The Edward Snowden Affair

by Michael Gurnow

  Some found Snowden’s story dubious, namely Swiss President Ueli Maurer. “This would mean that the CIA successfully bribed the Geneva police and judiciary. With all due respect, I just can’t imagine it,” he told the Zurich-based German newspaper SonntagsBlick.65 However, aside from subtly defending the capability and integrity of his own security forces by doubting the veracity of Snowden’s claim, Maurer is basing his assessment on the assumption that CIA agents—who were very likely, like Snowden, recognized by the Swiss government as being in the country for diplomatic purposes—would break cover by formally introducing themselves and divulging their agenda to a foreign police force and various judiciary boards before attempting to pay them off. It is much more feasible that one team of operatives treated the banker to dinner while another set of agents posing as Swiss police officers awaited the banker’s drunken departure. Aside from being trained professionals, their ruse would have been all the more convincing to someone who was intoxicated.

  Critics of Snowden’s report where quick to ask why the United States would have an interest in keeping tabs on the Swiss. It is well known that many American entrepreneurs hold offshore accounts to evade taxes, and a handful of Swiss banks have a reputation for being sympathetic to these interests because of their profitability. As time would tell, the most powerful nation in the world was not content to merely monitor American tax dodgers. In January 2013, Switzerland’s oldest bank, Wegelin & Co., was for all intents and purposes closed by U.S. authorities. This was after Swiss banking executives failed to appear in court once it was confirmed that from 2002 to 2010 the bank had made agreements with American clients to hide funds and aid in submitting false tax returns. The cumulative loss was $1.2 billion in U.S. revenue.66 Others questioned the plausibility of Snowden’s assertion on the grounds of how someone contracted to work in IT would learn of other highly classified, non-IT-related CIA assignments. Yet closer examination doesn’t necessarily remedy an already-puzzling storyline but convolutes it.

  What is undeniable and equally remarkable is that Snowden’s latent mental abilities lunge forward during this time, probably because his 140 IQ67 was finally being engaged and challenged. This is clear by his writing at the time. In all truth, the largest bulk of his 773 Ars posts relates to video games, with various IT and personal exchanges sprinkled in along the way.68 After five months of Ars silence, which had been, barring the whole of 2004, preceded by a steady stream of chatter since he began posting in 2001, Snowden appeared online once again. He avidly and almost exclusively engaged in highly involved stock market discussions. For example, on November 18, 2008, he posted, “Holy [J]esus, have you guys started using the new triple levered long/short Russell 1000/2000 index etfs? BGZ/BGU & TNA/TZA are the tickers, I believe. Puts the 2x ultra etfs to shame.”69 Two days later, he announced he’d invested $4,000 in TZA stock. He had bought it at $127.90 a share. By the end of the day, it was trading at $141.37.70

  An “etf” is an exchanged-trade fund. It functions as a normal stock but is actually a security that tracks an index, commodity or basket of assets as an index fund does. Because of its duel-sided nature, expense ratios of an ETF are lower than regular stock. The owner gets the benefit of the diversification an index fund provides but with the malleability of selling short if desired. As irony would have it, the best known ETF is the Spider, whose stock exchange symbol is “SPY.” An “ultrashort,” “inverse” or “bear” ETF is a type of fund designed specifically to profit from loses. It is a component of the highly complex derivative market. Some share holders invest in inverse ETFs in order to hedge their portfolios.

  It is always possible Snowden had absorbed some of the economic and political atmosphere around him and, in much the same manner that he perpetually overcompensated for his lack of a formal education, fabricated the numbers to impress Ars board members. If this is the case, he went to great lengths to create and sustain the ruse. By December 4, he was citing 1930s economic theory.71

  It is also feasible, yet not probable, Snowden had taught himself the intricacies of the modern stock market. However, considering his disclosure concerning the Swiss banker atop exhibiting a functional knowledge on an online forum of economic principle put into practice, it is not outside of reason that Snowden had been trained in this field. Where he would have found the time to tutor himself to such a professional degree is another logistic issue because, as previously noted, his position with the CIA had kept him from steadily posting on Ars for the first time in over five months. Instead of viewing justification for Snowden’s European activities necessitating a monumental leap in cognitive application and exercise, the most reasonable explanation is he was stationed in Geneva, in part, as the IT component of a financial investigation. This is a polite way of saying he was sent to Switzerland to hack into personal and financial databases, a skill which he would later explicitly and specifically be hired to do for the NSA. Advanced economic training would allow him to better understand his targets. Moreover, he was in an indisputable position of power. He would later list on his résumé he had been “called upon repeatedly for temporary duty” [ … ] “including support of the U.S. president” while working for the CIA.72 In other words, Snowden was responsible for the president’s IT security when the commander-in-chief arrived in Europe. Though portions of his résumé would later be questioned, this citation was not. Years later, in a letter of gratitude to a former Senator, he would also admit he had once worked for the Defense Intelligence Agency.73 This is one of the most clandestine branches of American government intelligence. It specializes in espionage. The organization recruits and trains agents, moles and spies who, in part, collect human intelligence such as pending financial policies from foreign bankers. It is also the bureau that former vice president Dick Cheney assigned to design and execute more drastic interrogation measures.74 Regardless of the particulars, Snowden’s moral objection to what he had witnessed was not a disagreement with the U.S. government’s seeking information about suspected financial crimes but the manner and method by which the data was being obtained.

  Snowden admitted it was during this time that he first considered exposing government secrets. His motive for not going public was twofold: “Most of the secrets the CIA has are about people, not machines and systems, so I didn’t feel comfortable with disclosures that I thought could endanger anyone.” His second reason rested on the recent election of Barack Obama. Though he did not vote for the politician, it nonetheless gave him hope there might be policy reforms upon the Bush administration’s invasive intelligence and surveillance doctrines which Snowden, as part of his job, was currently obligated to abide by and therefore support.75 Anderson also insinuated Snowden left the CIA in order to distance himself from his troubled conscience.76

  What Anderson did not know is that the apprehension she saw in her colleague was not just theoretical reservation. “How do you launch a VM from a LiveCD?” Snowden queried on the Ars board on February 14. “The goal here is to be able to bring a LiveCD (Virus/Malware/Keylogger-free VM-launching platform) and a USB drive (VM Image) to any given computer and be able to [do] your work through the VM without leaving anything behind on the physical host machine.”77 Snowden was asking how to extract data from a computer without leaving a trace. Thus, on Valentine’s Day 2009, the month he would leave the CIA, Snowden took the first steps which would later manifest into one of the largest intelligence leaks in history. It remains a curiosity why—given it would be four years in the making—this rather bold yet seemingly naïve question available to anyone with a computer went undetected. The answer is manifold. One, Snowden only vaguely hinted at what he did for a living on the Ars boards. Two, IT questions are a dime a dozen on a techie forum like Ars. Three, given he was a senior advisor, the CIA probably didn’t feel the need to surveil Snowden, and even if it did, covert IT work was what he had been hired to do. (Perhaps not to personally conduct data extraction but, as senior advisor, the ability to instruct field agents in how to d
o so.) Snowden was clever in this aspect. He probably assumed no one would think twice about the post. For the query to arouse suspicion, a person would need to have all the Snowden puzzle pieces. An individual would have to know who “TrueHOOHA” was, what the Ars account holder did for a living, what the question meant, as well as know he was disgruntled.

  The problem was he had been caught trying to access highly classified files. It is not known if Snowden was merely challenging his IT abilities, seeking to steal highly incriminating documents or trying to get a better understanding of the system in an effort to calm his emotional nerves. Once he was found out, his superior wrote a “derogatory” note. It was not sent further up the administrative ladder. Snowden had merely been told to take the rest of the day off.78 The CIA would later dispute this claim. Because the two anonymous officials who came forward with the information refused to redact the statement, the agency’s denial is indicative of not wanting to be further implicated in the Snowden debacle. Snowden would later refute the allegation.79

  His tenure with the CIA would come to a close by the end of February. He submitted his resignation after an internal investigation was ordered as a consequence of the write-up.80 However, if Anderson’s intuition is correct that he left the CIA in an attempt to turn a blind eye to the U.S. government’s questionable intelligence tactics and remove himself from personal and moral culpability, he did not journey far. Another intelligence organization was impressed with Snowden’s work and offered him a position which permitted him to continue doing what he loved in a place he had dreamed about since he was a teenager. The temptation to take a vastly higher-paying job in a mystical foreign land was too great to resist. It also afforded Snowden the opportunity to see how other intelligence agencies functioned.81

  He was hired as a contractor for the NSA through the Columbia, Maryland, branch of the Texas-based computer firm Dell Computers. The computer giant asked him to move to Japan. He’d listed on Ars this was his most sought-after country. In hopeful preparation of one day arriving there, he had taken three semesters of Japanese.82 It is unclear how long he was in Japan before the company transferred him—in what would later be a stroke of excessively bad luck for the U.S. government—to Hawaii.

  What is known about Snowden’s time in the Far East is limited. During his first summer there, he entered the Tokyo campus of University of Maryland University College, which is located on an American military outpost, and undertook Asian Studies. He was only enrolled for a semester.83 In another stroke of ironic synchronicity, Japan is where Snowden met fellow Marylandian, Lindsay Mills.

  Mills would pose a paradoxical challenge for the press years later. It had difficulty reconciling how the introverted nature and formal appearance of Snowden had aligned with the Maryland Institute College of Art graduate.84 She appeared to be the philosophical opposite of her boyfriend. Mills ran a blog, “L’s Journey,”85 and possessed Twitter, Pinterest, Flickr, YouTube and Instagram accounts.86 The media could not account for the apparent personality conflict due to what many would crassly designate as Mill’s flagrant exhibitionism.

  Throughout the Internet, Mills has hundreds of photographs of herself, a majority scantily clad, several involving acrobatics and many that include pole dancing as their centerpiece. In them the audience is met by a long-haired, dirty blonde with a slim, athletic build and crystal blue eyes. Yet the focal point of most every self-portrait is the overt playfulness and wry innocence Mills innately espouses. It would be easier for the press to sensationally refer to Mills as Snowden’s “pole dancing” girlfriend than take the time to explain that the photographs were Mills’ art. A few, such as The New Yorker, granted passing lip service to the possibility her online presence was not the average, ego-driven, spur-of-the-moment posting that Snowden was, in part, battling against the government exploiting. For example, in one picture “[Mills] stands just to the right of the center of the frame, wearing black lace underwear and a black bra, holding herself tight in a gesture of despondency, a bright yellow Forever 21 bag covering her face in a way that unfortunately recalls the infamous photos of prisoners in Abu Ghraib.”87 It is debatable whether her political allusion, color juxtaposition and sociological commentary of being unable to see, blinded as it were, due to an icon of consumerism, a shopping bag (which also cleverly critiques the pursuit of immortality through materialism via the brand name) is comparable to Annie Liebovitz’s portraits. But it is undeniable an artistic mindset is avidly trying to express itself. Her creative impulse is also apparent in her prose. After Snowden fled the United States, leaving Mills behind, she wrote, “My world has opened and closed all at once. Leaving me alone at sea without a compass. Surely there will be villainous pirates, distracting mermaids, tides change in the new open water chapter of my journey. But at the moment, all I feel is alone … sometimes life doesn’t afford proper goodbyes.”88

  The press frustratingly discovered that Mills’ colleagues and co-workers liked and were devoted to her. Four days after the world learned Snowden’s face, reporters were met by a vacant performance hall, Studio 4, in Hawaii, where Mills was part of the Waikiki Acrobatic Troupe. Its owner, Karl Vorwek, told reporters, “The pole people are definitely not coming back as long as you’re [the press] here.” He is referring to Mills, not being a stripper as the press’s cursory label would suggest, but “a beginner at acrobatics” by Vorwek’s professional assessment. Yet, as numerous former neighbors of the couple would confirm, Mills and Snowden kept their private lives private. Fellow co-worker Billy Bellew was oblivious to the fact Mills had been in an extended relationship with a live-in boyfriend.89 Mills even admits this in a blog post, “I was able to finally introduce E to my skeptical friends (they weren’t quite sure E existed).”90

  Something that was known during this time in Snowden’s life was that he had expert hacking capabilities. On a revised résumé, Snowden cited he had received his Ethical Hacker Certification, or CEH, in 2010.91 This is an official title, earned after passing a 125-question multiple-choice test issued by the International Council of E-Commerce Consultants. To take the exam, a person must have either taken a five-day course at an accredited training center or have a minimal of two years professional IT security experience.

  To reconcile the seeming paradox of the phrase “ethical hacker,” one must first understand the common label for the three types of hackers: white, gray and black hat. Following the iconography established in American Western cinema, a black hat is what most people think of when hearing the word hacker, a bad guy. A black hat attempts to penetrate computer systems and networks in order to insert malicious computer code. These individuals are typically self-serving because the program financially benefits them through a click-for-profit scheme or by revealing sensitive financial data. By contrast the “good guy” white hat targets a system in order to reveal its weaknesses so a person or business can better fortify their property. This is called a “security audit.” As the title suggests, a gray hat is a mixture of the two and an ethical fence-sitter. The latter does not make IT decisions based upon personal gain or the welfare of a paying client but is swayed by the moral demands of the situation. An example of a gray hat is the underground Anonymous coalition. At one turn the group targeted websites hosting child pornography.92 Later in the same year Anonymous attacked Sony after the company attempted to install hacking defenses on its PlayStation 3 game system.93 In theory a CEH is a white hat hacker. The government wanted Snowden to wear a white hat. Instead, he donned a gray one.

  A professional security technician who had worked for two of the most clandestine intelligence agencies in the world did not need a third party to verify his ability. He sought certification because the U.S. government unapologetically required he be acknowledged as a hacker. CEH certification is mandated for government IT employees as outlined by Department of Defense Directive 8570.94 Snowden was also certified by and held membership in (ISC)2, the International Information Systems Security Certification Consortiu
m. Unlike catch-all CEH- validation, the (ISC)2 has levels of certification. When queried, the (ISC)2 refused to disclose what type of (ISC)2 certification Snowden possesses.95

  Midway through his time with Dell, somewhat perplexingly because an undergraduate degree is a mandatory prerequisite, Snowden enrolled in a graduate program at one of the top 200 universities in the world.96 In 2011, he commenced online work for a master’s degree in computer security at the University of Liverpool. He was not auditing the program, because his graduation date was scheduled for 2013.97 A university representative stated that Snowden was not active in his studies, probably because he went from being the supervisor of a team assigned to modernize backup computer infrastructures to a “cyberstrategist” and “cyber counterintelligence” agent for Dell. The latter two self-described roles were assumed after he arrived back on American soil.98

  During this time Snowden was subjected to a five-year “periodic [background] reinvestigation.”99 Required of any government employee with top secret clearance, the inquiry was conducted by the firm which holds over 100 federal contracts and oversees background checks for more than 95 government agencies: U.S. Investigations Services (USIS).100 The same year, the company would become involved in an extended criminal investigation for its “systemic failure to adequately conduct investigations under its contract.”101 USIS gave Snowden a green light in 2011 despite an inconclusive internal investigation involving claims of attempting to access and possibly steal classified materials. USIS also failed to examine a facet of his résumé another government contractor would look at very closely.