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HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_020211

House Oversight Committee
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meanwhile was attending a two-week fitness training course at a Yoga camp that qualified her to be a yoga instructor. She then moved in with Snowden. Even though she had been living on and off with Snowden during the past two years abroad, including while he worked at the CIA in Switzerland and the NSA in Japan, they had not shared a home in America up until now. The now 25-year old Mills posted on Instagram “Finally in our first US place together.” She also put on line pictures of him in bed with her, who she now affectionately referred to in her posts as a “computer crusader.”

Dell meanwhile had him to work on problem- solving for its corporate clients. In preparation for his corporate role, he shaved off this facial hair and, with Lindsay’s help, bought a Ralph Lauren suit. These corporate clients were assisting the NSA, the CIA, and the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA). Consequently, Snowden dealt with a wide range of intelligence officers, and gave presentations on the vulnerabilities at computer security at the DIA-sponsored Joint Counter Intelligence seminar.

His dealings with these US intelligence officers in no way mitigated his resentment of the intelligence establishment. What began at the CIA in 2009 as objections to what he saw as the incompetence of his superiors grew into well-articulated disapproval of the way that the US government conducted its intelligence. He found NSA surveillance particularly worrisome, later telling the Guardian: "They [the NSA] are intent on making every conversation and every form of behavior in the world known to them." He claimed after defecting to Moscow that he had voiced his concerns about what he considered illicit surveillance to ten NSA officials, “none of whom took any action to address them.” The NSA can find no record of these complaints but if Snowden had indeed complained to these officials while working for Dell, his superiors at Dell either didn’t notice or care that they had a very disgruntled employee on their hand. He also made no secret of anger at the US government and the corporations that served it on the Internet. He railed on the Ars Technica site against the complicity of private corporations, such as Dell, that assisted the NSA. In his on-line posts in 2010, Snowden expressed loathing for the assistance that corporate America was providing the intelligence community. “It really concerns me how little this sort of corporate behavior bothers those outside of technology circles,” he wrote under his True Hoo-ha alias. He said he feared that America was already on “a slippery slope,” and suggested, perhaps adumbrating his own later actions, that this corporate assistance to US intelligence “was entirely within our control to stop.” What the “computer crusader,” as Mills had playfully called him in her Internet postings, expressed in these angry Internet postings was an almost obsessive concern over individuals freely submitting to government authority. “Society really seems to have developed an unquestioning obedience towards spooky types,” he wrote on Ars Technica without mentioning that he himself worked for a corporation, Dell that assisted spy agencies. He asked rhetorically on this public forum whether the sinister slide towards a surveillance state “sneaked in undetected because of pervasive government secrecy?”

The outright contempt he expressed towards this “government secrecy” in no way prevented him from seeking even more secret work at Dell for the intelligence services. In February 2011,

HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_020211