Vanity Fair: When Snowden was still missing on Tuesday-the N.S.A.’s efforts to find him intensified

[kpete]

From Vanity Fair’s Snowden Exclusive: A Tense Few Days in Hong Kong
Inside a hotel room in Hong Kong, Edward Snowden shared secrets with journalists Glenn Greenwald, Laura Poitras, and Ewen MacAskill—and then disappeared.

According to intelligence sources, neither Booz Allen nor the N.S.A. yet knew that Snowden had taken classified documents. At this point he was simply missing. It’s believed his family contacted Booz Allen when they couldn’t reach him, setting off alarms. “I feel alone, lost, overwhelmed, and desperate for a reprieve from the bipolar nature of my current situation,” Mills wrote that Monday.

When Snowden was still missing on Tuesday, the N.S.A.’s efforts to find him intensified. On Wednesday, a Century 21 real-estate agent, Kerri Jo Heim, was at the bungalow on Eleu Street with a photographer, preparing for an open house. At one point she was surprised to see two people, one a uniformed policeman, approach the front door. “They just asked if I knew what had happened to the former tenant, and I said I didn’t know,” Heim recalls.

That morning at the Mira, Snowden “was emotional” and had been worrying about his girlfriend, MacAskill remembers. “He was still lying in bed. Just agitated.” Told of this, a person who knows Snowden well says, “Part of him is very naïve. I think he thought the world would see how fucked up what the N.S.A. was doing is and give him a part in a parade. I think he knew people would get mad, and charge him, but that the more that came out, the more people would say, ‘Hey, no.’ ”

That first Guardian story sent tremors through the N.S.A. Somewhere, it was clear, there had been a leak. But was it inside the N.S.A. or elsewhere? Verizon? A rogue congressional source? No one as yet had any sense of how serious this might be. “This data was coming in, but there was no context,” says one official. The Guardian gave them very little to go on.

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the rest:
http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/2014/05/edward-snowden-politics-interview