278 | HOW AMERICA LOST ITS SECRETS
Snowden wanted more than just NSA secrets. He used his new position and widened access at Booz Allen to go after secret docu- ments from the intelligence services of Britain, Australia, New Zealand, and Israel. He revealed this operation only after receiving sanctuary in Russia. He told an interviewer that by moving to his new Booz Allen job as an infrastructure analyst, he gained the abil- ity to pry secrets out of the allies of the NSA. “I had a special level of clearance, called ‘Priv Ac” he said. This “priv ac” status did not allow him to bypass the password protection at sealed-off compart- ments at the NSA, but it did allow him to request files from foreign services cooperating with U.S. intelligence.
By way of example, he described one file from the British GCHQ cipher service that he copied, stole, and provided to other parties. It exposed a legally authorized British operation to collect electronic data on terrorist matters in Pakistan by tapping into Cisco rout- ers used by telecom companies in Asia. This GCHQ operation, as Snowden knew, violated neither British nor American law. He told a BBC interviewer in regard to that file, “What’s scariest is not what
© the government is doing that’s unlawful, but what they’re doing © that is completely lawful.” So his criteria for taking such documents were not their illegality. In his five weeks at this Booz Allen job, he also used this same newly acquired “priv ac” at the NSA to steal files from the Israeli, Canadian, and Australian intelligence services.
Jumping from one outside contracting firm to another for the purpose of penetrating other Western intelligence services is not the conventional mission of a whistle-blower. In the parlance of CIA counterintelligence, the actions of an employee of an intelligence service who changes his jobs solely to steal the more valuable secrets of this service is called an “expanding penetration.” It is not possible to believe that Snowden did not know the immense damage that the highly sensitive documents he was taking from the NSA and its allies could cause.
His choice to switch jobs did not come out of the blue. It was not based on serendipitously discovering the documents after he began working at Booz Allen. As he told Lana Lam, he knew in advance that by switching to the job at Booz Allen, he would gain the oppor- tunity to take the lists of NSA sources. He knew that the NSA’s
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