Snowden’s Choices | 277
have sent Poitras documents anonymously over his own Tor soft- ware and server. And he could have remained in his self-described “paradise” in Hawaii with his girlfriend.
When he chose to move to Booz Allen, the risk of exposure greatly increased because of its auditing system. Any documents he took without authorization could be traced back to him (though not in real time). As he later told Greenwald and Poitras, he knew that stealing documents at the Booz Allen job meant that he would either go to prison or escape from America. He didn’t want to face prison time, so the job change required an escape plan. As part of that plan, soon after he started work at the Booz Allen—managed facility, he submitted a request for a medical leave of absence.
We can safely assume that the reason he made this risky switch in employment was that he wanted something beyond the whistle- blowing documents. He wanted documents that were not avail- able at the Dell job. One such document he took was the top secret Congressional Budget Justification book for fiscal year 2013. This “black budget,” as it is called in Congress, contained the entire intel-
® ligence community’s priorities for, among other things, monitoring ® the activities of potential adversaries and terrorist organizations. It specified the money requested not only by the NSA but by the CIA, the DIA, the National Reconnaissance Office, and other intel- ligence services. Snowden could not have objected to the budget’s being somehow secret or illegitimate, because it was duly approved by both houses of Congress and the president. If it was not for pur- poses of whistle-blowing, presumably he had another purpose for taking such a document. It certainly held value to other actors. “For our enemies, having it [the black budget] is like having the playbook of the opposing NFL team,” said the former CIA deputy director Morell in 2015. “I guarantee you that the SVR, the Russian foreign intelligence service, would have paid millions of dollars for such a document.” If unlike Ames, Hanssen, and Pelton, Snowden was not after acquiring money, he must have seen another value in taking it.
The documents he stole at Booz Allen certainly increased his value to adversary nations, because they included lists revealing the NSA’s sources in Russia, China, and other foreign countries.
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