As an outside contractor, working for Dell, Snowden wasn’t entitled to the same whistleblower protections as Drake. Even if he had reported his concerns over NSA surveillance nothing would have happened, he later told Risen. He believed his efforts ‘would have been buried forever’, and that he would have been discredited and ruined. ‘The system does not work. You have to report wrongdoing to those most responsible for it.’
Snowden had lost faith in meaningful congressional oversight of the intelligence community. Instead, Congress was part of the problem, he felt. In particular he was critical of the ‘Gang of Eight’, the group of congressional officials who are notified about the most sensitive US intelligence operations.
By December 2012, he had made up his mind to contact journalists. Asked at what moment he had decided to blow the whistle, Snowden says: ‘I imagine everyone’s experience is different, but for me, there was no single moment. It was seeing a continuing litany of lies from senior officials to Congress – and therefore the American people – and the realisation that that Congress, specifically the Gang of Eight, wholly supported the lies that compelled me to act. Seeing someone in the position of James Clapper – the director of national intelligence – baldly lying to the public without repercussion is the evidence of a subverted democracy. The consent of the governed is not consent if it is not informed.’
In March 2013, Clapper told the Senate intelligence committee that the US government does ‘not wittingly’ collect data on millions of Americans. The statement was untrue, as Snowden would reveal and Clapper would himself later admit. It was also perhaps a felony.
By his account, one document in particular pushed Snowden over the edge. He stumbled upon a classified 2009 report by the NSA’s inspector general – the same person to whom Drake had complained. Snowden had been carrying out a ‘dirty word search’: he was spring-cleaning the system to remove material that shouldn’t have been there. When he opened the document he couldn’t stop himself from reading it.
The report was a detailed 51-page account of how the Bush administration had carried out its illegal wiretapping program following 9/11. The program, codenamed STELLAR WIND, involved the collection of content and metadata from millions of Americans without a warrant. Some of the facts about the wiretapping scandal had emerged a few years earlier, but nothing like the whole story. For Snowden this was incontrovertible proof that senior US officials were breaking the law. Without, he learned, any repercussions at all. ‘You can’t read something like that and not realise what it means for all of the systems we have,’ he told the New York Times.
In Hawaii, by early 2013, Snowden’s sense of outrage was still growing. But his plan to leak appeared to have stalled. He faced too many obstacles. To get access to a final tranche of documents Snowden required greater security privileges than he enjoyed in his position at Dell. Clapper made his ill-fated appearance before the Senate in March. The same month Snowden took a new job with the private contractor Booz Allen Hamilton, yielding him access to a fresh trove of information. According to the NSA staffer who spoke to Forbes, Snowden turned down an offer to join the agency’s Tailored Access Operations, a group of elite hackers. He had entered the final tense weeks of his double life.
Snowden’s last workplace was in downtown Honolulu. It is a shiny, corporate contrast to the RSOC bunker. It occupies the 30th floor of Makai Tower, on Bishop Street, in the financial district. The reception has beige furnishings, framed vintage maps and a television, volume low, tuned to Fox News. Instead of a windowless canteen filled with buzz-cut soldiers, Booz Allen Hamilton staff in suits and Hawaiian shirts stroll through a sunlit courtyard of fountains and choose from dozens of restaurants. The nearest pub, Ferguson’s, isn’t exactly rowdy: it offers bacon-wrapped dates, baked Brie and red pepper tzatziki.
Booz Allen Hamilton’s chairman and president, Ralph Shrader, made complacent assurances about security on the company blog: ‘In all walks of life, our most trusted colleagues and friends have this in common. We can count on them. No matter what the situation or challenge, they will be there for us. Booz Allen Hamilton is trusted in that way. You can count on that.’
Snowden may have allowed himself a wry smile. He was counting on his new employer not to suspect anything. Snowden was reaching the point of no return. Elements in the US government, he knew, would see his actions as a cyber version of Pearl Harbor, a sneak attack. For it to come from within, from a supposed ‘traitor’, would make the wrath all the worse. That Snowden saw it as an act of patriotism, a defence of American values, would soften Washington’s vengeance not a bit.
Snowden’s own name was an apposite one for a man engaged in such risky enterprises. In the 1590s in Britain, John Snowden, a Catholic priest, became a double agent working for Lord Burghley, Queen Elizabeth’s lord treasurer. The historian Stephen Alford describes this Snowden as ‘subtle, intelligent and self-assured’. His job was to spy on Catholic emigrés on the continent who were consorting with the Spanish and plotting against Elizabeth. Snowden used ciphers, secret letters and other tricks. The Elizabethans called such men ‘intelligencers’ or ‘espials’; what they got up to was espiery. (The French term espionage only came into use from the 18th century onwards.)
But Edward Snowden, the modern-day espial, could not use his true name if he was to reach out to the US reporters who worked on national security, and who so far had no clue that Snowden existed. To make contact with them he would need a codename. Given the gravity of what he was undertaking, TheTrueHOOHA seemed jejune. Snowden came up with something new. He chose the handle ‘Verax’, a classical Latin adjective meaning ‘truth-telling’. The word verax is rather rare. It crops up in Plautus, Cicero and Horace. It is used particularly of oracles and supernatural sources.
Snowden intended to become just such a prophetic voice from deep inside the intelligence community. As with his real surname, his codename had a history: two obscure British dissenters also called themselves ‘Verax’. One was Henry Dunckley, a 19th-century Baptist social critic who used the nom de plume in the Manchester Examiner. The other was Clement Walker, a 17th-century Somerset parliamentarian during the English civil war who was eventually locked up and died in the Tower of London. Significantly, verax is also an antonym of mendax. Mendax means ‘deceiving’ and was the handle used by Julian Assange of WikiLeaks when he was a young Australian hacker. WikiLeaks, with their electronic mass-leaking of US army files from Afghanistan, and of State Department diplomatic cables from all over the world, had recently plunged the US administration into uproar. Perhaps Snowden’s allusion was deliberate.
Outwardly, his life continued as before. Read with hindsight, his girlfriend’s blog entries seem poignant. On 1 March, Mills writes that she will be an ‘international woman of mystery’ and that her Friday show later the same evening has a ‘007’ theme.
The performance goes well. Three days later she writes: ‘When I was a child most of my friends would play dress up and fantasize about being a princess, superman or pickle rancher (I have some weird friends). I would imagine being a spy. Running down sewer tunnels to escape treacherous enemies, eavesdropping on important adult conversations, and giving a full report to General Meow. So getting the opportunity to play a Bond and a babe for even a few minutes during my performance on Friday was very fulfilling. And the spy high of Friday night must have subconsciously stuck in my brain, for the following evening E and I randomly pick Skyfall for our date night movie.’