The Snowden Files: The Inside Story of the World's Most Wanted Man

by Luke Harding

  1

  TheTrueHOOHA

  Ellicott City, near Baltimore

  December 2001

  ‘Nothing at last is sacred but the integrity of one’s own mind.’

  RALPH WALDO EMERSON,

  ‘Self-Reliance’, Essays: First Series

  In late December 2001, someone calling themselves ‘TheTrueHOOHA’ had a question. TheTrueHOOHA was an 18-year-old American male, an avid gamer, with impressive IT skills and a sharp intelligence. His real identity was unknown. But then everyone who posted on Ars Technica, a popular technology website, did so anonymously. Most contributors were young men. All were passionately attached to the internet.

  TheTrueHOOHA wanted tips on how to set up his own web server. It was a Saturday morning, a little after 11am local time. He posted: ‘It’s my first time. Be gentle. Here’s my dilemma: I want to be my own host. What do I need?’

  Soon Ars’s regular users were piling in with helpful suggestions. Hosting your own web server wasn’t a big deal, but did require a Pentium 200 computer, at least, plenty of memory and decent bandwidth. TheTrueHOOHA liked these answers. He replied: ‘Ah, the vast treasury of geek knowledge that is Ars.’ At 2am he was still online (albeit rather tired: ‘Yawn. Bedtime, gotta rise up early for more geek stuff tomorrow, ya know,’ he wrote).

  TheTrueHOOHA may have been an Ars novice. But his replies were fluent and self-assured. ‘If I sound like a belligerent, self-important, 18-year-old upstart with no respect for his elders, you are probably onto something,’ he typed. He took a dim view of his teachers, apparently, writing: ‘Community colleges don’t have the brightest professors, you know.’

  TheTrueHOOHA would become a prolific Ars contributor. Over the next eight years he authored nearly 800 comments. He chatted frequently on other forums, too, especially #arsificial. Who was he? He appeared to do a wide variety of jobs; he described himself variously as ‘unemployed’, a failed soldier, a ‘systems editor’, and someone who had US State Department security clearance.

  Was there a touch of Walter Mitty? His home was on the east coast of America in the state of Maryland, near Washington DC. But by his mid-twenties he was already an international man of mystery. He popped up in Europe – in Geneva, London, Ireland (a nice place, apparently, apart from the ‘socialism problem’), Italy and Bosnia. He travelled to India.

  TheTrueHOOHA kept mum about what exactly he did. But there were clues. Despite having no degree, he knew an astonishing amount about computers, and seemed to spend most of his life online. Something of an autodidact, then. His politics appeared staunchly Republican. He believed strongly in personal liberty, defending, for example, Australians who farmed cannabis plants.

  At times he could be rather obnoxious. He told one fellow-Arsian, for example, that he was a ‘cock’; others who disagreed with his sink-or-swim views on social security were ‘fucking retards’. Even by the free-for-all standards of chat rooms – much like a bar where anybody could pull up a stool – TheTrueHOOHA was an opinionated kind of guy.

  Other users never learned TheTrueHOOHA’s off-screen name. They did glimpse what he looked like, though. In April 2006, a couple of months shy of his 23rd birthday, TheTrueHOOHA posted photos of himself, taken at an amateur modelling shoot. They show a handsome young man, with pale skin and delicately bruised eyes, somewhat vampiric in appearance, staring moodily into the camera. In one shot, he wears a strange leather bracelet.

  ‘Cute,’ one user posted. ‘No love for the wristband eh?’ TheTrueHOOHA queried, when someone said he looked gay. He insisted he was heterosexual. And added casually: ‘My girlfriend is a photographer.’

  TheTrueHOOHA’s chat logs cover a colourful array of themes: gaming, girls, sex, Japan, the stock market, his disastrous stint in the US army, his impressions of multi-racial Britain, the joys of gun ownership. (‘I have a Walther P22. It’s my only gun but I love it to death,’ he wrote in 2006.) In their own way, the logs form a Bildungsroman, a novel of youthful experience, written by someone from the first generation that grew up with the internet.

  Then in 2009 the entries fizzle away. Something happens. The early exuberance disappears; the few last posts are dark and brooding. An edge of bitterness creeps in. In February 2010 he makes one of his final posts. TheTrueHOOHA mentions a thing that troubles him: pervasive government surveillance. He writes:

  Society really seems to have developed an unquestioning obedience towards spooky types.

  I wonder how well would envelopes that became transparent under magical federal candlelight have sold in 1750? 1800? 1850? 1900? 1950? Did we get to where we are today via a slippery slope that was entirely within our control to stop? Or was it a relatively instantaneous sea change that sneaked in undetected because of pervasive government secrecy?

  TheTrueHOOHA’s last post is on 21 May 2012. After that he disappears, a lost electronic signature amid the vastness of cyberspace. But a year later, as we now know, TheTrueHOOHA, aka Edward Snowden, travels to Hong Kong.

  Edward Joseph Snowden was born on 21 June 1983. Friends know him as ‘Ed’. His father Lonnie Snowden and mother Elizabeth – known as Wendy – were high-school sweethearts who married at 18. Lon was an officer in the US coast guard; Snowden spent his early years in Elizabeth City, along North Carolina’s coast, where the coast guard has its biggest air and naval base. He has an older sister, Jessica. Like other members of the US forces, Snowden Snr has strong patriotic views. He is a conservative. And a libertarian.

  But he is also a thoughtful conservative. Snowden’s father is articulate, well-read and quotes the works of the poet Ralph Waldo Emerson, who advocated a man adhering to his own principles against the dictates of a corrupt state. On joining the coast guard, Lon Snowden swore an oath to uphold the US constitution and the Bill of Rights. He meant it. For him the oath was not just a series of empty phrases: it underpinned the solemn American contract between a citizen and the state.

  When Snowden was small – a boy with thick blond hair and a toothy smile – he and his family moved to Maryland, within DC’s commuter belt. Snowden went to primary and middle schools in Crofton, Anne Arundel County, a town of pleasant villas between DC and Baltimore. Neither of Snowden’s former schools is visually alluring; both look like windowless brick bunkers. (The first, at least, has a garden with shrubs, butterflies and a stand-alone plane tree next to the car park.) In his mid-teens, Snowden moved on to nearby Arundel High, which he attended for one and a half years.

  As his father recalls, Snowden’s education went wrong when he fell ill, probably with glandular fever. He missed ‘four or five months’ of class. Another factor hurt his studies: his parents were drifting apart. Their troubled marriage was on its last legs, and he failed to finish high school. In 1999, aged 16, Snowden enrolled at Anne Arundel Community College. The college’s sprawling campus boasts baseball and football stadiums and the sporting motto: ‘You can’t hide that wildcat pride.’

  Snowden took computer courses, and later earned his GED, a high-school diploma equivalent. But his failure to complete high school would be a source of lingering embarrassment and defensiveness. In February 2001, Snowden’s mother filed for divorce. It came through three months later.

  In the aftermath of this messy break-up, Snowden lived with a room-mate, and then with his mother, in Ellicott City, just west of Baltimore. His mother’s home is situated in a self-contained housing development named Woodland Village, with its own swimming pool and tennis court. Her grey two-storey town house is next to a grassy slope. There is a children’s playground; geraniums and hostas grow in the yards; middle-aged ladies can be seen walking large, glossy dogs. It is a friendly place. Neighbours recall seeing Snowden through the open curtains, usually at work on his computer.

  The town in which they lived was named after Andrew Ellicott, a Quaker who emigrated from England in 1730. In the late 18th century, Ellicott City was a prosperous place, with flour mills on the east bank of the river, and sturdy houses of dark local
granite. Baltimore, with its port, was nearby. By the 21st century, the mills were long gone, or turned into heritage sites. In some cases they had been literally washed away. The main local employer in Maryland now was the federal government. Washington DC was a short commute away.

  Snowden grew up under the giant shadow of one government agency in particular. From his mother’s front door it takes 15 minutes to drive there. Half way between Washington and Baltimore, the agency is strictly off limits. It clearly has a secret function. Half-hidden by trees is a giant green cube-shaped building. Curious antennae dot the roof. There is an enormous car park, a vast power station and a white, golf ball-like radome. Inside are satellite dishes. There are electrified fences and an atmosphere of heavy-duty security. An entrance sign off the Baltimore–Washington Parkway reads: ‘NSA next right. Employees only.’

  This discreet metropolis is the headquarters of the National Security Agency (NSA), the US’s foreign signals spying organisation since 1952. As a teenager, Snowden knew all about the NSA. His college was practically next door. Many of his mother’s neighbours worked there. They set off by car every morning, through rolling green Maryland countryside, returning from the 1,000-acre complex at Fort Meade every evening. The Puzzle Palace, or SIGINT city, as it is known, employs 40,000 people. It is the largest hirer of mathematicians in the United States.

  For Snowden, however, the likelihood of joining this crepuscular government world was remote. In his early twenties, his focus was on computers more generally. To him, the internet was ‘the most important invention in all human history’. He chatted online to people ‘with all sorts of views that I would never have encountered on my own’. He spent days surfing the net and playing Tekken, a Japanese role-play game. He wasn’t only a nerd: he kept fit, practised kung fu and, according to one entry on Ars, ‘dated Asian girls’.

  But he recognised that this didn’t really add up to much of a career. In 2003, he posts: ‘I’m an MCSE [Microsoft Certified Solutions Expert] without degree or clearance who lives in Maryland. Read that as unemployed.’

  Snowden’s father, meanwhile, had moved to Pennsylvania. He was about to re-marry.

  The 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq prompted Snowden to think seriously about a career in the military. Like his father – who ended up spending three decades in the US coast guard – Snowden says he had the urge to serve his country. ‘I wanted to fight in the Iraq war because I felt like I had an obligation as a human being to help free people from oppression.’ His motives seem idealistic, and in line with President George W Bush’s then-stated goals for the overthrow of Saddam Hussein.

  Snowden thought about joining the US special forces. The military offered what seemed, on the face of it, an attractive scheme, whereby recruits with no prior experience could try out to become elite soldiers. In May 2004 he took the plunge and enlisted. He reported to Fort Benning in Georgia, a large US military camp. The scheme meant eight to 10 weeks’ basic training, then an advanced infantry course. Finally there was an assessment of suitability for special forces.

  His spell in the US military was a disaster. Snowden was in good physical shape but an improbable soldier. He was short-sighted, with -6.50/-6.25 vision. (‘My visual acuity ends at about four inches from my eyes, and my optometrist always has a good laugh at me,’ he posted.) He also had unusually narrow feet. ‘It took 45 minutes for the civilians in Ft. Benning to find combat boots that would fit me,’ he tells Ars – an episode that ended in an unpleasant reprimand from his drill sergeant.

  Few of his new army colleagues, he maintained, shared his sense of noble purpose, or his desire to help oppressed citizens throw off their chains. Instead, his superiors merely wanted to shoot people. Preferably Muslims. ‘Most of the people training us seemed pumped up about killing Arabs, not helping anyone,’ he says.

  Then during infantry training he broke both his legs. After more than a month’s uncertainty, the army finally discharged him.

  Back in Maryland, he got a job as a ‘security specialist’ at the University for Maryland’s Center for Advanced Study of Language. It was 2005. (He appears to have begun as a security guard, but then moved back into IT.) Snowden was working at a covert NSA facility on the university’s campus. Thanks perhaps to his brief military history, he had broken into the world of US intelligence, albeit on a low rung. The Center worked closely with the US intelligence community – or IC as it styled itself – providing advanced language training.

  Snowden may have lacked a degree, but in mid-2006 he landed a job in information technology at the CIA. He was rapidly learning that his exceptional IT skills opened all kinds of interesting government doors. ‘First off, the degree thing is crap, at least domestically. If you “really” have 10 years of solid, provable IT experience … you CAN get a very well-paying IT job,’ he writes in July 2006. ‘I have no degree, nor even a high school diploma, but I’m making much more than what they’re paying you even though I’m only claiming six years of experience. It’s tough to “break in”, but once you land a “real” position, you’re made.’

  Snowden had figured out that US government service offered exciting possibilities including foreign travel and generous perks. You didn’t need to be James Bond – merely apply for a ‘standard IT specialist position’. He describes the State Department as ‘the place to be right now’.

  One of the perks was access to classified information: ‘Yeah, working in IT for the State Department guarantees you’ll have to have Top Secret clearance.’ He also offers tips on career strategy. State was ‘understaffed right now’. He goes on: ‘Europe posts are competitive, but you can get in the door much easier if you express an interest in going to near-east hellholes. Once you’re in, tough out the crappy tour and you should be able to pick from a list of preferred posts.’ Later he remarks, ‘Thank god for wars.’

  Snowden’s job-hopping worked for him personally. In 2007 the CIA sent him to Geneva in Switzerland on his first foreign tour. He was 24. His new job was to maintain security for the CIA’s computer network and look after computer security for US diplomats based at the Geneva mission (the diplomats may have been high-powered but many had only a basic understanding of the internet). He was a telecommunications information systems officer. He also had to maintain the heating and air-conditioning.

  Switzerland was an awakening and an adventure. It was the first time Snowden had lived abroad. Geneva was a hub for all sorts of spies – American, Russian and others. It hid commercial and diplomatic secrets. The city was home to a large community of bankers, as well as several UN secretariats and the HQs of multinational companies; about a third of its residents were foreigners. It was genteel, sedate and organised. Most of its residents were wealthy but a migrant underclass lived here too. (Snowden expressed amazement at how down-at-heel Nigerians swiftly mastered Switzerland’s numerous languages.)

  The US mission where Snowden had diplomatic cover was in the centre of town – a 1970s glass and concrete block, accessed via a wrought-iron gate and protected by a hedge and wall. The Russian mission was close by. Snowden lived in a comfortable four-bedroom US government flat directly overlooking the River Rhône, at 16 Quai du Seujet, in the Saint-Jean Falaises part of town. In terms of lifestyle, the posting was hard to beat. A few blocks east was Lake Geneva, where the US ambassador had his residence. Not far away were the Alps and the challenges of climbing, skiing and hiking.

  The Ars Technica logs paint a portrait of a young man who, initially at least, still viewed the world through a provincial US prism. To begin with, Snowden had mixed feelings about the Swiss. In one chat he complains of high prices (‘you guys wouldn’t believe how expensive shit is here’), the lack of tap water in restaurants, and the exorbitant cost of hamburgers – $15.

  There were other moments of culture shock, over the metric system and Swiss affluence (‘Jesus Christ are the Swiss rich. The fucking McDonald’s workers make more money than I do,’ he exclaims). But in general he warms to his new pi
cturesque surroundings. In one exchange he writes:

 

  the roads are 35 inches wide

 

  with 9000 cars on them, two tram tracks, and a bus lane

 

  and a bike lane

 

  i imagine mirrors get clipped off all the time

 

  I’m afraid I’d bump into someone and have to pay for it.

 

  do they have a large immigrant population doing the lower-class work?

 

  Yeah. Lots of unidentifiable southeast asian people and eastern europeans who don’t speak french or english

 

  but don’t get me wrong – this place is amazing

 

  it’s like living in a postcard

 

  it’s just nightmarishly expensive and horrifically classist

 

  TheTrueHOOHA: where are you? .ch?

 

  Yeah. Geneva, Switzerland

 

  wicked!

 

  Yeah … it’s pretty cool so far

  In Geneva Snowden was exposed to an eclectic range of views, including radical ones. Mel Kaldalu, an Estonian rock star also known as Roy Strider, met Snowden at an event in the city supporting Tibetan culture. The Free Tibet movement organised demos in the city ahead of the 2008 Beijing summer Olympics. (The International Olympic Committee has its HQ in nearby Lausanne.)

  Snowden attended several pro-Tibet events – ironic given subsequent accusations that he was a Chinese spy. He took part in Chinese New Year celebrations with his martial arts club. ‘He once gave me a one-on-one martial arts lesson, and I was surprised at his abilities – and very amused that he seemed unable to go very easy on a newbie,’ Mavanee Anderson, another friend in Geneva, wrote in Tennessee’s Chattanooga Times Free Press.