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He had ambitions of becoming a male model. He did not seem overly concerned about his privacy, posting pictures of himself “mooning” for the camera. He also posted provocative modeling pictures of himself on the Ars Technica website. He commented on his own beefcake- style pictures “So sexxxy it hurts” and “I like my girlish figure that attracts girls.” He approached a model agency called Model Mania. He had some concern about the photographer who “shoots mostly guys.” Snowden said in a post he was “a little worried he might, you know, try to pull my pants off and choke me to death with them, but he turned out to be legit and is a pretty damn good model photographer.” He posted the photographs on the Internet, commenting: “ I think I look pretty good in the shots, so it's kind of hard to get used to thinking of yourself in terms of being an element in a picture as opposed to just a picture of X." Despite his enthusiasm, the lack of any paid job offers dashed any hopes he had of a modeling career.
He also began dating Lindsay Mills around this time. She was an extremely attractive 19-year old art student at the Maryland Institute College of Art. Jonathan Mills, Lindsay’s father, was an applications developer at the Oracle Corporation. According to him, she met Snowden on an Internet dating site. However they met, Snowden and Mills had much in common. They both had divorced parents who gave them a great deal of latitude in conducting their personal lives. Both of them were keenly interested in perfecting their bodies through exercise and diet regimes, Mills’ only paid employment over the next 8 years would be as a fitness and Yoga instructor in Maryland. They both also had ambitions to be models and neither of them had inhibitions about posing provocatively for photographers. They both also had a desire to travel to exotic places, including cities in Asia. Mills had spent four month in Guilin, China before meeting Snowden.
As bleak as his prospects as a high school dropout may have seemed, he had an unexpected stroke of good fortune in the spring of 2006. The CIA, out-of-the-blue, offered Snowden a $66,000 a year job as a CIA communications officer. “I don’t have a degree of ANY type. In fact, I don’t even have a high school diploma,” Snowden boasted in May 2006 on the website Ars Technica under his alias The TrueHooHa. He added, with only a slight exaggeration, “I make 70K.”
But how did Snowden get the job? The CIA’s minimum requirements in 2006 for a job in its clandestine division included a bachelor's or master's degree and a strong academic record, with a preferred GPA of 3.0 or better. Snowden had only completed one year of high school. He had never attended college. He said himself that he had “no degree.” So he had none of the requisite degrees for the job he got.
CIA deputy director Ledgett said the CIA needed technical workers in 2006. But even if Snowden only applied in this capacity, which entailed a 5-year contract-term employment agreement, the minimum requirements for an intelligence technology job were a minimum of an Associates’ Degree awarded by a two-year Community college in Electronics and Communications Engineering Technology Computer Network Systems, or Electronics Engineering Technology. Candidates further must have a final GPA of at least 3.0 on a 4.0 scale
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