Luke Harding: The Snowden Files

Snowden added some code and text ‘in a non-malicious manner’, proving his point. His immediate boss signed off on it. But then the more senior manager with whom Snowden had clashed previously discovered what he had done and was furious. The manager entered a derogatory report – known as a ‘derog’ in spy parlance – into Snowden’s file.

This relatively trivial episode was important in one respect: it may have demonstrated to Snowden the futility of raising grievances via internal channels. Complaining upwards only led to punishment, he could have concluded. But for now there were new horizons to explore.

In February 2009 Snowden resigned from the CIA. His personnel file, whatever it contained, was never forwarded to his next employer – the NSA. Now Snowden was to work as a contractor at an NSA facility on a US military base, out in Japan.

The opportunities for contractors had boomed in the years since 9/11, as the burgeoning US security state outsourced intelligence tasks to private companies. Top officials such as the NSA’s former director Michael Hayden moved effortlessly between government and corporations. This was a revolving door – a lucrative one. Snowden was now on the payroll of Dell, the computer firm. The early lacunae in his CV were by this stage pretty much irrelevant. He had top-secret clearance and outstanding computer skills. Whatever misgivings his former CIA colleagues may have had were lost in the system.

Snowden felt passionately about Japan from his early teens. He had spent a year and a half studying Japanese; he dropped ‘ Arigatou gozaimasu !’ and other phrases into his first Ars chat. Snowden sometimes used the Japanese pronunciation of his name. He dubbed himself: ‘E-do-waa-do’ and wrote in 2001: ‘I’ve always dreamed of being able to “make it” in Japan. I’d love a cushy .gov job over there.’ He played Tekken obsessively; playing an everyman-warrior battling evil against the odds shaped his moral outlook, he later said. Between 2002 and 2004 he worked as the webmaster for Ryuhana Press, a Japanese anime website.

Snowden was keen to improve his language and technical skills. In 2009 he signed up for summer school at a Tokyo-based campus affiliated to the University of Maryland’s University College.

During Japan, Snowden’s online activity dries up, however. He pretty much stops posting on Ars Technica. Japan marks a turning point. It is the period when Snowden goes from disillusioned technician to proto-whistleblower. As Snowden had sight of more top-secret material, showing the scale of NSA data mining, his antipathy towards the Obama administration grew. ‘I watched as Obama advanced the very policies that I thought would be reined in,’ Snowden says, adding of his Japan period: ‘I got hardened.’

Between 2009 and 2012 Snowden says he found out just how all-consuming the NSA’s surveillance activities are: ‘They are intent on making every conversation and every form of behaviour in the world known to them.’ He also realised another uncomfortable truth: that the congressional oversight mechanisms built into the US system and designed to keep the NSA in check had failed. ‘You can’t wait around for someone else to act. I had been looking for leaders, but I realised that leadership is about being the first to act.’

By the time he left Japan in 2012, Snowden was a whistleblower-in-waiting.

‘The authority of government, even such as I am willing to submit to… is still an impure one: to be strictly just, it must have the sanction and consent of the governed.’

In March 2012, Snowden left Japan and moved across the Pacific to Hawaii. At the same time, it seems he donated to his libertarian political hero Ron Paul. An ‘Edward Snowden’ contributed $250 to Paul’s presidential campaign from an address in Columbia, Maryland. The record describes the donor as an employee of Dell. In May, Snowden donated a second $250, this time from his new home at Waipahu, describing himself as a ‘senior adviser’ for an unstated employer.

Snowden’s new job was at the NSA’s regional cryptological centre (the ‘Central Security Service’) on the main island of Oahu, which is near Honolulu. He was still a Dell contractor. The centre is one of 13 NSA hubs outside Fort Meade devoted to SIGINT, and in particular to spying on the Chinese. The logo of ‘NSA/CSS Hawaii’ features two green palm trees set on either side of a tantalising archipelago of islands. The main colour is a deep oceanic blue. At the top are the words: ‘NSA/CSS Hawaii’; at the bottom, ‘Kunia’. It looks an attractive place to work.

He arrived on the volcanic island in the middle of the Pacific with a plan. The plan now looks insane. It was audacious, but – viewed dispassionately – almost certainly going to result in Snowden’s incarceration for a very long time and possibly for the rest of his life.

The plan was to make contact anonymously with journalists interested in civil liberties. Proven journalists whose credentials and integrity could not be doubted. And – though quite how this would happen was a little hazy – to leak to them stolen top-secret documents. The documents would show evidence of the NSA’s illegality. They would prove that the agency was running programs that violated the US constitution. To judge by what he later said, Snowden’s aim was not to spill state secrets wholesale. Rather, he wanted to turn over a selection of material to reporters and let them exercise their own editorial judgement.

To corroborate his claims about the NSA to a sceptical Fourth Estate would not only require lots of documents, Snowden realised. It would also take a preternatural degree of cunning. And a cool head. And some extraordinary good fortune.

Snowden’s new post was NSA systems administrator. This gave him access to a wealth of secret material. Most analysts saw much less. But how was he supposed to reach out to reporters? Sending a regular email was unthinkable. And meeting them in person was difficult, too: any trip had to be cleared with his NSA superiors 30 days in advance. Also, Snowden didn’t ‘know’ any reporters. Or at least not personally.

His girlfriend of eight years, Lindsay Mills, joined him in June on Oahu, which means ‘the gathering place’. Mills grew up in Baltimore, graduated from Maryland Institute College of Art, and had been living with Snowden in Japan. Aged 28, she had worked in a number of jobs – ballet dancer, dance teacher, fitness instructor and pole-dance specialist. Her biggest passion was photography. Mills took a regular photograph of herself – often wearing not much – and posted it on her blog. It was titled: ‘L’s journey. Adventures of a world-travelling, pole-dancing superhero.’

Snowden and Mills rented a three-bedroom, two-bathroom bungalow at 94-1044 Eleu Street, a sleepy, tree-lined neighbourhood in Waipahu, which was a former sugar plantation 15 miles west of Honolulu. It was a blue wooden property, comfortable but not luxurious, with no view of sea or mountains. The front yard had a small lawn, a Dwarf Bottlebrush shrub, some palm trees and a neighbour’s avocado leaning in. The rear had more palm trees, concealing it from the street and a knoll where teenagers furtively smoked.

A sticker on the front door – ‘Freedom isn’t free’, adorned with a Stars and Stripes – hinted at Snowden’s convictions. Neighbours seldom, if ever, spoke to him. ‘A couple of times I’d see him across the street and he nodded and that was it. My impression was that he was a very private person. He did his own thing,’ said Rod Uyehara, who lived directly opposite. A retired army veteran, like many in the neighbourhood, he assumed the young man with short hair was also military.