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down-loading documents for some 10 months before he copied these documents. When I discussed the chronology of the copied documents with a former government official briefed on the investigation, he suggested that Snowden’s purpose may have changed between 2012 and 2013. When I asked him what might have induced the change, he replied “That is one of the unanswered questions.” That Snowden only took these two whistle-blowing documents at the tail-end of his 9-month operation, and after he had contacted Poitras and Greenwald, suggests he may have had another motive prior to contacting journalists. In light of this chronology, the investigation had to consider the possibility that his whistle-blowing was, partly if not wholly, a cover for another enterprise.
The investigation soon ran into another serious issue: his access. Snowden had described to journalists a situation in which he had access to“ millions of records that [he] could walk out the door with at any time with no accountability, no oversight, no auditing, the government didn’t even know they were gone,” but, as it turned out, he was not among the limited number of individuals at the Center who had access to these documents, The NSA’s and Booz Allen’s employment records showed that Snowden had not yet completed his requisite on-the- job training at the National Threat Operations Center in Hawaii when he carried out the theft. Consequently, he had not yet been provided with the passwords he needed to get the documents. A former NSA official bluntly told me that Snowden, at least during the period of the thefts in April and May 2013, had no more legitimate access to the compartments than the cleaning personnel at the Center. Somehow he converted his proximity to access.
This lack of access could not be ignored in any law-enforcement investigation. Consider if a
hundred top-quality D-flawless diamonds were stolen from locked vaults at Tiffany’s by a recently- hired trainee who, it turned out, did not have either the combination to open these vaults. One possibility that the police would be expected to consider was that the trainee might have had help from a current or former insider at the company who knew the combinations. Snowden had accomplished a similar inexplicable feat as the hypothetical jewel thief.
In Snowden’s case, the FBI had to consider two very different possibilities that could explain how he could have acquired the password. He said in his video confession that he was solely responsible but there was another possibility. He had help, unwitting or witting, from others and he was trying to protect away from them.
The FBI faced a dilemma. It could either assume that the NSA’s security regime was so badly flawed that Snowden could trick his fellow workers into providing him with access or that there was another individual at the Center who might have assisted or directed Snowden. If it pursued the former hypothesis, it could close the case as far as the sitting Grand Jury was concerned. After all, Snowden had admitted he was the perpetrator and, if further evidence was needed, he could be seen showing stolen documents to Greenwald on the video. And Greenwald later used these documents. For the Grand Jury, it was, as one former federal prosecutor put it, “a slam dunk.” Not even Snowden denied the charge that he gave secret documents to individuals that
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