After the 9/11 Commission concluded that part of the reason why US intelligence agencies were unable to “connect the dots” in advance of the attack was because this “stove-piping, the NSA stripped away a large part of its “stove-piping.” One result was that the NSANet, which Snowden had access to at Dell in 2012, became a shared network.  It had common access points.  General Hayden described them to me as 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 stem 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 for Snowden in the fall and winter of 2012. Many of the documents he took off the NSANet revealed not only operations of the NSA but also those of the CIA and Pentagon.  By taking them he had come to a Rubicon from which there would be no return.  He later explained in an email to Vanity Fair from Moscow, “I crossed that line.”

As far as is known, he was not sharing them 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 drives, despite the risks that possessing such a collection of secrets might entail, for some future use. 

But why would Snowden jeopardize his career and, if caught, his freedom, by undertaking this illicit enterprise?  He may have had by now strong ideological objections the NSA’s global surveillance. As he said later in Moscow,  “we’re subverting our security standards for the sake of surveillance.”  But ordinarily 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 of resigning, he sought to widen his access to NSA documents. This behavior suggests to me that he had another agenda.  One possible clue to it is the first document he took; the NSA exam. The secret in that document, the answers to the questions, were a form of power to him: power to burrow deeper into the executive structure of the NSA.  It would unlock the door to door to even the more powerful documents containing the NSA’s sources stored in Level 3 compartments.    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 New York 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 NSA’s agents and operation in adversary countries could, if revealed, closed down the NSA’s capabilities to gather information in them.     

Such a fascination with the power of government-held secrets 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 on all ends of the political spectrum who fear that government agencies will use covert machinations against them.  In Shils’ concept, this anti-government counter-culture is “tormented” by the government’s possession of knowledge unavailable to them.  Those who subscribe to this culture tend to believe that the agencies that hold these secrets, such as the FBI, CIA and NSA, can control their lives.  The other side of this torment over others holding secrets is the belief that by 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 both a SCI, or Sensitive Compartmental Information, clearance, a pass into a 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 US Army classified documents had been posted on Julian Assange’s Wikileaks website.  While these Wikileaks revelations of secrets were making front-page headlines, the NSA documents that Snowden had taken were far more explosive since they contained NSA intelligence secrets. And no NSA document had ever been published in the press in 2012.  One reason why NSA documents remained secrets, as all intelligence workers at Dell were told when they signed their oath, was that the unauthorized release of communications intelligence documents could violate US 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. And in answer to his rhetorical question, he no doubt knew that they would cause an immense reaction on the front page. Cyber punks, as these activists called themselves, tended to be hostile to the NSA since they believed (correctly) that it monitored their activities on the Internet.  This anti-NSA view was well represented at the Computer Chaos Club convention in Berlin. In addressing these cyber punks Assange and his followers at Wikileaks declared that the main enemy in cyber space was the NSA. 

In the late fall of 2012, Snowden further tested his newly found powers. Using an alias, he reached out to some of the leading hacktavists.  It opened a door for him to the darker side of cyber space.      

CHAPTER EIGHT

Hacktavist

. “When you gaze long into an abyss the abyss gazes into you”. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche  

By 2012, the alienated hacktavist battling to unlock the secrets of evil corporations and governments had become a stock hero of popular culture.  For example, in the prize-winning Girl with the Dragon Tattoo trilogy by Stieg Larsson, which sold 90 million copies, the heroine, a self-educated hacker in her twenties named Lisbeth Salander steals incriminating documents from computers that provides journalist Mikael Blomkvist with scoops that save the progressive magazine he edits from bankruptcy.  Her sociopathic behavior, which includes embezzling millions of dollars, extortion, maiming and murder, is accepted by the journalists at the magazine because her hacking exposes crimes and abuses of power.  In the realm of non-fiction universe, hacktavists also use their skills to attempt to redress perceived abuses of power, For example in December 2010, the group “Anonymous,”  whose members called “Anon” often wear Guy Fawkes masks resembling those worn in the 2006 movie V Is For Vendetta, launched a successful denial of service attack called “Operation Avenge Assange,” It was aimed at paralyzing companies, including PayPal and MasterCard that refused to process donations for Wikileaks because these “anons” believed that these companies were stifling the freedom of the Internet by hindering the money flow to Wikileaks. Since hacktavists often use illicit means to redress their grievances, such denial of 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 cyber space which has become known as the dark net.      Fortunately for hacktavists, the  dark net is accessible to anyone.

  It is a place frequented by those that 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 a US twenty-dollar bill, files to make a 3D-printed gun, and books describing how to receive illegal goods in the mail without getting caught. There were, too, links to rape and child abuse videos “

    To operate effectively on the dark net, a mask of anonymity is often necessary.  But it is not easy to completely hide enes tracks in cyber space.  The way that the Internet ordinarily works is that whenever an individual sends emails, instant messages, or visits a websites, his or her identity can be referenced by the IP address assigned to him or her by their internet service provider.    The problem is that if dark side users’ IP address is discoverable, they obviously cannot remain anonymous.  So, to evade this built-in transparency in the Internet, dark side users have come to rely on ingenious software to hide their IP address. The most commonly used software for this purpose is TOR.  It was first called The Onion Router, since it moves IP addresses through multiple layers, but it quickly became known simply by its acronym, TOR.   TOR software hides the IP address by routing messages through a network of TOR-enabled relay stations, called “nodes.” Each node further obscure the user’s IP, even from the next node in the network. This scrambling allows messages to exit the chain of TOR nodes without an easily discoverable IP.  By doing so, it “anomizes” each user of the dark side.

   Because of the anonymity it provides, TOR became the software of choice for individuals and organization who wanted to hide their identity.  For example, TOR software made possible Silk Road, which acted as an exchange for drug dealers, assassins, safe crackers, and prostitutes until it was closed down by the FBI in 2011.  It was created by Ross Ulbricht, a libertarian who wore a Ron Paul t-shirt, “to create a website where people could buy anything anonymously, with no trail whatsoever that led back to them.” (Ulbricht received a life prison sentence for running this criminal enterprise in May 2015.)  To eradicate the Internet trail, Silk Road employed TOR software.   

 TOR was also employed to steal and transfer classified secrets by Private Bradley Manning (now called Chelsea Manning.)  He used TOR software to transfer some 50,000 diplomatic cables and military reports from his laptop to Julian Assange’s Wikileaks website. Eventually Manning was identified by a fellow hacker, convicted by a military court for violations of the Espionage Act, and sentenced to 35 years in prison.  TOR enabled Wikileaks to publish other secret data, such as the theft of Sony’s files allegedly by the North Korean intelligence service in 2015.  It was the means for guaranteeing anonymity to the IT workers who responded to his by now famous clarion call “System admins of the world unite.”  It allowed system administrators who opposed the “surveillance state,” as well as other disgruntled employees of government agencies or corporation, to send documents they copied to the Wikileaks website without revealing their IP addresses.  Since Wikileaks did not know the identity of their sources, they could not be legally compelled to reveal them.   "Tor's importance to WikiLeaks cannot be overstated," Assange said in an interview with Rolling Stone in 2010.  Indeed without the anonymity provided by its TOR software, Wikileaks could not have easily entered into a document-sharing arrangement major newspapers, including the Guardian, New York Times, Der Spiegel, Le Monde and El Pais.  Through the magic of TOR, these newspapers simply attribute their sources to Wikileaks which, in turn, made Assange a major force in international journalism/.

    Ironically, TOR originally was a creation of US intelligence.  In the early 2000s, the US Naval Research Laboratory and the Defense Advance Research Project Agency (DARPA) developed it to allow US intelligence operatives to cloak their movements on the Internet. They could anonymously manipulate web sites operated by Islamic radicals, for example, and create their own Trojan Horse sites to lures would-be terrorists and spies.  As it turned out, that use of TOR software had a conceptual flaw.  If US intelligence services used it, the targets could figure out that anyone visiting a site without an IP address was using TOR software to hide it. If TOR was exclusive used by US intelligence services, the targets could further deduce that all the anonymous visitors were avatars for American intelligence.  It would be analogous to undercover police using pink-color cars that civilians did not use.

   To remedy this flaw, the US government in 2008 made TOR software open-source and freely available to everyone in the world.   It even provided funding for its promulgation with the State Department, the National Science Foundation, and the Broadcasting Board of Governors financing TOR’s core developer.  The public rationale for this generosity was that TOR could serve as a tool for, as the State Department called it, “democracy advocates in authoritarian states."  The result was TOR software became a tool of both intelligence services and their adversaries. 

    As TOR software became widely used by adversaries (as well as common criminals), the NSA sought to find vulnerabilities in it.  “It should hardly be surprising that our intelligence agencies seek ways to counteract targets’ that use TOR software to hide their communications, explained a NSA spokesperson.  The NSA’s adversaries also took an interest in identifying TOR users. 

TOR software also took on a cult-like importance to hacktavists concerned with the US government tracking their activities.  An illuminating insight into the mind-set of the TOR hacktavists is provided by Catherine A. Fitzpatrick in her 2013 book Privacy For Me Not For Thee.  She describes these hacktavists as largely “radical anarchists,” who believe “the state is all-powerful, that law-enforcement is so strong that it will prevail anyway, and that they are a persecuted minority.”   As a refuge against the surveillance of the state, and in particular the NSA, they not only hide attempt to their own identity nut use encryption to obscure their messages.  Their goal is free their movements from “of any interference from law-enforcement.”  In this mind-set, according to Fitzpatrick,  “They believe government intelligence agencies will stop at nothing to stop them from absolute encryption.”

TOR software was a means to defeat the NSA, but to be successfully there needed to be such a proliferation of TOR servers that the NSA could not piece together IP addresses. The problem was that in 2012 the TOR project, as they called it, was still a very tiny operation in 2012.  It employed less than 100 core developers who were located mainly in Germany, Iceland, Japan, Estonia, and the United States.  Its staff worked mainly out of a single room in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

The guiding spirit behind the TOR movement was Jacob Appelbaum, a charismatic 28-year old who had grown up in northern California.  Like Snowden, he had dropped out of high school.  Appelbaum identified himself to his followers on the Internet as a “hacktivist” battling state surveillance.  For him, as with many in the hacktavist culture, the main enemy was the NSA. After all, the NSA had a vast army of computer scientists working to unravel TOR software.   Appelbaum was also well connected in this culture.  He was the North American representative for Wikileaks before he moved to Berlin in 2013. He also managed Wikileaks’ cyber security when it released classified documents in Iceland in 2010.  He was so well-regarded among hacktavists that Assange chose him as his keynote speaker replacement at the “Hackers of the Planet Earth” (HOPE) convention in New York City.  Assange also sung his praises, telling Rolling Stone “Jake [Appelbaum] has been a tireless promoter behind the scenes of our cause.”   For its part, Rolling Stone entitled its profile of Appelbaum, “Meet the most dangerous man on the Internet.”   The reason that Assange needed a replacement for this particular event was that he feared he would be arrested if he came to New York because he had released the Manning files on Wikileaks.

   In Berlin, Appelbaum went to extreme lengths to protect himself from American surveillance.  For example, when George Packer interviewed him for the New Yorker, in 2014, he insisted on meeting with Packer naked in a sauna so he could be sure Packer did not have a recording device (other than his notebook.)  Appelbaum stated repeatedly in other interviews that he was being spied upon by America.  While his claims may have sounded paranoid to his interviewers, as a character in Joseph Heller’s Catch 22 famously said, “Just because you are paranoid doesn’t mean that you are not being followed.”   In any event, Appelbaum acted to defeat the perceived surveillance. 

Runa Sandvik was another principal core developers in the TOR project in 2012.  A Norwegian national in her mid-twenties, she wrote in 2012 a well-followed blog for Forbes on Internet privacy in which she identified herself as a privacy and security researcher working at the intersection of technology, law and policy.  As a close associate of Appelbaum’s, she worked tirelessly to extend TOR’s cloak of anonymity against the surveillance of the NSA and other would-be intruders of privacy.  Appelbaum and Sandvik shared another distinction. They both came in contact with Snowden before he went public and while he was still working for the NSA in Hawaii.

Snowden was in 2012 a major advocate of TOR software. He made no secret of his concerns about it electronic interceptions.  He even wore to work a jacket with a parody of the NSA insignia, which, instead of merely depicting the NSA eagle, show the eagle clutching AT&T phone lines.  He had also become a member of the Electronic Freedom Foundation, the digital rights organization that was helping finance TOR.  His efforts on behalf of TOR were not limited to symbolic gestures. Through his work as a system administrator for Dell, he had found documents revealing NSA efforts to defeat TOR’s ability to camouflage its user’s identity on the Internet. Though not yet successful, he found that the NSA was attempting to build back-door entry ways into TOR software.      He also knew that the NSA was becoming increasingly hostile to the spread of TOR software.  One of the NSA documents that he illicitly downloaded was entitled “TOR Stinks.” It described the NSA’s enormous but not fully successful efforts to penetrate TOR servers.  In addition, he downloaded NSA documents describing programs begun in 2012 that aimed at searching the Internet for the cyber-signatures of foreign parties suspected of hacking into US government systems.  So he knew that the NSA considered the TOR movement an enemy.

Nevertheless, Snowden worked to assist the TOR movement. He created TOR’s main exit node in Hawaii in 2012.  This activity required a two gigabyte server called “The Signal,” which he described as the largest TOR relay station in Honolulu.
Sandvik first heard directly from Snowden in November 2012.   At the time, he wrote her under the alias “Cincinnatus,” but also supplied his real name and address in Hawaii so that she could supply him with TOR stickers. So she knew his identity seven months before he went public.  He would later tell Sandvik from Moscow that he had been “moonlighting” on behalf of the TOR cause at the NSA.  By “moonlighting” he meant that in 2012 he had two jobs: Officially he was working as an NSA system administrator; unofficially he was working to advance the TOR Project.   He added, with some understatement, that his moonlighting was “something the NSA might not have been too happy about.”

  By November 2012, while still working for Dell at the NSA, his dual role led him to organize a “crypto party” aimed at finding new recruits for TOR.    The “crypto party” movement itself had been started in 2011 in Australia by Asher Wolf, a radical hacktavist and anarchist living in Melbourne.  She promoted them not unlike the tupper-ware parties of the 1950s.  They worked as follows. The party organizer, usually with a representative of the TOR project, advertised the party on the Internet.  Attendees were encouraged to bring their own laptops so they could install TOR as well encryption software in them. The attendees then would be instructed on how to use it. Finally, those converted to TOR software would be told to proselytize about its virtues by holding their own “crypto party.”  Wolf’s idea was to use these gatherings to expand the realm of TOR. 
   On November 18, 2012, Snowden launched his initial crypto party.  It was called the “Oahu Crypto party” and had its own web page. He told Asher Wolf that it would be the first Crypto party in Honolulu. She wrote him back, advising him to “keep it simple.”(Wolf later said she did not know he was working at the NSA.)

  Snowden apparently had no inhibitions in staging a party which the NSA might consider subversive of its battle against TOR.  He even invited his fellow NSA workers in Hawaii as well as others in the local computer culture.  He asked Sandvik, who was living in Washington DC at the time, to participate, proposing that she co-host it with him in Honolulu. He scheduled it for December 11, 2012.  He suggested that TOR stickers that could be used as “swag” to lure an audience.     According to her account, Snowden informed he that he “had been talking to some of the more technical guys at work into setting up some additional fast servers” for TOR.  His “work” place at the time was the NSA. If so, he had already attempted to find co-workers at the NSA who might be interested in attending an anti-NSA surveillance presentation.  

    Sandvik not only agreed a to be Snowden’s co-presenter but she made the Oahu Crypto party a TOR-sponsored event.  Sandvik flew to Honolulu on December 6, 2012. It was a fourteen hour flight and a relatively expensive one.  She later told Wired magazine that the invitation from Snowden coincided with her plan to take a “vacation in Hawaii.”  Whatever her reason, it brought her in direct contact with a TOR supporter with access to the computers of its main enemy, the NSA.  

On December 11, 2012, following Snowden’s instructions, Sandvik arrived shortly before 6 PM at the Fishcake furniture store in downtown Honolulu.  She proceed to the back of the store where there was a public space called the Box Jelly.  It was used mainly for counterculture events. Folding chairs and work tables had already been set up, Snowden was there waiting for her with Lindsay Mills, who he introduced to Sandvik as his girlfriend.  He told her that she was there to film the event.

     Mills did not mention this Crypto party in her blog. But that Snowden brought her and introduced her to Sandvik suggests that he did not keep secret from her his activities to further TOR.

The event started at six PM sharp. By Sandvik’s count, about twenty people gradually filled the room. Some of them were from the local “Hi-Cap” computer club and other attendees were from Snowden’s NSA base.  Snowden began the presentation by giving reasons why Internet users needed to defend their privacy by using both encryption and TOR software. According to one attendee who asked not to be identified by name, Snowden, while not revealing that he worked for the NSA, spoke with such precise knowledge about government surveillance capabilities that he suspected Snowden worked for the government.   Snowden next introduced Sandvik, who took the podium and discussed the work of the TOR project, stressing the importance of expanding the TOR network.  Following their presentations, Snowden and Sandvik took questions from the audience.  

  The Oahu crypto party, according to Sandvik, ended about 10 PM.   No one objected to Mills making a video of the meeting even though it was dedicated to the idea of protecting privacy.  The video was not posted on the Internet so presumably Snowden wanted it for his own purposes.  Afterwards, Sandvik went to a local diner called Zippy’s for a late dinner.   She left Hawaii two days later.

 Even though a number of the prominent hacktavists he invited were unable to attend, Snowden declared the Crypto party a huge success in his after-hours report. One of the people Snowden invited under the alias Cincinnatus was Parker Higgins, who was a prime mover in the previously-mentioned Electronic Freedom Foundation. He now lived in California where he had founded the San Francisco Crypto Party. (Higgins would make headlines in 2013 by flying a chartered blimp over the NSA’s secret facility in Utah and photographing it from the air).   Despite Snowden’s efforts, Higgins wrote him that he was unable to attend the December Crypto Party because of the high price of the airfare that month between San Francisco and Honolulu. (Higgins was hardly poor: his family home in Oahu had been rented to President Obama for two of his vacations in Hawaii.)  As a consolation, Higgins told Snowden that he would try to attend Snowden’s next Crypto Party, which was scheduled for February 23, 2013.  

Even while he used his position as a system administrator at Dell for the NSA to download secret documents, Snowden remained in touch with some of the leading figures in the TOR project under his various aliases. He also continued to invite activists to his crypto parties and he openly advertised the Oahu Crypto Parties on the Internet until 2013.  It certainly was not the “loose lips sink ships” mind set of the NSA’s Cold War days. It better reflected on what CIA Deputy Director Morell, who reviewed the situation in 2014 as a member of President Obama’s NSA Review Committee, described as the NSA’s new “culture of transparency.” Even though the NSA’s activities were largely walled off to the outside world, he found that the NSA in the post-Cold War age had encouraged its technical workers to freely discuss challenges that arose in its computer operations. ‘The idea was to spread knowledge and learn from the successes of others,” Morell wrote, “but it created an enormous security vulnerability, given the always-existent risk of an insider committed to stealing secrets.”   According to a former intelligence executive, this new “open c