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without anyone else realizing that it had been stolen. It intrigued him enough for him to bring it to the attention of his superiors, as he later said. Snowden saw that a rogue system administrator like himself could use his computer privileges to download and steal documents in ways that would go unnoticed. The emergence of a rogue system administrator was not that farfetched in 2009. Hacktavists such as Julian Assange had adopted the battle cry: system administrators, or “syst admins of the world unite.” Instead of asking them to “throw off their chains,” as Marx did, he asked them to send classified documents about secret government activity to the Wikileaks site. Snowden recalled in Moscow in 2014: “I actually recommended they [the NSA] move to two- man control for administrative access back in 2009.” To make his point even clearer, he added: “A whistleblower could use these things, but so could a spy.” Not without irony, Snowden himself became that rogue system administrator some three years later at Dell. In fact, he later used the vulnerability he pointed out to steal NSA documents at Dell (before moving to Booz Allen.).
In September 2009, Snowden made a ten day trip to India. He later said he was on an official visit “working at the US embassy.” He was still on the Dell payroll. Hotel records show that he arrived at the Hyatt Regency hotel in New Delhi on September 2™ from Japan, and at 3:30 pm on September 3", checked into the Koenig Inn, a facility that was an annex to Koenig Solutions, a school that gave crash courses on programming and computer hacking. According to Rohit Aggarwal, the head of the school, Snowden stayed there until September 10" while taking classes with a private instructor. It cost $2,000 in tuition and fees, which Snowden prepaid from Japan with his own personal credit card. Even though Snowden later said he only took courses in “programming,” the school’s records show that during that week he took intensive courses in sophisticated hacking techniques. Although the course was entitled “ethical hacking” that was also a euphemism for teaching the techniques of illicit hacking. The course provided tutoring on hacker’s tools, such as “Spyeye” and “ZeuS,” that are used to circumvent security procedures. It also demonstrated how these hacking tools could be customized by criminals and spies to break into files, plant surveillance programs, impersonate system administrators, assume the privileges of system administrators in a network, and capture the passwords of others. On September 11", Snowden, according to hotel records, left India for Japan. While the stated purpose of the hacking training was to allow security consultants to detect intruders, it also prepared Snowden to be, if he chooses to be, an intruder in the NSA system.
One problem with working as a contractor is that the standard two-year contracts are not necessarily renewed, making a contractor’s job essentially temporary employment. Nor is there much possibility for advancement for IT workers. As one contractor told me “It is a dead end job with great pay.” In the fall of 2010, Snowden’s contract in Japan with Dell SecureWorks came to anend. Dell then offered Snowden a new position in the United States.
He now was assigned to work at Dell headquarters in Annapolis, Maryland. He rented a modest suburban house shaded by a Sakura cherry tree in suburb of Annapolis, Maryland. Mills
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