Snowden Files: a disillusioned technician

Part 2 of 5 extracts from Luke Harding's book on NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden 

In January of that year [2009], the New York Times published a report on a secret Israeli plan to attack Iran. The Times said its story was based on 15 months’ worth of interviews with current and former US officials, European and Israeli officials, other experts and international nuclear inspectors.

TheTrueHOOHA’s response, published by Ars Technica, is revealing. In a long conversation with another user, he wrote the following messages:

“WTF NYTIMES. Are they TRYING to start a war?”

“They’re reporting classified s***”

“moreover, who the f*** are the anonymous sources telling them this? those people should be shot in the b***”

“that s*** is classified for a reason”

“it’s not because ‘oh we hope our citizens don’t find out’ its because ‘this s*** won’t work if iran knows what we’re doing’”

Snowden’s anti-leaking invective seems stunningly at odds with his own later behaviour, but he would trace the beginning of his own disillusionment with government spying to this time. “Much of what I saw in Geneva really disillusioned me about how my government functions and what its impact is in the world. I realised that I was part of something that was doing far more harm than good,” he later said.

In February 2009, Snowden resigned from the CIA. Now he was to work as a contractor at an NSA facility on a US military base in Japan.

The opportunities for contractors had boomed as the burgeoning US security state outsourced intelligence tasks to private companies. Snowden was on the payroll of Dell, the computer firm. The early lacunae in his CV were by this stage pretty much irrelevant. He had top-secret clearance and outstanding computer skills. He had felt passionately about Japan from his early teens and had spent a year and a half studying Japanese. He sometimes used the Japanese pronunciation of his name – “E-do-waa-do” – and wrote in 2001: “I’ve always dreamed of being able to ‘make it’ in Japan. I’d love a cushy .gov job over there.”

Japan marked a turning point, the period when Snowden became more than a disillusioned technician: “I watched as Obama advanced the very policies that I thought would be reined in.” Between 2009 and 2012, he says he found out just how all-consuming the NSA’s surveillance activities are: “They are intent on making every conversation and every form of behaviour in the world known to them.” He also realised that the mechanisms built into the US system and designed to keep the NSA in check had failed. “You can’t wait around for someone else to act. I had been looking for leaders, but I realised that leadership is about being the first to act.” He left Japan for Hawaii in 2012, a whistleblower-in-waiting.

Snowden’s new job was at the NSA’s regional cryptological centre (the Central Security Service) on the main island of Oahu, near Honolulu. He was still a Dell contractor, working at one of the 13 NSA hubs devoted to spying on foreign interests, particularly the Chinese. He arrived with an audacious plan to make contact anonymously with journalists interested in civil liberties and to leak them stolen top-secret documents. His aim was not to spill state secrets wholesale. Rather, he wanted to turn over a selection of material to reporters and let them exercise their own editorial judgement. According to an NSA staffer who worked with him in Hawaii and who later talked to Forbes magazine, Snowden was a principled and ultra-competent if somewhat eccentric colleague. He wore a hoodie featuring a parody NSA logo. Instead of a key in an eagle’s claws, it had a pair of eavesdropping headphones, covering the bird’s ears. He kept a copy of the constitution on his desk and wandered the halls carrying a Rubik’s cube. He left small gifts on colleagues’ desks. He almost lost his job sticking up for one co-worker who was being disciplined.

In Hawaii, by early 2013, Snowden’s sense of outrage was still growing. But his plan to leak appeared to have stalled. He faced too many obstacles. He took a new job with the private contractor Booz Allen Hamilton, yielding him access to a fresh trove of information. According to the NSA staffer who spoke to Forbes, Snowden turned down an offer to join the agency’s tailored access operations, a group of elite hackers.

Remote reach

On March 30, in the evening, Snowden flew to the US mainland to attend training sessions at Booz Allen Hamilton’s office near Fort Meade. His new salary was $122,000 (£74,000, Dh447,740) a year, plus a housing allowance. On April 4, he had dinner with his father. Lon Snowden says he found his son preoccupied and nursing a burden. “We hugged as we always do. He said: ‘I love you, Dad.’ I said: ‘I love you, Ed.’”

“My position with Booz Allen Hamilton granted me access to lists of machines all over the world [that] the NSA hacked,” Snowden told the South China Morning Post, adding that this was exactly why he’d accepted it. He was one of around 1,000 NSA “sysadmins” allowed to look at many parts of this system. (Other users with top-secret clearance weren’t allowed to see all classified files.) He could open a file without leaving an electronic trace. He was, in the words of one intelligence source, a “ghost user”, able to haunt the agency’s hallowed places. He may also have used his administrator status to persuade others to entrust their login details to him.

Although we don’t know exactly how he harvested the material, it appears Snowden downloaded NSA documents on to thumbnail drives. Thumb drives are forbidden to most staff, but a sysadmin could argue that he or she was repairing a corrupted user profile and needed a backup. Sitting back in Hawaii, Snowden could remotely reach into the NSA’s servers. Most staff had already gone home for the night when he logged on, six time zones away. After four weeks in his new job, Snowden told his bosses at Booz that he was unwell. He wanted some time off and requested unpaid leave. When they checked back with him, he told them he had epilepsy (a condition that affects his mother).

And then, on May 20, he vanished.

In December 2012, a reader pinged an email to Guardian columnist Glenn Greenwald, one of the more prominent US political commentators of his generation, based in Brazil. The email didn’t stand out; he gets dozens of similar ones every day. The sender didn’t identify himself. He (or it could have been a she) wrote: “I have some stuff you might be interested in.”

“He was very vague,” Greenwald recalls.

This mystery correspondent asked Greenwald to install PGP encryption software on his laptop. Once up and running, it guarantees privacy (the initials stand for Pretty Good Privacy) for an online chat. Greenwald had no objections. But there were two problems. “I’m basically technically illiterate,” he admits. Greenwald also had a lingering sense that the kind of person who insisted on encryption might turn out to be slightly crazy.

A month after first trying Greenwald and failing to get a response, Snowden tried a different route. At the end of January 2013, he sent an email to Greenwald’s friend and collaborator Laura Poitras, a documentary film-maker. She was another leading critic of the US security state — and one of its more prominent victims. For six years, between 2006 and 2012, agents from the Department of Homeland Security detained Poitras each time she entered the US. They would interrogate her, confiscate laptops and mobile phones, and demand to know whom she had met. They would seize her camera and notebooks. Nothing incriminating was ever discovered. Poitras became an expert in encryption. She decided to edit her next film, her third in a trilogy about US security, from outside America, and moved temporarily to Berlin.

Snowden’s email to Poitras read: “I am a senior member of the intelligence community. This won’t be a waste of your time.” (The claim was something of an exaggeration: he was a relatively junior infrastructure analyst.) Snowden asked for her encryption key. She gave it. “I felt pretty intrigued pretty quickly,” Poitras says. “At that point, my thought was either it’s legit or it’s entrapment.”

The tone of the emails was serious, though there were moments of humour. At one point Snowden advised Poitras to put her mobile in the freezer. “He’s an amazing writer. His emails were good. Everything I got read like a thriller,” she recalls.

Then Snowden delivered a bombshell…

— Guardian News and Media Ltd

Part 3 of 5 to be published tomorrow