No Place to Hide Read online

  Near the end of 2009, Snowden, now disillusioned, decided he was ready to leave the CIA. It was at this stage, at the end of his stint in Geneva, that he first began to contemplate becoming a whistle-blower and leaking secrets that he believed revealed wrongdoing.

  “Why didn’t you do it then?” I asked.

  At the time he thought or at least hoped that the election of Barack Obama as president would reform some of the worst abuses he had seen. Obama entered office vowing to change the excessive abuses of national security that had been justified by the War on Terror. Snowden expected that at least some of the roughest edges of the intelligence and military world would be smoothed over.

  “But then it became clear that Obama was not just continuing, but in many cases expanding these abuses,” he said. “I realized then that I couldn’t wait for a leader to fix these things. Leadership is about acting first and serving as an example for others, not waiting for others to act.”

  He was also concerned about the damage that would result from disclosing what he had learned at the CIA. “When you leak the CIA’s secrets, you can harm people,” he said, referring to covert agents and informants. “I wasn’t willing to do that. But when you leak the NSA’s secrets, you only harm abusive systems. I was much more comfortable with that.”

  So Snowden returned to the NSA, this time working for the Dell Corporation, which contracted with the agency. In 2010, he was stationed in Japan and given a much higher degree of access to surveillance secrets than he previously had.

  “The stuff I saw really began to disturb me,” Snowden said. “I could watch drones in real time as they surveilled the people they might kill. You could watch entire villages and see what everyone was doing. I watched NSA tracking people’s Internet activities as they typed. I became aware of just how invasive US surveillance capabilities had become. I realized the true breadth of this system. And almost nobody knew it was happening.”

  The perceived need, the obligation, to leak what he was seeing felt increasingly urgent to him. “The more time I spent at the NSA in Japan, the more I knew that I couldn’t keep it all to myself. I felt it would be wrong to, in effect, help conceal all of this from the public.”

  Later, once Snowden’s identity was revealed, reporters tried to depict him as some sort of simple-minded, low-level IT guy who happened to stumble into classified information. But the reality was far different.

  Throughout his work at both the CIA and NSA, Snowden told me, he was progressively trained to become a high-level cyber operative, someone who hacks into the military and civilian systems of other countries, to steal information or prepare attacks without leaving a trace. In Japan, that training intensified. He became adept at the most sophisticated methods for safeguarding electronic data from other intelligence agencies and was formally certified as a high-level cyber operative. He was ultimately chosen by the Defense Intelligence Agency’s Joint Counterintelligence Training Academy to teach cyber counterintelligence at their Chinese counterintelligence course.

  The operational security methods he insisted we follow were ones he learned and even helped design at the CIA and especially the NSA.

  In July 2013 the New York Times confirmed what Snowden had told me, reporting that “while working for a National Security Agency contractor, Edward J. Snowden learned to be a hacker” and that “he had transformed himself into the kind of cybersecurity expert the N.S.A. is desperate to recruit.” The training he received there, said the New York Times, was “pivotal in his shift toward more sophisticated cybersecurity.” The article added that the files Snowden accessed showed that he had “shifted to the offensive side of electronic spying or cyberwarfare, in which the N.S.A. examines other nations’ computer systems to steal information or to prepare attacks.”

  Although I tried to adhere to the chronology in my questioning, I often couldn’t resist jumping ahead, mostly out of eagerness. I particularly wanted to get to the heart of what, for me, had been the most amazing mystery since I began speaking to him: What had really driven Snowden to throw away his career, turn himself into a potential felon, and breach the demands of secrecy and loyalty that had been drummed into his head for years?

  I asked this same question in many different ways, and Snowden thus answered in many different ways, but the explanations felt either too superficial, too abstract, or too devoid of passion and conviction. He was very comfortable talking about NSA systems and technology, but clearly less so when he himself was the subject, particularly in response to the suggestion that he had done something courageous and extraordinary that warranted a psychological explanation. His answers seemed more abstract than visceral, and so I found them unconvincing. The world had a right to know what was being done to its privacy, he said; he felt a moral obligation to take a stand against wrongdoing; he could not in good conscience remain silent about the hidden threat to the values he cherished.

  I believed those political values were real to him, but I wanted to know what had driven him personally to sacrifice his life and liberty in defense of those values, and I felt I wasn’t getting the true answer. Maybe he didn’t have the answer, or maybe, like many American men, especially when immersed in a national security culture, he was reluctant to dig too deep into his own psyche, but I had to know.

  Apart from anything else, I wanted to be sure he had made his choice with a genuine and rational understanding of the consequences: I was unwilling to help him take so great a risk unless I was convinced he was doing so with full autonomy and agency, with a real grasp of his purpose.

  Finally, Snowden gave me an answer that felt vibrant and real. “The true measurement of a person’s worth isn’t what they say they believe in, but what they do in defense of those beliefs,” he said. “If you’re not acting on your beliefs, then they probably aren’t real.”

  How had he developed this measure for assessing his worth? Where did he derive this belief that he could only be acting morally if he was willing to sacrifice his own interests for the sake of the greater good?

  “From a lot of different places, a lot of experiences,” Snowden said. He had grown up reading large amounts of Greek mythology and was influenced by Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces, which, he noted, “finds common threads among the stories we all share.” The primary lesson he took away from that the book was that “it is we who infuse life with meaning through our actions and the stories we create with them.” People are only that which their actions define them as being. “I don’t want to be a person who remains afraid to act in defense of my principles.”

  This theme, this moral construct for evaluating one’s identity and worth, was one he repeatedly encountered on his intellectual path, including, he explained with a hint of embarrassment, from video games. The lesson Snowden had learned from immersion in video games, he said, was that just one person, even the most powerless, can confront great injustice. “The protagonist is often an ordinary person, who finds himself faced with grave injustices from powerful forces and has the choice to flee in fear or to fight for his beliefs. And history also shows that seemingly ordinary people who are sufficiently resolute about justice can triumph over the most formidable adversaries.”

  He wasn’t the first person I’d heard claiming video games had been instrumental in shaping their worldview. Years earlier, I might have scoffed, but I’d come to accept that, for Snowden’s generation, they played no less serious a role in molding political consciousness, moral reasoning, and an understanding of one’s place in the world than literature, television, and film. They, too, often present complex moral dilemmas and provoke contemplation, especially for people beginning to question what they’ve been taught.

  Snowden’s early moral reasoning—drawn from work that formed, as he said, “a model for who we want to become, and why”—had evolved into serious adult introspection about ethical obligations and psychological limits. “What keeps a person passive and compliant,” he explained, “is fear of repercussions
, but once you let go of your attachment to things that don’t ultimately matter—money, career, physical safety—you can overcome that fear.”

  Equally central to his worldview was the unprecedented value of the Internet. As for many of his generation, “the Internet” for him wasn’t some isolated tool to use for discrete tasks. It was the world in which his mind and personality developed, a place unto itself that offered freedom, exploration, and the potential for intellectual growth and understanding.

  To Snowden, the unique qualities of the Internet were incomparably valuable, to be preserved at all costs. He had used the Internet as a teenager to explore ideas and speak with people in faraway places and from radically different backgrounds whom he’d never otherwise have encountered. “Basically, the Internet allowed me to experience freedom and explore my full capacity as a human being.” Clearly animated, even passionate, when talking about the value of the Internet, Snowden added, “For many kids, the Internet is a means of self-actualization. It allows them to explore who they are and who they want to be, but that works only if we’re able to be private and anonymous, to make mistakes without them following us. I worry that mine was the last generation to enjoy that freedom.”

  The role this played in his decision became clear to me. “I do not want to live in a world where we have no privacy and no freedom, where the unique value of the Internet is snuffed out,” Snowden told me. He felt compelled to do what he could to stop that from happening or, more accurately, to enable others to make the choice whether to act or not in defense of those values.

  Along those lines, Snowden repeatedly emphasized that his goal was not to destroy the NSA’s capability to eliminate privacy. “It’s not my role to make that choice,” he said. Instead, he wanted American citizens and people around the world to know about what was being done to their privacy, to give them the information. “I don’t intend to destroy these systems,” he insisted, “but to allow the public to decide whether they should go on.”

  Often, whistle-blowers like Snowden are demonized as loners or losers, acting not out of conscience but alienation and frustration at a failed life. Snowden was the opposite: he had a life filled with the things people view as most valuable. His decision to leak the documents meant giving up a long-term girlfriend whom he loved, a life in the paradise of Hawaii, a supportive family, a stable career, a lucrative paycheck, a life ahead full of possibilities of every type.

  After Snowden’s NSA stint in Japan ended in 2011, he went to work again for the Dell Corporation, this time deployed to a CIA office in Maryland. With bonuses, he was on track to make in the range of $200,000 that year, working with Microsoft and other tech companies to build secure systems for the CIA and other agencies to store documents and data. “The world was getting worse,” said Snowden of that time. “In that position, I saw firsthand that the state, especially the NSA, was working hand in hand with the private tech industry to get full access to people’s communications.”

  Throughout the five hours of questioning that day—indeed, for the entire time I spoke with him in Hong Kong—Snowden’s tone was almost always stoic, calm, matter-of-fact. But as he explained what he had discovered that finally moved him to action, he became impassioned, even slightly agitated. “I realized,” he said, “that they were building a system whose goal was the elimination of all privacy, globally. To make it so that no one could communicate electronically without the NSA being able to collect, store, and analyze the communication.”

  It was that realization that fixed Snowden’s determination to become a whistle-blower. In 2012, he was transferred by Dell from Maryland to Hawaii. He spent parts of 2012 downloading the documents he thought the world should see. He took certain other documents not for publication, but so that journalists would be able to understand the context of the systems on which they were reporting.

  In early 2013, he realized that there was one set of documents he needed to complete the picture he wanted to present to the world that he could not access while at Dell. They would be accessible only if he obtained a different position, one where he would be formally assigned as an infrastructure analyst, allowing him to go all the way into the raw surveillance repositories of the NSA.

  With this goal in mind, Snowden applied for a job opening in Hawaii with Booz Allen Hamilton, one of the nation’s largest and most powerful private defense contractors, filled with former government officials. He took a pay cut to get that job, as it gave him access to download the final set of files he felt he needed to complete the picture of NSA spying. Most important, that access allowed him to collect information on the NSA’s secret monitoring of the entire telecommunications infrastructure inside the United States.

  In mid-May of 2013, Snowden requested a couple of weeks off to receive treatment for epilepsy, a condition he learned that he had the year before. He packed his bags, including several thumb drives full of NSA documents, along with four empty laptops to use for different purposes. He did not tell his girlfriend where he was going; it was, in fact, common for him to travel for work without being able to tell her his destination. He wanted to keep her unaware of his plans, in order to avoid exposing her to government harassment once his identity was revealed.

  He arrived in Hong Kong from Hawaii on May 20, checking into the Mira Hotel under his own name, and he had been there ever since.

  Snowden was staying at the hotel quite openly, paying with his credit card because, he explained, he knew that his movements would ultimately be scrutinized by the government, the media, and virtually everyone else. He wanted to prevent any claim that he was some type of a foreign agent, which would be easier to make had he spent this period in hiding. He had set out to demonstrate, he said, that his movements could be accounted for, there was no conspiracy, and he was acting alone. To the Hong Kong and Chinese authorities, he looked like a normal businessman, not someone skulking off the grid. “I’m not planning to hide what or who I am,” he said, “so I have no reason to go into hiding and feed conspiracy theories or demonization campaigns.”

  Then I asked the question that had been on my mind since we first spoke online: Why had he chosen Hong Kong as his destination once he was ready to disclose the documents? Characteristically, Snowden’s answer showed that the decision was based on careful analysis.

  His first priority, he said, was to ensure his physical safety from US interference as he worked with Laura and me on the documents. If the American authorities discovered his plan to leak the documents, they would try to stop him, arresting him or worse. Hong Kong, though semi-independent, was part of Chinese territory, he reasoned, and American agents would find it harder to operate against him there than in the other places he considered as candidates for seeking ultimate refuge, such as a small Latin American nation like Ecuador or Bolivia. Hong Kong would also be more willing and able to resist US pressure to turn him over than a small European nation, such as Iceland.

  Though getting the documents out to the public was Snowden’s main consideration in the choice of destination, it was not the only one. He also wanted to be in a place where the people had a commitment to political values that were important to him. As he explained, the people of Hong Kong, though ultimately subject to the repressive rule of the Chinese government, had fought to preserve some basic political freedoms and created a vibrant climate of dissent. Snowden pointed out that Hong Kong had democratically elected leaders and was also the site of large street protests, including an annual march against the Tiananmen Square crackdown.

  There were other places he could have gone to, affording even greater protection from potential US action, including mainland China. And there were certainly countries that enjoyed more political freedom. But Hong Kong, he felt, provided the best mix of physical security and political strength.

  To be sure, there were drawbacks to the decision, and Snowden was aware of them all, including the city’s relationship to mainland China, which would give critics an easy way to demonize him. But there
were no perfect choices. “All of my options are bad ones,” he often said, and Hong Kong did indeed provide him a measure of security and freedom of movement that would have been difficult to replicate elsewhere.

  Once I had all the facts of the story, I had one more goal: to be sure that Snowden understood what would likely happen to him once his identity was revealed as the source behind the disclosures.

  The Obama administration had waged what people across the political spectrum were calling an unprecedented war on whistle-blowers. The president, who had campaigned on a vow to have the “most transparent administration in history,” specifically pledging to protect whistleblowers, whom he hailed as “noble” and “courageous,” had done exactly the opposite.

  Obama’s administration has prosecuted more government leakers under the Espionage Act of 1917—a total of seven—than all previous administrations in US history combined: in fact, more than double that total. The Espionage Act was adopted during World War I to enable Woodrow Wilson to criminalize dissent against the war, and its sanctions are severe: they include life in prison and even the death penalty.

  Without question, the full weight of the law would come crashing down on Snowden. The Obama Justice Department would charge him with crimes that could send him to prison for life and he could expect to be widely denounced as a traitor.

  “What do you think will happen to you once you reveal yourself as the source?” I asked.

  Snowden answered in a rapid clip that made clear he had contemplated this question many times before: “They’ll say I violated the Espionage Act. That I committed grave crimes. That I aided America’s enemies. That I endangered national security. I’m sure they’ll grab every incident they can from my past, and probably will exaggerate or even fabricate some, to demonize me as much as possible.”

  He did not want to go to prison, he said. “I’m going to try not to. But if that’s the outcome from all of this, and I know there’s a huge chance that it will be, I decided a while ago that I can live with whatever they do to me. The only thing I can’t live with is knowing I did nothing.”