by Luke Harding
On one occasion, Snowden gave his singer friend Kaldalu a lift to Munich. The two chatted for hours on the empty German autobahn – about China, Israel–Palestine and the US’s role in international affairs. Snowden argued the US should act as a world policeman. Kaldalu disagreed. He says: ‘Ed’s definitely an intelligent guy. Maybe even a little bit stubborn. He’s outspoken. He likes to discuss things. Self-sustainable. He has his own opinions.’
The Estonian rock star and the CIA technician talked about the difficulty pro-Tibet activists had in getting Chinese visas. Snowden was sceptical about the Beijing Olympics. Kaldalu said the Israeli occupation of Palestine was morally questionable. Snowden said he understood this, but viewed US support for Israel as the ‘least worst’ option. Kaldalu suggested a ‘deconstructive’ approach. The pair also discussed the New World Order: how rapid digital changes and the advent of Facebook and social media might affect democracy and the way people governed themselves.
Snowden’s had been a comparatively insular upbringing on the US east coast. But now he was living in Europe, and having exciting conversations with intellectual left-wing guitarists (‘The funniest part is he’s a SUPER NERD,’ Snowden wrote of Kaldalu). This was, of course, thanks to the US government. His CIA job brought other privileges, too. When he got parking tickets he didn’t pay them, and cited diplomatic immunity. He also enjoyed further opportunities to see more of Europe. According to Ars Technica, Snowden travelled to Sarajevo, where he listened to the Muslim call to prayer from his hotel room. He visited Bosnia, Romania and Spain – giving opinions on their food and women.
Without mentioning the CIA, Snowden did tell Kaldalu something of his work. ‘I understood he was an IT support guy in the US embassy. He said he had a travelling job, and that a lot of embassies have to communicate and have safe platforms … He was a little bit sarcastic about the level of IT among diplomats. He said he had to install chat Messenger for people, and said he could do much more than that. It was obvious he had a lot of IT experience.’
Sometimes Snowden wondered whether Switzerland was a ‘bit racist’. At the same time he was impressed by Swiss attitudes towards individual liberty, and the fact that prostitution was legal. Snowden also emerged as a speed freak. He owned a new dark-blue BMW, and on the drive to Munich hit 180 km an hour. He admitted he had had an electronic speed limiter removed so he could go faster, and expressed a desire to drive on a professional race track. He also raced motorbikes in Italy.
Snowden may have hung out with alternative types but he believed fervently in capitalism and free markets. His faith was practical as well as doctrinal. For much of his Swiss period he was playing the stock market, unapologetically shorting stocks and watching with a fascinated horror as the 2008 global crash unfolded, sucking the US and Europe into a vortex. Sometimes he made money; quite often he lost it.
He chats online about his exploits. He defends the gold standard. He is dismissive of high unemployment – seeing it, according to Ars, as ‘necessary’ and a ‘correction to capitalism’. When one user asks how ‘do you deal with 12 per cent unemployment?’, Snowden hits back: ‘Almost everyone was self-employed prior to 1900. Why is 12 per cent unemployment so terrifying?’
The figure who most closely embodied Snowden’s maverick right-wing views was libertarian Ron Paul, who enjoyed an enthusiastic grassroots following, especially among the young. Paul spent 30 years in Congress, on and off, defying both the Republican establishment and the political consensus. He was a bitter opponent of socialism, Keynesian economics and the Federal Reserve. He was against US intervention abroad. He loathed government surveillance.
Snowden supported Paul’s 2008 bid for the US presidency. He was also impressed with the Republican candidate John McCain, describing him as an ‘excellent leader’ and ‘a guy with real values’. He wasn’t an Obama supporter as such. But he didn’t object to him either. During the election, Snowden said he might back Obama if he could somehow team up with McCain – an unlikely prospect. TheTrueHOOHA posts on Ars: ‘We need an idealist first and foremost. Hillary Clinton, I think, would be a pox on the country.’
Once Obama won and became president, Snowden came to dislike him intensely. He criticised the White House’s attempts to ban assault weapons. The lodestar in Snowden’s thinking, at this time and later, was the US constitution; in this case the second amendment and the right to bear arms. Snowden was unimpressed by affirmative action. He was also against social security, believing that individuals shouldn’t go running to the state for help, even in times of trouble.
A couple of users called him out on this, one posting: ‘Yeah! Fuck old people!’
TheTrueHOOHA responded with fury. He wrote: ‘You fucking retards … my grandmother is eighty fucking three this year and, you know what, she still supports herself as a goddamned hairdresser … maybe when you grow up and actually pay taxes, you’ll understand.’
Another topic made him even angrier. The Snowden of 2009 inveighed against government officials who leaked classified information to newspapers – the worst crime conceivable, in Snowden’s apoplectic view. In January of that year the New York Times published a report on a secret Israeli plan to attack Iran. It said that President Bush had ‘deflected’ a request from Israel for specialised bunker-busting bombs to carry out the risky mission. Instead Bush had told the Israelis he had authorised ‘new covert action’ to sabotage Iran’s suspected nuclear-weapons programme.
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 worth quoting in full:
HOLY SHIT http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/11/washington/11iran.html?_r=1&hp
WTF NYTIMES
Are they TRYING to start a war? Jesus christ they’re like wikileaks
they’re just reporting, dude.
They’re reporting classified shit
Shrugs
about an unpopular country surrounded by enemies already engaged in a war and about our interactions with said country regarding planning sovereignty violations of another country
you don’t put that shit in the NEWSPAPER
Meh
moreover, who the fuck are the anonymous sources telling them this?
those people should be shot in the balls.
‘But the tense exchanges also prompted the White House to step up intelligence-sharing with Israel and brief Israeli officials on new American efforts to subtly sabotage Iran’s nuclear infrastructure, a major covert program that Mr. Bush is about to hand off to President-elect Barack Obama.’
HELLO? HOW COVERT IS IT NOW? THANK YOU
Meh
I wonder how many hundreds of millions of dollars they just completely blew.
You’re over-reacting. It’s fine.
It’s not an overreaction. They have a HISTORY of this shit
with flowers and cake.
these are the same people who blew the whole ‘we could listen to osama’s cell phone’ thing the same people who screwed us on wiretapping over and over and over again. Thank God they’re going out of business
the NYT?
Hopefully they’ll finally go bankrupt this year. yeah.
A few minutes later the chat continues:
It’s nice they report
on stuff.
I enjoy it when it’s ethical reporting.
political corruption, sure
scandal, yes
is it unethical to report on the government’s intrigue?
VIOLATING NATIONAL SECURITY? no
meh.
national security.
Um, YEEEEEEEEEEEES.
that shit is classified for a reason
it’s not because ‘oh we hope our citizens don’t find out’
it’s because ‘this shit won’t work if iran knows what we’re doing.’
Shrugs
‘None would speak on the record because of the great secrecy surrounding the intelligence developed on Iran.’
direct. quote.
THEN WHY ARE YOU TALKING TO REPORTERS?!
‘Those covert operations, and the question of whether Israel will settle for something less than a conventional attack on Iran, pose immediate and wrenching decisions for Mr. Obama.’
THEY’RE NOT COVERT ANYMORE
Oh you’ve got to be fucking kidding me. Now the NYTimes is going to determine our foreign policy?
And Obama?
Obama just appointed a fucking POLITICIAN to run the CIA!
yes unlike every other director of CIA ever
oh wait, no
I am so angry right now. This is completely unbelievable.
The ‘fucking politician’ was Leon Panetta, appointed by Obama in 2009 despite his evident lack of intelligence background. The appointment was supposed to draw a line under the intelligence scandals of the Bush years – the renditions, the secret CIA prisons and the illegal wiretapping.
Snowden evidently knew of WikiLeaks, a niche transparency website whose story would later intersect with his own. But he didn’t like it. At this point, Snowden’s antipathy towards the New York Times was based on his opinion that ‘they are worse than Wikileaks’. Later, however, he would go on to accuse the paper of not publishing quickly enough and of sitting on unambiguous evidence of White House illegality. These are somewhat contradictory views.
Certainly Snowden’s anti-leaking invective seems stunningly at odds with his own later behaviour. But there is a difference between what the Times arguably did – reveal details of sensitive covert operations – and what Snowden would do in 2013. Snowden nowadays explains: ‘Most of the secrets the CIA has are about people, not machines and systems, so I didn’t feel comfortable with disclosures that I thought could endanger anyone.’
In fact, Snowden would trace the beginning of his own disillusionment with government spying to this time in Switzerland, and to the near-three years he spent around CIA officers. His friend Mavanee Anderson, a legal intern working for the US mission to the UN in Geneva at that time, describes him as quiet, thoughtful, introspective, and someone who carefully weighed up the consequences of any action. By the end of his Geneva stint, she claims Snowden was experiencing a ‘crisis of conscience’.
Snowden later spoke of a formative incident. He told Greenwald that CIA operatives tried to recruit a Swiss banker in order to get hold of secret financial information. Snowden said they pulled this off by getting the banker drunk and then encouraging him to drive home, which he foolishly did. The Swiss police arrested him. The undercover agent offered to help, and exploited the incident successfully to befriend and then recruit the banker.
‘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 said.
Any decision to spill US government secrets as a result was inchoate, an idea slowly forming in Snowden’s head. Nor, it appears, had he yet seen the most contentious documents he was later to leak. Snowden says that he was ready to give President Obama the benefit of the doubt, and was waiting for him to reverse the most egregious civil liberties abuses of the Bush era. They included Guantanamo Bay, a US military dumping ground for fighters rounded up on the battlefield, some of whom had no connection with extremism or al-Qaida, and yet who languished for years without trial.
Snowden wanted Obama to bring to account those from Team Bush who were responsible: ‘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 programmes, and refused to spend the political capital to end the kind of human rights violations we see in Guantanamo, where men still sit without charge.’
What did Snowden’s bosses know of his unhappy state of mind? In 2009 Snowden fell out with one of his Geneva colleagues. He gave an account of the incident to the New York Times’s James Risen. According to Risen, Snowden was keen to get promoted but got embroiled in a ‘petty email spat’ with a superior, whose judgement he challenged. Months later, Snowden was filling in his annual CIA self-evaluation form. He detected flaws in the personnel web application and pointed those out to his boss. His boss told him to drop it but eventually agreed to allow Snowden to test the system’s susceptibility to hacking.
Snowden added some code and text ‘in a non-malicious manner’, proving his point. His immediate boss signed off on it. But then the more senior manager with whom Snowden had clashed previously discovered what he had done and was furious. The manager entered a derogatory report – known as a ‘derog’ in spy parlance – into Snowden’s file.
This relatively trivial episode was important in one respect: it may have demonstrated to Snowden the futility of raising grievances via internal channels. Complaining upwards only led to punishment, he could have concluded. But for now there were new horizons to explore.
In February 2009 Snowden resigned from the CIA. His personnel file, whatever it contained, was never forwarded to his next employer – the NSA. Now Snowden was to work as a contractor at an NSA facility on a US military base, out in Japan.
The opportunities for contractors had boomed in the years since 9/11, as the burgeoning US security state outsourced intelligence tasks to private companies. Top officials such as the NSA’s former director Michael Hayden moved effortlessly between government and corporations. This was a revolving door – a lucrative one. Snowden was now 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. Whatever misgivings his former CIA colleagues may have had were lost in the system.
Snowden felt passionately about Japan from his early teens. He had spent a year and a half studying Japanese; he dropped ‘Arigatou gozaimasu!’ and other phrases into his first Ars chat. Snowden sometimes used the Japanese pronunciation of his name. He dubbed himself: ‘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.’ He played Tekken obsessively; playing an everyman-warrior battling evil against the odds shaped his moral outlook, he later said. Between 2002 and 2004 he worked as the webmaster for Ryuhana Press, a Japanese anime website.
Snowden was keen to improve his language and technical skills. In 2009 he signed up for summer school at a Tokyo-based campus affiliated to the University of Maryland’s University College.
&
nbsp; During Japan, Snowden’s online activity dries up, however. He pretty much stops posting on Ars Technica. Japan marks a turning point. It is the period when Snowden goes from disillusioned technician to proto-whistleblower. As Snowden had sight of more top-secret material, showing the scale of NSA data mining, his antipathy towards the Obama administration grew. ‘I watched as Obama advanced the very policies that I thought would be reined in,’ Snowden says, adding of his Japan period: ‘I got hardened.’
Between 2009 and 2012 Snowden 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 another uncomfortable truth: that the congressional oversight 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.’
By the time he left Japan in 2012, Snowden was a whistleblower-in-waiting.
2
CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE
The NSA’s Regional Cryptologic Center,
Kunia, Hawaii
‘The authority of government, even such as I am willing to submit to … is still an impure one: to be strictly just, it must have the sanction and consent of the governed.’
HENRY DAVID THOREAU,
‘Civil Disobedience’
In March 2012, Snowden left Japan and moved across the Pacific to Hawaii. At the same time, it seems he donated to his libertarian political hero Ron Paul. An ‘Edward Snowden’ contributed $250 to Paul’s presidential campaign from an address in Columbia, Maryland. The record describes the donor as an employee of Dell. In May, Snowden donated a second $250, this time from his new home at Waipahu, describing himself as a ‘senior adviser’ for an unstated employer.
Snowden’s new job was at the NSA’s regional cryptological centre (the ‘Central Security Service’) on the main island of Oahu, which is near Honolulu. He was still a Dell contractor. The centre is one of 13 NSA hubs outside Fort Meade devoted to SIGINT, and in particular to spying on the Chinese. The logo of ‘NSA/CSS Hawaii’ features two green palm trees set on either side of a tantalising archipelago of islands. The main colour is a deep oceanic blue. At the top are the words: ‘NSA/CSS Hawaii’; at the bottom, ‘Kunia’. It looks an attractive place to work.