The Edward Snowden Affair (5 page)

During this time Snowden was subjected to a five-year “periodic [background] reinvestigation.”
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Required of any government employee with top secret clearance, the inquiry was conducted by the firm which holds over 100 federal contracts and oversees background checks for more than 95 government agencies: U.S. Investigations Services (USIS).
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The same year, the company would become involved in an extended criminal investigation for its “systemic failure to adequately conduct investigations under its contract.”
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USIS gave Snowden a green light in 2011 despite an inconclusive internal investigation involving claims of attempting to access and possibly steal classified materials. USIS also failed to examine a facet of his résumé another government contractor would look at very closely.

If Snowden’s thoughts of whistleblowing had not already gone from being a germ of an idea alongside a juvenile attempt to peek behind the surveillance curtain when he was in Geneva to resolute intentions gradually being put into action, they were certainly starting to congeal. He was again growing disenchanted with the government’s actions. One of the reasons he hadn’t already gone public was starting to dissipate. Snowden said it was at this time he “watched as Obama advanced the very policies that I thought would be reined in.” As a consequence, Snowden said he “got hardened.”
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He would reiterate this during an online chat on June 17, 2013: “Obama’s campaign promises and election gave me faith that he would lead us toward fixing the problems he outlined in his quest for votes. Many Americans felt similarly. Unfortunately, shortly after assuming power, he closed the door on investigating systemic violations of law, deepened and expanded several abusive programs, and refused to spend the political capital to end the kind of human rights violations like we see in Guantanamo, where men still sit without charge.”
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Snowden was back in the States no later than March 2012 because, obviously having given up hope Obama would reform intelligence legislation, he made a donation to Ron Paul’s 2012 presidential bid from a residence in Columbia, Maryland.
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(On July 12 during a Moscow meeting with Russian officials, attorneys and human rights groups, he could label himself a Libertarian.)
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He traveled throughout the U.S. for Dell before taking time off to spend with his family, although he remained on the computer company’s payroll. He had already begun executing his plan. Though Snowden’s going all but silent on his beloved Ars boards in February 2010 could have been due to increased responsibility at Dell, it was likely he had done so as one of the preliminary steps in his intention to blow the whistle: He was reducing his digital footprint. During his last month at Dell he extracted data from its systems which related to eavesdropping programs of the NSA and Britain’s Government Communications Headquarters. Snowden had made a novice mistake, but he didn’t get caught. Dell would later confirm Snowden had left an electronic footprint.
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(Shortly after the press debuted the story of Snowden receiving a written CIA reprimand, he quickly issued a statement refuting the assertion he’d tried to steal CIA files. However, Dell’s report remained uncontested months after it was made. Therefore, his testimony that the “derogatory” note was the result of administrative backlash after Snowden had proved his supervisor wrong about a security flaw is suspect, especially since the event took place the month of the Valentine’s Day query on Ars.)
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One of the most vital stages came next. He applied to work for another government intelligence contractor.

Booz Allen Hamilton (BAH) is a technology consulting firm which holds government contracts alongside Dell in Hawaii.
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Snowden wanted to switch employers for one simple reason and that was where BAH would have him working: Kunia Regional SIGINT Operations, which is part of the NSA’s Threat Operations Center. The outpost’s focus is China’s classified programs. This segment of the NSA is an infiltration target for Chinese spies, both private and for the Chinese equivalent of the NSA, the Ministry of State Security of the People’s Republic of China, or MSS, as well as for the Second Department of the People’s Liberation Army, known as 2PLA. Snowden wanted information about American surveillance of China because he already had incriminating evidence about the American government’s activities domestically as well as in Europe. He was aware of what Kunia did due to his proximity on the island when he was with Dell and had suspicions of what Kunia might contain. He was not disappointed.

The location was pivotal but the job he’d applied for was vital. As an infrastructure analyst Snowden would be given the ability to accomplish what he wanted. By BAH’s own definition, an infrastructure analyst provides the ability for “organizations to process, interpret, and use massive data stores in weeks or months.”
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His job would be to move and reorganize files but he was hired as a professional hacker who could locate and exploit vulnerabilities in signal communication systems (“SIGINT” in Kunia’s title is the military acronym for “signals intelligence”). Kunia hacks Chinese telephone and Internet networks. With its over one billion users primarily divided between three carriers, China is the world’s largest mobile network carrier. Furthermore, the NSA provided Snowden with an unguarded, open door. He was part of the team expected to monitor whether other countries were attempting to do the same to America. In cyberintelligence terms, this is referred to as moving from offense, cyberwarfare, to defense, cybersecurity or counterintelligence. It is standard operating procedure to have analysts try their hand at both roles in order to determine their greatest strengths, propensities and preferences. It was a perfect situation. If Snowden triggered an alarm after extracting or moving data while working defense, he could easily account for it using the alibi that he was merely testing a system’s integrity.
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Snowden didn’t ease into a position at BAH. The firm expressed reservations about his résumé. It did not know about his CIA reprimand. The contractor’s concern was his claim he had been a student at John Hopkins.
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After explaining the institution’s name change, though no university representative could confirm his enrollment, Snowden was given the job.

Snowden wouldn’t start for BAH until late March or early April 2013, but he moved into a blue, 1,559-square-foot rental house which sat on the corner of the street in Waipahu, Hawaii, in May 2012.
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This is where he made a second donation to the Libertarian presidential candidate.
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Mills joined him the next month.
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Little attention has been paid to Snowden’s second “dark year” and how he occupied his time during this furlough. American Director of National Security Lieutenant General Keith Alexander stated Snowden had held a position at the NSA a year before assuming his position at BAH. It is not clear whether the general is referring to the analyst’s tenure at Dell, which was much longer, or if there was yet another job the whistleblower once had in the Department of Defense.
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He knew he’d gotten the job with BAH by December, because this is when he first attempted to make anonymous contact with
The Guardian’s
Glenn Greenwald. Not receiving a response, a month later he tried Oscar-nominated documentarian Laura Poitras. Though non-committal at the time, she redirected him to Pulitzer-winning journalist Bart Gellman of the
The Washington Post
. Snowden emailed him the following month to mixed results. Time was of the essence, because though it would be several months before he would flee the country and almost three weeks hence when newspapers would release their famed first exposés, Snowden had yet to complete his last data reconnaissance mission.

He stayed with his family in Maryland while undergoing two weeks of training for BAH at Fort Meade.
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He told his father he had changed jobs due to budget cuts.
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After saying goodbye, he left for Kunia on April 4.
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He would confirm during a one-hour interview in June with the
South China Morning Post
that the documentation he was providing the newspaper had been gathered two months before.
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Many published disclosures would bear the end date of April 2013.

There was much speculation as to how the stolen data was physically transported out of Kunia. Two parties quickly formed: those who believed he had nonchalantly walked out of the building with the four laptops he was seen with when he arrived in Hong Kong,
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and people who argued Snowden used the less conspicuous removable flash/junk/thumb drive. The second faction stated the obviousness of removing entire computers from the intelligence compound was impossible given security protocols. This observation was met by the counterargument that a security system’s greatest weakness is the people who run it because they can be socially engineered. Social engineering is psychology in motion. It is the direct and indirect emotional, intellectual and political manipulation of people. In most any other scenario, the argument might be a convincing one. A person bold enough to be freely seen removing laptops from a secure area is assumed to be doing so with express, permitted purpose and freedom. However, an NSA campus is not any secure facility. It is the NSA. Those who argued Snowden had used thumb drives to extract the data had to defend against the NSA policy forbidding any portable recording device on the premises.
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However, Snowden’s job title permitted him to be one of the select few exceptions. It was his job to transport data. Yet even as an infrastructure analyst working defense, Snowden could only set off so many alarms for unauthorized downloads before serious questions were asked. Months later, the NSA would still be unable to provide an accurate assessment of the quantity and quality of the materials stolen, no less the method(s) used. It would even be some time before it was clear his pilfering wasn’t limited to Kunia.

By May 1, the house he and Mills were renting was empty. This was not because Snowden was about to flee the country; the property owner wanted to put it on the market.
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The couple moved a few blocks away into a home which housed a two-story living room. They had received the keys for their new residence two weeks prior.
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Mills had no clue what was about to take place. Less than a month into his role as infrastructure analyst, Snowden requested a two-week reprieve in order to seek medical treatment for his epilepsy which, he stated, had manifested the year before. He was granted the time off.
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Early on Monday, May 20, in a very risky move since all NSA personnel are required to file for international travel at least 30 days in advance, Snowden boarded a plane for Hong Kong.
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He told Mills, who had just returned from visiting her family in Laurel, Maryland, he would return shortly. By noon he had checked into the 429-room Mira Hotel located in Tsim Sha Tsui. It cost him $330 per night.
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He had, in his terms, a “basic understanding” of Mandarin from at least seven years prior.
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Unfortunately the predominant language in Hong Kong is Cantonese.

Greenwald and Poitras arrived in Hong Kong on June 1. They had no idea what Snowden looked like. He told them to go to the third floor of the Mira and look for a man holding a Rubik’s Cube. To ensure Murphy’s Law was not in effect should another person be in coincidental possession of the puzzle toy, they were to ask him when the restaurant would open and he would advise against the establishment.
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The government had already been informed it had a leak.

On Wednesday, June 5,
The Guardian
debuted “NSA collecting phone records of millions of Verizon customers daily.”

On Thursday, June 6,
The Washington Post
presented “U.S. intelligence mining data from nine U.S. Internet companies in broad secret program” twenty minutes before the
The Guardian
published “NSA Prism program taps in to user data of Apple, Google and others.” The newspapers’ source is anonymous. All three editorials included top secret, classified government documents.

On Saturday, June 9,
The Guardian
released the first part of a video interview of the man purportedly responsible for the previously announced NSA leaks. The world got to see its first glimpse of Edward Snowden.

T
HE WORLD MIGHT NOT HAVE EVER HEARD
of Edward Snowden if it hadn’t been for Thomas Drake.
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