The Snowden Files: The Inside Story of the World's Most Wanted Man (2 page)

Over the course of the day, however, Snowden told his story. He was, he said, a 29-year-old contractor with the National Security Agency. He had been based at the NSA’s regional operations centre in Kunia on the Pacific island of Hawaii. Two weeks ago he had quit his job, effectively abandoned and bid farewell to his girlfriend,
and secretly boarded a flight to Hong Kong. He had taken with him four laptops.

The laptops were heavily encrypted. But from them Snowden had access to documents taken from NSA and GCHQ’s internal servers. Tens of thousands of documents, in fact. Most were stamped ‘Top Secret’. Some were marked ‘Top Secret Strap 1’ – the British higher tier of super-classification for intercept material – or even ‘Strap 2’, which was almost as secret as you could get. No one – apart from a restricted circle of security officials – had ever seen documents of this kind before. What he was carrying, Snowden indicated, was the biggest intelligence leak in history.

Greenwald noticed the accumulated debris of many days of room service – trays, abandoned bowls of noodles, dirty cutlery. Snowden said he had ventured out just three times since checking into the Mira under his own name a fortnight earlier. He sat on the bed as Greenwald bombarded him with questions: where did you work, who was your boss in the CIA, why? Greenwald’s credibility was on the line. So was that of his editors at the
Guardian
. Yet if Snowden were genuine, at any moment a CIA SWAT team could burst into the room, confiscate his laptops, and drag him away.

Snowden, they began to feel certain, was no fake. His information could well be real. And his reasons for becoming a whistleblower were cogent, too. His job as a systems administrator meant – he explained lucidly, persuasively, coolly – that he had a rare overview of the
NSA’s extraordinary surveillance capacities, that he could see the dark places where the agency was going.

The NSA could bug ‘anyone’, from the president downwards, he said. In theory the spy agency was supposed to collect only signals intelligence on foreign targets, known as SIGINT. In practice this was a joke, Snowden told Greenwald: it was already hoovering up metadata from millions of Americans. Phone records, email headers, subject lines, seized without acknowledgement or consent. From this you could construct a complete electronic narrative of an individual’s life – their friends, their lovers, their joys, their sorrows.

Together with GCHQ, the NSA had secretly attached intercepts to the undersea fibre-optic cables that ringed the world. This allowed the US and UK to read much of the globe’s communications. Secret courts were compelling telecoms providers to hand over data. What’s more, pretty much all of Silicon Valley was involved with the NSA, Snowden said – Google, Microsoft, Facebook, even Steve Jobs’s Apple. The NSA claimed it had ‘direct access’ to the tech giants’ servers.

While giving themselves unprecedented surveillance powers, the US intelligence community was concealing the truth about its activities, Snowden said. If James Clapper, the director of national intelligence, had deliberately lied to Congress about the NSA’s programs, he had committed a felony. The NSA was flagrantly violating the US constitution and the right to privacy. It had even put secret back doors into online encryption software – used
to make secure bank payments – weakening the system for everybody.

As Snowden told the story, the NSA’s behaviour seemed culled from 20th-century dystopian fiction. It was recognisable from the writings of Aldous Huxley or George Orwell. But the NSA’s ultimate goal seemed to go even further: to collect everything from everybody, everywhere and to store it indefinitely. It signalled a turning point. It looked like the extirpation of privacy. The spy agencies had hijacked the internet – once a platform for individuality and self-expression. Snowden used the word ‘panopticon’. This was a significant coinage by the 18th-century British philosopher and codifier Jeremy Bentham. It described an ingenious circular jail where the warders could see the prisoners at all times, without their knowing if they were being observed.

And this, Snowden asserted, was why he had decided to go public. To throw away his life and career. He told Greenwald he didn’t want to live in a world ‘where everything that I say, everything that I do, everyone I talk to, every expression of love or friendship is recorded’.

Over the coming weeks, Snowden’s claims would ignite an epochal debate. They would enrage the White House and Downing Street. And they would cause international havoc, as Snowden slipped out of Hong Kong, attempted to gain asylum in Latin America, and got stuck in Vladimir Putin’s Moscow.

In America and Europe (though not at first in the Britain of James Bond), there was a spirited argument about the right balance between security and civil liberties,
between freedom of speech and privacy. Despite the febrile polarisation of US politics, right-wing libertarians and left-wing Democrats joined together to support Snowden. Even President Obama conceded the debate was overdue and reform was required. Though this didn’t stop US authorities from cancelling Snowden’s passport, charging him with espionage and demanding his return from Russia.

The fight to publish Snowden’s story was to present the journalists themselves with dramatic problems – legal, logistical, editorial. It pitted a famous newspaper, its global website and a few media allies against some of the most powerful people on the planet. And it would lead to the destruction of the
Guardian
’s computer hard drives in an underground basement, watched over by two British GCHQ boffins. The machine-smashing was to be a particularly surreal episode in the history of western journalism and its battles against the state.

As he sat in his Hong Kong hotel room, throwing the switch to launch all this, Snowden was calm. According to Greenwald, he was convinced of the rightness of his actions, intellectually, emotionally and psychologically. In the aftermath of his leaks, Snowden recognised imprisonment would surely follow. But during that momentous summer he radiated a sense of tranquility and equanimity. He had reached a rock-like place of inner certainty. Here, nothing could touch him.

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:

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.