Chapter 1Elizabeth City

Foreword

Four flash drives. That is what the largest classified archive in the history of American intelligence weighed — a few grams of silicon and plastic in a backpack, small enough to lose in the wash, carried through the Honolulu airport on the afternoon of May 20, 2013. For most of a decade I had written about the other direction of travel: the founders who measured ambition in acres of humming dark and megawatts drawn off the grid, who built server halls the size of small towns and put their names on the doors. My beat was accumulation — more compute, more parameters, more square footage of cooled machine. It had not occurred to me that the most consequential object in the story might be the smallest one, and that it might be moving out.

The people I had made my name on built in the light. They gave interviews, filed patents, printed their valuations on the sides of rockets. Whatever else you thought of them, they wanted to be seen imagining the thing they were making. Edward Snowden's subject was the opposite civilization — the one raised at the same scale, out of the same silicon, a data center rising in the Utah desert with a budget to rival theirs, drawing the same megawatts, engineered by people who had structured its existence so that it would never be acknowledged at all. The old joke inside Fort Meade was that the agency's initials stood for No Such Agency. I had spent years covering the future that held press conferences. Its twin, the one designed never to hold one, I had walked past without seeing. Snowden was the man who made me look at it.

I came to him expecting a thriller, because that is how the story had been sold to the rest of us: the hotel room in Hong Kong, the journalists, the flight that stranded him thirty-nine days deep in the transit zone of a Moscow airport. The Mira Hotel gives this book its title because that room is where a systems administrator from a Maryland suburb became a global event. But the thriller was the least interesting thing about him.

What I found, working from the public record — his own memoir, the court filings in the Eastern District of Virginia, a decade of press archives, the seven thousand documents that actually reached print — was not a spy and not quite a hacker. It was a clerk. A man who believed, with an almost nineteenth-century faith, that the record was the thing. That if you could only get the documents into daylight, the documents would do the rest. Everything he did, from the encryption he taught his journalists to the archive he curated on his way out the door, followed from that one conviction.

That faith is what makes him worth a book, and also what makes him so hard to hold. Two facts about Edward Snowden are true at the same time and refuse to dissolve into each other: that he forced the largest democracy on earth to look at the plumbing of its own surveillance, and that he did so and then became a citizen of a state that would never tolerate a Snowden of its own. Most of the writing about him has tried to make one fact cancel the other. I have tried, in these pages, to let both stand — because the country he exposed has never managed to cancel them either, and I did not see why a biographer should be granted a resolution the history has withheld.

I did not set out to admire him, and I am not certain, now, that admiration is the word. What I feel is nearer to recognition. Twenty years among people convinced they were building the future had not prepared me to find, in a man his own government calls a thief, the one figure in the whole story who saw most clearly what was actually being built. This book follows the four drives from a desk in Hawaii to a suburb outside Moscow. It asks you to take seriously a claim I resisted for a long time: that the smallest object in the room was the one telling the truth.

— Daniel Asher, London

Chapter 1 · Elizabeth City

Edward Joseph Snowden was born on June 21, 1983, in Elizabeth City, North Carolina, a small port town on the Pasquotank River whose name is an English corruption of an Algonquin word meaning "where the current forks." The town's economic foundation across the preceding century had been the combination of United States Coast Guard operations and the scattered manufacturing enterprises that the North Carolina coastal plain supported. His father, Lonnie Snowden, was a Coast Guard chief petty officer at the Aviation Technical Training Center in Elizabeth City, working as a curriculum designer and electronics instructor. His mother, Elizabeth "Wendy" Snowden, would later work as a clerk at the United States federal court in Baltimore. Edward had an older sister named Jessica, who would in time become a lawyer at the Federal Judicial Center in Washington, the research and education arm of the federal courts.

Edward's lineage on his mother's side was deep American. By his own account in Permanent Record, the Mayflower-descended thread ran back to John Alden, the Plymouth Colony's cooper, and to Priscilla Mullins, whose daughter Elizabeth Alden was the first Pilgrim child born in New England. The family had threaded through nine generations of New England seafaring before, after the Revolutionary War, the Jocelin line settled in North Carolina. Amaziah Jocelin became, after independence, the United States Navy Agent for the Port of Wilmington and established that city's first chamber of commerce, calling it (in a coincidence Snowden would later note in his memoir) the Intelligence-Office. The maternal Carolina-Confederate line filled out across the Jocelins, Moores, Halls, Meylands, Howells, Stevenses, Restons, and Stokleys. The family had, in Snowden's own framing, "always answered the call of duty." His maternal grandfather, whom he called Pop, was Rear Admiral Edward J. Barrett, then deputy chief of the Coast Guard's aeronautical engineering division at headquarters in Washington. After his Coast Guard retirement, Pop became a senior official in the FBI's aviation section. Edward inherited his middle name and the Edward Joseph naming pattern from him.

The Snowden family was, by the conventional arithmetic of American middle-class professional life, substantially stable. The family moved, when Edward was nine, from North Carolina to Crofton, Maryland, following Lonnie's Coast Guard transfer to operations in the Washington D.C. area. They lived in a planned community fitted around the curves of the Crofton Country Club between Crofton Parkway and Route 450, what Snowden in his memoir would describe as a development whose neighborhood subdivisions carried "quaint ye-olde names like Crofton Towne, Crofton Mews, The Preserve, The Ridings." Crofton sat at the western edge of Anne Arundel County. It was halfway between Annapolis and Washington, twenty minutes north of the Crofton-County highway interchange that fed into the Baltimore-Washington Parkway, which in turn ran past the gates of Fort George G. Meade, the army installation whose outer perimeter contained the headquarters of the National Security Agency. The family was, in geographic fact, a five-minute drive from one of the two largest signals-intelligence operations on the planet.

The Maryland years established the familial context in which Edward's adolescence would be conducted. Crofton was a bedroom community in the federal-government-worker demographic that the Washington suburbs had, across the 1990s, accumulated around. The neighborhood was quiet. The public schools were adequate but not exceptional. Lonnie and Wendy Snowden would, across the subsequent decade of Edward's adolescence, progressively separate and eventually divorce in 2001, when Edward was seventeen, in circumstances that Edward has characterized as relatively amicable but that produced, across his later teenage years, a domestic instability whose effects his subsequent trajectory partially reflected. Wendy had, by the time of Edward's adolescence, taken a position with the NSA at Fort Meade as a clerk in the agency's general administrative apparatus before moving across to the federal courts in Baltimore. The Snowden household had, in operational reality, been a national-security-adjacent household across Edward's entire formative period. The boy who would, two decades later, take an axe to the most secret American intelligence apparatus had been raised inside its grid, on its salary, by its civilian employees, at its bedroom-community remove.

The first computer arrived in the Crofton house when Edward was approximately eight, a Compaq Presario that Lonnie had brought home, set up in a spare room, and then largely surrendered to his son. By his mid-teenage years Edward had been conducting substantive online technology-community participation. He spent the late 1990s in what would become, by his own self-characterization, a sustained absorption in the early consumer internet: the bulletin boards, the IRC channels, the early hacker-and-cypherpunk online communities, the broader libertarian-technologist conversation that the post-Cold-War internet had been organizing itself around. Edward would later describe himself as a child of dial-up: he could remember the modem handshake's sequence of tones with the precision other children of his cohort remembered cartoon theme songs. The screech-and-static of a 28.8K modem connecting to a regional internet service provider in 1995 was, for him, the sound of arrival.

Edward attended Arundel High School from 1997 through 1999. He did not complete his high-school diploma. He had been, across the 1998-1999 period, diagnosed with mononucleosis whose recovery extended across several months. The extended absence from school, combined with the family-disruption stress that the Snowdens' progressing separation was producing, resulted in Edward missing substantial course requirements. Rather than repeat the year, he withdrew from high school. He obtained a General Educational Development certificate instead.

He enrolled, across subsequent semesters, at Anne Arundel Community College in computer-related coursework. He did not complete a degree. He took the Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer (MCSE) certification, the standard mid-1990s industry credential for Windows-systems administration, while also taking a smattering of college courses across multiple fields. The pattern of incomplete formal education, high-school dropout, GED, partial community college, professional industry certification, would be, across the subsequent years of his professional advancement, the resume that his subsequent employers would overlook on the basis of the demonstrated technical capacities he progressively accumulated outside the formal educational systems. His employment record would in time list the National Security Agency, the Central Intelligence Agency, Dell Computer, and Booz Allen Hamilton. None of those employers would ever require a copy of a high-school diploma he did not possess.

The broader phenomenon that Edward's educational trajectory reflected was, by the early 2000s, a structural feature of the American intelligence-community contractor labor market. The post-9/11 expansion of the intelligence community had produced an acute shortage of cleared technical workers that the traditional educational-credential hiring criteria could not quickly address: universities with accredited computer-science programs requiring four-year degrees produced graduates on a timeline incompatible with the urgent post-9/11 scaling needs. The intelligence community's response was the credential waiver — the authorization of hiring for positions that would normally have required bachelor's degrees, extended to individuals whose demonstrated technical competence supplied the functional equivalent of the credential the degree would have certified. The National Security Agency's formal post-9/11 hiring expansion included specific guidance permitting credential waivers for individuals with demonstrated technical capability in shortage specialties, including network security and systems administration. Edward's MCSE certification, which documented specific Windows-network-administration competency through an industry-standard exam process, was the credential that the NSA's waiver framework was designed to substitute for the bachelor's degree his partial community-college enrollment had not produced. The waiver framework was, in the broader intelligence-community labor-market assessment of the post-9/11 decade, the single decision that most directly produced the access profile that Edward's subsequent disclosure required. The NSA had, in the urgency of its post-9/11 scaling, admitted technical workers whose informal educational backgrounds and self-directed learning trajectories had produced individuals less institutionally socialized into the secrecy norms that the agency's culture expected from its direct-hire career employees. Edward was not the only person the credential waivers had admitted. He was the one whose subsequent trajectory had made the policy consequential.

The NSA's headquarters at Fort Meade, the specific institutional structure Edward would spend a decade orbiting before penetrating, was itself a product of the Cold War surveillance expansion that the post-9/11 period had substantially amplified. The agency had been formally established by President Harry Truman on October 24, 1952, through a seven-page memorandum to the Secretary of Defense whose classification had been so complete that NSA's existence was not publicly acknowledged for decades — giving rise to the long-running insider joke that its initials stood for "No Such Agency" or "Never Say Anything." The Fort Meade campus, which by the 2012-2013 period of Edward's final assignment encompassed the eleven-story OPS1 headquarters building with its blue-black electromagnetic-shielding glass panels, the adjacent OPS2A building, the Visitor Control Center, the supercomputing facilities in the Utah Data Center under construction at Bluffdale, and approximately 37,000 employees plus contractor staff, had been built up across the preceding six decades into the largest signals-intelligence operation on the planet. Its annual budget, as Edward would in time reveal through the 2013 Black Budget, was approximately $10.8 billion in fiscal year 2013 — the largest single-agency budget in the civilian intelligence community.

The Utah Data Center at Bluffdale, whose construction was ongoing across the period of Edward's Hawaii assignment, was the specific infrastructure project that the NSA's post-9/11 expansion had most extensively funded. The facility, located approximately twenty-five miles south of Salt Lake City on Camp Williams military land, encompassed approximately 1.5 million square feet of building space including approximately 100,000 square feet of server halls. Its construction cost was approximately $1.5 billion. Its estimated power consumption, at operational capacity, was approximately 65 megawatts — enough to power a small city. The intelligence community had awarded the primary construction contract in 2011 to Balfour Beatty Infrastructure, Inc., the American subsidiary of the British construction conglomerate. The facility's planned computing capacity was, in the NSA's internal planning documents that Edward would in time read, intended to support the analysis of the bulk-collected data at a scale whose precise specifications remain classified. James Bamford, the investigative journalist who had spent three decades covering NSA operations and had published the most comprehensive public accounts of the agency's history in The Puzzle Palace (1982) and The Shadow Factory (2008), was the first journalist to extensively document the Bluffdale facility in a March 2012 Wired magazine article. Edward read that article. He was, at the moment of reading, sitting at the NSA Hawaii facility that was preparing to feed its collected data into the Bluffdale systems. The gap between what Bamford's article characterized as the facility's purpose and what Edward's system-administrator access revealed about the data the facility was designed to analyze was, in Edward's subsequent account, one of the early-formation data points of the disclosure he was already beginning to plan.

What Edward was doing across his later teenage years was working freelance web design through a small operation called Squirrelling Industries, run by a married woman in her mid-twenties whom he called Mae in his memoir. Her townhouse sat on the southwestern edge of Fort Meade where her husband worked as an Air Force linguist assigned to the NSA. Edward worked there at $30 an hour cash, in love with his married boss, on federal property at the most secret American intelligence installation, in a pre-9/11 America where the Fort Meade gates were not yet bollarded and barricaded. In his memoir's account, he could "just drive onto the army base housing the world's most secretive intelligence agency in my '92 Civic, windows down, radio up, without having to stop at a gate and show ID." This was, in retrospect, the substantive demonstration of the porousness of the pre-9/11 American security state that the post-9/11 transformation would reverse. The boy who would in time become the highest-profile leaker the NSA had ever produced first entered the agency's perimeter as a teenager in a Honda Civic, music up, no badge, no question, no record.

The cultural context that his online participation occurred within was, across the late 1990s and early 2000s, the American libertarian-technologist community whose ideological commitments were organized around the proposition that digital technology would, across the subsequent decades, liberate individuals from governmental and corporate controls. The technology-libertarian framework had been articulated across the work of figures including John Perry Barlow, the Electronic Frontier Foundation founder whose 1996 "Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace" had provided the movement's foundational text. The Declaration's opening sentence, which Edward had encountered as a high-schooler and which he would later quote in interviews, addressed the world's industrial governments directly: "On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather." The Declaration was, in the literary register, melodramatic. It was also, in the political register, the manifesto of the cohort whose political convictions Edward's subsequent decisions would substantially reflect.

He read the cypherpunk mailing-list archives. He absorbed the ethics of figures like Tim May and Phil Zimmermann, the inventor of PGP encryption who had been federally investigated in the early 1990s for "exporting munitions" by publishing the encryption source code online. He read the early Wired magazine, the SF-grounded technology journalism that the post-Cold-War tech-libertarian moment had organized itself through. He developed, across the years of his self-directed online education, the substantive technical-and-ethical framework on which his subsequent disclosures would eventually draw. The framework's central proposition was that technical capacity, properly understood, was a form of political agency. The framework's central anxiety was that the same technical capacities, when accumulated by states, produced surveillance regimes whose structural reach exceeded what individual citizens could meaningfully resist. The proposition and the anxiety would, across the subsequent decade, become the operational thesis of his life.

Phil Zimmermann's ordeal had been, for the teenage Edward absorbing the cypherpunk tradition, the paradigmatic demonstration of the government's relationship to citizen encryption tools. In February 1993, the US government had opened a criminal investigation against Zimmermann under the Arms Export Control Act, on the theory that the publication of PGP's source code online constituted the export of munitions to foreign nationals. The investigation ran for three years before the Justice Department dropped it in January 1996 without filing charges. What the investigation had demonstrated was that the American government's reflex, when confronted with civilian encryption technology it could not easily compromise, was to criminalize the technology. The lesson, from the teenage Edward's perspective, was that the government's instinct was to control what citizens could protect from surveillance, and that the cypherpunk community's response, to distribute encryption tools as widely as possible before criminalization could take effect, was the correct countermeasure. Zimmermann became, across the subsequent years, a hero of the movement. PGP became the standard encryption tool of the security-conscious online community. Edward would, two decades later, use PGP to initiate contact with Glenn Greenwald in December 2012 — deploying the specific technology whose inventor the government had tried to imprison as the technical mechanism of the disclosure whose exposure the government would subsequently spend a decade trying to contain.

The parallel case of Jim Bell was also, in the cypherpunk tradition Edward absorbed, a cautionary data point about the government's treatment of the community's more aggressive members. Bell, a Portland-based electrical engineer and cypherpunk mailing-list participant, had in 1995-1996 published an essay titled "Assassination Politics" that proposed a theoretically anonymous assassination-market mechanism using cryptographic tools. The essay had been more political provocation than operational blueprint, but it had attracted sustained FBI and IRS attention. Bell was arrested in 1997 on tax evasion and obstruction charges, served eleven months, and was arrested again in 2001 after surveillance of his monitoring of federal agents. Bell's trajectory was the limit case of the cypherpunk tradition's confrontation with the American security state: the man who had pushed the community's privacy-tools logic to its most extreme conclusion had been systematically destroyed by the institutions that logic had been formulated to resist. The teenage Edward absorbed the Bell case alongside the Zimmermann case as evidence of the government's appetite for eliminating community members whose technical knowledge and political commitments produced outputs the government found threatening. The lesson was not Bell's specific argument about assassination markets; it was the demonstration that the government would use whatever legal mechanism was available to eliminate the individuals it found most threatening. Two decades later, the Espionage Act would serve as Edward's equivalent mechanism.

The family pattern of military and federal service set the conditions for what Edward would do after the September 11 attacks of 2001. Both his grandfathers had served. His father had served. He had, across his upbringing, internalized the family expectation that he too would serve in some capacity. The 9/11 attacks supplied the motivating event. The family expectation supplied the channel. The institutional path he chose, which his father, in Edward's account, considered "a waste of his technical talents," would surprise the family but would conform to the deeper Snowden tradition of military service across the generations.

Edward's father Lonnie Snowden was himself a visible public presence in the aftermath of the disclosure, and the biographical record of the father's response illuminates the family context that the son's decision disrupted. Lonnie Snowden, retired from the Coast Guard by the time of the June 2013 disclosure, appeared in multiple television interviews across the summer of 2013 in which he expressed love for his son while simultaneously characterizing the manner of the disclosure as something he wished Edward had handled differently. In a June 2013 television interview with Fox News's Eric Bolling, Lonnie described Edward as a principled young man acting out of conscience, while also stating his belief that Edward could have found alternative channels for raising his concerns. In October 2013, Lonnie traveled to Moscow to see his son. He arrived on October 10 for a six-day visit — his first reunion with Edward since before the disclosure — and the two met several times across the stay, the visa and logistics arranged with the assistance of Edward's Russian attorney Anatoly Kucherena. Speaking to reporters at Sheremetyevo airport before returning to the United States, Lonnie said he was satisfied with the way his son had been treated in Russia and described Edward as living comfortably. The reunion did not dissolve the larger separation the disclosure had imposed — father in America, son in exile, their meetings necessarily rare and conducted under the constraints of Edward's Russian residency — but it was real, and it stood as the personal-level counterpoint to the estrangement the disclosure had produced across the generation before Edward's own.

He was eighteen years old when the second plane hit the South Tower at 9:03 AM on the morning of September 11, 2001. He was, at that moment, on federal property, inside the perimeter of the National Security Agency, working freelance web design out of his married boss's spare bedroom. The country he had been raised in was, in the half-hour following 9:03 AM, transforming into the country that would in time produce the surveillance apparatus that Edward, twelve years later, would expose. He was already inside the gates. He would remain inside the gates for the next twelve years. He would walk out of the gates, on May 20, 2013, with four USB drives in a backpack and the largest classified-document archive in the history of American intelligence on those drives, and the country he had grown up in would never look the same to him again.

Chapter 2 walks with him from the Fort Meade gates on the morning of September 11, 2001, into the Army recruiting office, into the CIA, and out across the European continent.