By spring, he was bored senseless. Snowden had signed a contract with Dell for an analyst’s slot in the NSA’s National Threat Operations Center (NTOC), pronounced by insiders as “EN-tock.” There he would work alongside the agency’s military and civilian staff to predict, detect, and defeat Chinese hacking attempts against U.S. government systems. Snowden reached that position eventually, but corporate politics unseated him on his way. Another company, CACI International, held the prime contract. Someone there bounced the Dell subcontractor in favor of a CACI employee. By the time Snowden learned of the change, he had already packed and shipped his belongings by sea. In compensation, Dell offered him a sleepy billet in HT322—Hawaii Technical Directorate, Office of Information Sharing. His job was to configure and maintain classified network servers, enforcing access restrictions on each account.
The substitute position paid more than the one he came for, but it could hardly have been more prosaic. Within weeks, he had automated most of the job, writing scripts for maintenance and other routine tasks that his predecessor had performed by hand. It seldom took him more than “a half hour a day,” Snowden told me, to keep the Microsoft SharePoint servers running smoothly. Now and then he was called upon for elementary technical support. Not everyone at the NSA was a computer wizard, not by a long shot. One baffled colleague at Fort Meade headquarters sent an urgent request to the help desk in August 2012. For some reason, she could no longer open files sent from Hawaii. When a more senior official groused on August 24 that the support ticket had “sat around for over a week,” someone tossed it to Snowden. He sent back a solution the same day, but by then the email chain had grown out of hand. Six days and thousands of words were expended before Snowden stamped out the last of the confusion. “Select ‘Word Pad’ from the list of programs, make sure the box in the bottom-left that says ‘Always use the selected program to open this kind of file’ is checked, then click ok,” he wrote on August 30.
In his spare time, Snowden began to browse the file directories under his administrative care. It was not always required for his job, but neither was it an unambiguous breach of rules. Snowden held valid credentials to read, write, copy, or delete just about any document on the SharePoint servers. His NSA manager, a career civilian employee, soon broadened Snowden’s domain. Spotting underworked talent, he assigned Snowden to help out in busier precincts of the Windows network division. Strictly speaking, Snowden’s added duties stretched federal contracting regulations. Dell probably did not know it, but the company was now billing NSA for hours that Snowden spent outside his contractual “statement of work.” Off-the-books arrangements of that sort were commonplace in the NSA, which deployed its people where needed and could not realistically seek a contract amendment for each new task. Snowden was a Microsoft-certified systems engineer, a credential he had earned at nineteen, and he had real-world network management experience. His supervisors did not intend to waste those skills. By April, ejsnowd had joined the short list of “super users” in Kunia’s Windows Server Engineering Division. He could override the restrictions on ordinary user accounts, see further and deeper into the network, and make changes to its fundamental workings. The NSA’s chief technical officer, Lonny Anderson, later said the agency had “three tiers of system administrators, one, two, and three.” Snowden had reached the top tier, called PRIVAC, for “Privileged Access.” Inside the Tunnel, he had the run of every Windows machine with an IP address.
“I was also helping out the Linux team,” he told me, referring to a rival operating system, used widely in networking. “So you know, I had Linux boxes, Linux credentials, virtual servers, all that stuff. So basically, I had the keys to everything. I had the keys to all the data sharing. I had access to all the servers. I knew all of the infrastructure.”
Then came Heartbeat. That project, in the coming months, opened conduits to TS/SCI networks that stretched far beyond Kunia, beyond the Pacific, beyond the digital boundaries of the NSA itself. Snowden was not yet thirty years old.
* * *
—
On December 29, 2001, a decade before Snowden reached Hawaii, a new voice joined the forums on Ars Technica. He called himself TheTrueHOOHA. Ars, which took its name from the Latin for “art of technology,” hosted online salons where expert nerds and wannabes communed over all things digital. After Snowden became a household name, Ars users and editors found circumstantial evidence that he had been the man behind that handle. For years, Snowden refused to confirm or deny it. He finally acknowledged paternity during our second face-to-face interview. In principle, he told me, he did not like the precedent. Anyone should feel free to speak anonymously without pressure to account for his words, then or later.
When the teenage Snowden chose his handle, he staked out a set of implicit claims. He knew things. He had an attitude. He liked to stir the pot. In the Army slang he borrowed (and misspelled), TheTrueHOOHA stood for “anything and everything except ‘no.’” Snowden described himself as a “belligerent, self-important, 18-year-old upstart,” a tolerably accurate appraisal by a young man who could still make fun of himself. His contributions from Ellicott City, Maryland, half an hour north of Fort Meade, blended show-offy erudition, teenage irony, righteous anger, generous advice, and orthodox libertarian bromides.
From his first post, Snowden announced a thirst for autonomy. He wanted full control of the technology he used. “It’s my first time, be gentle,” he began. “Here’s my dilemma: I want to be my own host. What do I need?” As any Ars reader would recognize, Snowden meant that he wanted to build a network server—the sort that runs a website or distributes digital files—instead of taking the easy path of renting one commercially.
Snowden had spent years by now on other electronic forums, acquiring and discarding whimsical handles such as Shrike and Belgarion. He knew a lot about computers, and demonstrated as much, but he was a newbie to the ways and means of connecting them. He wanted granular answers to basic questions—“I need to know how to get it to recognize a ping and send the proper files, or whatever the hell a server does”—but he did not want to be patronized. Homework did not deter him. If he had to learn a whole new field, he would download and devour the manuals. “I wish to be as self-sufficient as possible,” he wrote. “I figured there would be a few gurus here who can relate to my urge to know everything.”
When he could not be dissuaded from the project, fellow Arsians began piling on assignments. There were hardware shopping lists and links to technical guides. There were fine-grained exegeses of domain name systems, dynamic host configuration protocols, and on and on. Snowden swelled with excitement. “I’m so jazzed up that someone cares; I can’t think straight,” he wrote at 2:08 a.m. “Oooh. The purity of geek nirvana.”
By the time his parents had reached this age, the high school sweethearts were married and stably employed. Edward Joseph Snowden, their second child, was born in Elizabeth City, North Carolina, on June 21, 1983. His father, Lonnie G. Snowden Jr., followed his namesake into the Coast Guard and rose to the top rank of warrant officer. His mother, Elizabeth, who went by Wendy, launched a career as a federal government clerk. In 1992, when the Snowdens moved north to Crofton, Maryland, nine-year-old Ed wore oversized glasses and a dirty blond bowl cut, amusing friends of his parents with precocious chatter. Teachers at the Crofton Woods Elementary School, on the other hand, could not make out his words. They confused his slow, deliberate southern drawl with a developmental disability. When they tested him, according to family confidants, his IQ score was 155 on the Stanford-Binet scale, or the 99.97th percentile. Two more tests returned similar scores. IQ is a controversial proxy for intelligence, but one evaluator told Snowden’s mother, “He will learn what he wants to learn.”
Snowden’s older sister, Jessica, who went on to work as a researcher for the federal judiciary, had comparable test results. She skipped a grade in school and brought home straight As. Ed did not exactly follow suit. H
e refused to bother with subjects that bored him, losing interest easily and falling behind. Friends and family said he read voraciously, with unusual concentration, from the age of three. In his grade school years, they would find him asleep at his grandmother’s house, face covered by an open volume of The World Book Encyclopedia. His grades were erratic: top marks in courses he liked, Bs and Cs or worse in those he did not. In the fall of 1998, his sophomore year at Arundel High School, a bad case of mononucleosis kept him home for four months. When informed that he would have to repeat the grade, he refused to return to school. “The public education system turned it’s wretched, spikéd back on me,” Snowden wrote in a self-profile some years later. The reverse might equally be said.
During his hiatus at home, the fifteen-year-old used command-line tools such as Telnet to browse interesting internet domains. One day he found his way online to the Los Alamos National Laboratory, which does classified and unclassified research for the U.S. Department of Energy. Using an elementary technique called directory walking, Snowden discovered that the lab had password-protected its employee portal but left the subdirectories wide open. He left voicemails on the lab’s main number to report the security flaw, then waited impatiently for evidence of a repair. About two weeks later, his mother answered the Snowden family telephone at home. “Hi, I’m from the Los Alamos National Laboratory,” a sober voice said. “Is Mr. Snowden around?” He was looking for Ed, not Lon. After questioning him closely, the man asked if Snowden was looking for work.
To this day, some critics in the U.S. government scorn Snowden as a high school dropout, a low-ranking employee of modest skills who had no grasp of the secrets he disclosed. That is a dishonest narrative. It would surely be embarrassing, if true, that such a slacker upended the NSA so thoroughly in its core mission of “information dominance,” the use of other people’s secrets to shape events. The truth about Snowden is more interesting. It is the story of a young man who fell short in class, refused to conform, gave no serious thought to a university degree, burned a lot of time in game arcades, and never had to pay the dues that (some of) his seniors did before ascending to six-figure salaries. And yet. It is also the story of a self-taught polymath, determined to apply his talents on his own terms, who repeatedly found his way around conventional barriers.
The defining feature of Snowden’s young adulthood was a knack for breaking down problems, unpacking the parts, discerning how the innards worked, and shaping them to his will. He had an eye for hidden openings. It was a hacker’s frame of mind, in the classic sense, applicable as much to daily life as to machines. Disregard the “normie” path. Find a side window if the front door is locked, skip needless steps, follow instructions out of sequence if that speeds results. Automate a tedious task or substitute a more efficient one. Rewrite or repurpose any product, any process, if you can turn it to your own ends. Share the recipe.
* * *
—
Some of Snowden’s life hacks were inspired. Some did not work at all. At sixteen, after recovering from mono, he enrolled part-time at Anne Arundel Community College. He had found a congenial shortcut, he thought, to a high school diploma. As he read the rules, he could qualify for a General Educational Development (GED) credential with college credits alone, ditching the tedious classes and learning as he liked. To his parents, he seemed to be choosing almost at random. Introduction to Psychology. Martial Arts. The Solar System. Principles of Accounting. He aced algebra and geometry, dropped trigonometry for Japanese, detoured into Mandarin, and barely escaped chemistry with a C. “I’m not paying for you to go to college to have fun,” his father told him, repeatedly admonishing the teenager to focus on core academics. Maryland’s Department of Education was unpersuaded by Snowden’s interpretation of the rules, obliging him to sit for the GED exam. The results and his diploma arrived in June 2002, the same month he would have graduated after illness held him back a grade. He had skipped three-quarters of high school but scored in the 95th percentile in writing, 96th in social studies, 99th in science, mathematics, and literature and the arts.
Lon Snowden despaired of employment for a son who lacked a college degree. He did not believe online wanderings could build the skills and credentials Ed would need. The younger Snowden, contemporaries said, had a preternatural confidence in his path. Like other digital natives of his generation, Snowden learned to think, debate, and build things online before most Americans mastered the rudiments of email. Between 1998 and 2003, from ages fifteen to twenty, he assembled a technical education piece by piece.
One of his best career hacks came in February 2002, when Snowden registered for an expensive private course in Windows system engineering. The Computer Career Institute at Johns Hopkins, a for-profit entity, took his money without requiring proof of relevant work experience, previous training, or even the high school diploma that was still a month away. Lon Snowden could make no sense of it. Who signs up for advanced networking without taking the introductory course? His son saw the move as a strategic play. He had learned something important in online forums: certified engineering skills were an easy shortcut through employment screening in the Washington area’s booming tech sector. Computer skills were in high demand, and human resources departments did not know how to judge prospective hires. A Microsoft certification had become a standard proxy. All Snowden had to do was master a syllabus spanning 4,416 pages of technical reading on infrastructure design, installation of complex networks, and so on. That, and troubleshoot simulated failures in timed exercises. Several months later, he passed the grueling sequence of seven qualifying exams. At nineteen, with the barest minimum of coursework, he became a Microsoft-certified systems engineer, identification number 2661071. It was the first of many such credentials, but the MCSE was a golden ticket that year. It would bump him to the head of the queue when the time came.
Snowden had discovered a minor superpower. He could read between the lines of a test, intuiting the designer’s intent. He anticipated misdirection, imagining the traps that he would set if he wrote the exam himself. If no one got a question wrong, the test would not produce results in the desired bell-shaped curve. Snowden trained himself to spot false answers inserted for the unwary. “I’m not convinced I’m actually that intelligent,” he told me in an introspective moment. “I have an understanding, a sort of talent for understanding what’s being tested. The person who’s writing the test, what are they trying to do? I can understand the subtext of the question. . . . I’m not sure it’s actually more meaningful in terms of ‘he’s smart’ so much as just maybe I kind of beat the test. The difference is subtle, I think, but anywhere you’re being measured and rated against standards, I don’t know what else to say besides I’ve done well when my qualifications didn’t necessarily merit that placement.” Whatever that kind of skill was called, it extended to performance beyond the classroom. He asserted as much, with some bombast, in a 2003 contretemps with an Ars user who had bolstered a claim by citing his college diploma. “Can you redeem your degree for a cash prize? Maybe a stuffed animal?” Snowden wrote, adding, “Great minds do not need a university to make them any more credible: they get what they need and quietly blaze their trails into history.” Such was his ambition, even then.
Even as he built up professional skills, Snowden devoted great heaps of time to role-playing and fantasy. Since his midteens he had worked and played with a tight group of slightly older friends who shared his fascination with Japanese popular culture. Together they ran a pair of businesses: Clockwork Chihuahua Studios, a web design company, and Ryuhana Press, an online showcase for anime art and comics. Snowden later told me the dot-com boom had brought a lot of money into those start-ups, providing him with some financial independence. He listed himself on RyuhanaPress.com as “Editor/Coffee-Boy,” alongside alter egos of Edowaado and Phish. Friends embarrassed him on his nineteenth birthday by posting photographs of the skinny teen in various stages of undress, opining that “Ed i
s positive that he is God’s gift to women.”
Snowden clowned online, but he was dead serious about gaming. In that environment, he displayed the planning skills, the instinct to bypass defenses, and the competitive drive that carried him up or around career ladders in the U.S. intelligence community. In August 2001, alongside his Ryuhana Press pals Katie Bair and Lindsey Deets, he traveled in costume to Baltimore for a gathering known as Otakon, after the Japanese slang term otaku for obsessive fans. Snowden cosplayed as Hakeem, a character from the comic Oasis Destiny. Hakeem was a “rogue,” known for slipping past enemy lines and pivoting to attack from within. Embracing the persona, Snowden scouted a side route past convention center guards and slipped into the overcapacity event. The following year, still in role, he infiltrated again—this time taking his friends with him through back corridors. Years later, when someone asked about his character, Snowden opined that “very few are roguish enough to be a true Hakeem.” His advice for the ambitious was to “start practicing evading Con Security now.”
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