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CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
Snowden’s Choices
“Tt is the choices we make that show who we truly are”
J.K Rowling, the Philosopher’s Stone
Whereas Russian authorities had the opportunity to thoroughly debrief Snowden as to his motive for stealing state secrets, US authorities did not have that opportunity (and it seems unlikely that they will have it in the foreseeable future.) So Snowden’s motive is a missing part of the puzzle. It also cannot even be assumed that he had a single consistent motive during the nine- month course of his illicit copying of documents. Snowden has shown, if nothing else, that he is adaptable. He may have began taking documents for one reason and found other reasons as he proceeded in his quest. Many of the circumstances of his probes, contacts, theft and escape remain disputed by his supporters and shrouded by the secrecy of the NSA. What we do know is that Snowden made four extraordinary choices during the nine month period in 2013 that speak to the concerns that may have guided his actions. In the case of a classified intelligence breach, as in a chess game, the sequence of moves a player makes provides an important clue to his strategy.
The first move that Snowden made in preparation of the Level 3 breach was switching jobs on March 15th 2013. Snowden chose to leave his job as a system administrator at Dell SecureWorks to take job at Booz Allen as an analyst-in-training. His motive was not money, as it was a lower- paying position. At the time, he made this choice he had already set up an encrypted channel with Laura Poitras for the purpose of sending her secret material. But he did not have to change jobs to send her secrets. So what was his purpose in making this fateful choice?
The job change was not necessary to expose NSA domestic activities. If he had only wanted to be a whistle-blower, there were ample documents about the NSA’s activities already available to him on the NSANet. He also had access at Dell to the administrative file which contained the FISA court orders issued every three months to Verizon. In addition, as the NSA’s damage assessment established, before switching jobs Snowden had already taken most of the documents pertaining to the NSA’s domestic operations that he could have supplied to Poitras and Greenwald for whistle-blowing purposes. Indeed, while still at Dell, it will be recalled, he had he had told Poitras he had a copy of Presidential Policy Directive 20, a document in which President Obama authorized the NSA to tap into fiber cables crossing the United States. Snowden described it to her as “a kind of martial law for cyber operations, created by the White House.” True, he took a more recently-issued FISA warrant and PRISM presentation in April after switching jobs, but he could have just as easily taken the January 2013 version of the FISA warrant from the administrative file of Dell. It would have had the same explosive effect in the media.
Nor did he switch jobs to lessen the risk of getting caught. He actually put himself in far greater jeopardy by switching jobs. At Dell he was relatively safe from apprehension since he could take documents, such as the above-mentioned Presidential Policy Directive 20, from access points at the NSA shared by many of his peers. Since these shared access points provided the equivalent of a common reading room at a library, it would be difficult to trace the theft of any documents taken from them to a particular user. Indeed, if he just wanted to expose the NSA’s domestic
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