The New Yorker: SNOWDEN CALLS RUSSIAN-SPY STORY “ABSURD”

[struggle4progress]

58. Well, let's examine just one of the claims made by Rogers: in his recent Meet the Press

appearance, Mike Rogers suggested Snowden "was ready to go, he had a go bag, if you will”

In fact, Snowden himself has just confirmed this suggestion, by Rogers on Meet the Press, that he kept a packed go-bag, in an interview with Jane Mayer published in the New Yorker yesterday: Mayer quotes Snowden as saying he had kept a "go-bag packed" since 2007

In the Mayer interview, Snowden further explains that the packed "go-bag" is common for people living undercover. But here he may simply be standing in a hole, digging himself in deeper. According to a timeline published in the Washington Post, Snowden himself claims he was posted by the CIA to Geneva in 2007 but left the CIA in 2009 to work for a private NSA contractor in Japan. An August 2013 Reuters report by Mark Hosenball indicates Snowden worked for Dell from 2009 until early 2013

So from 2009 on, Snowden apparently was not living undercover on government orders. And it's not immediately clear why a civilian contractor would consider himself to be living undercover and would therefore keep a "packed go-bag." There are, however, indications suggesting interpretations unfavorable to Snowden. In an October 2013 New York Times article, Eric Schmidt reported that Snowden's CIA supervisor send Snowden home from Geneva, in part due to suspicions "that Mr. Snowden was trying to break into classified computer files to which he was not authorized to have access". Moreover, there seems to be reason to believe that "Snowden began downloading documents describing the U.S. government's electronic spying programs while he was working for Dell ... and left an electronic footprint indicating when he accessed the documents". In June 2013, the South China Morning Post published an interview in which Snowden himself stated that “My position with Booz Allen Hamilton granted me access to lists of machines all over the world the NSA hacked”:

... Asked if he specifically went to Booz Allen Hamilton to gather evidence of surveillance, he replied: “Correct on Booz.” His intention was to collect information about the NSA hacking into “the whole world” ... The documents he divulged to the Post were obtained during his tenure at Booz Allen Hamilton in April, he said ...

These facts might provide a rather different view of the "packed go-bag" Snowden now admits having:

Snowden had been hoping since his days in Geneva to access classified files without authorization, and by 2012 he had succeeded doing so at Dell. In 2013, he moved to a Booz Allen Hamilton facility in Hawaii, with the intent of stealing files regarding NSA activities worldwide; while there (according to a November 2013 report by Mark Hosenball and Warren Strobel) Snowden obtained access when he "persuaded 20 to 25 co-workers at the NSA regional operations center in Hawaii to give him their user names and passwords by telling them they were needed for him to do his job as a computer systems administrator"

The natural take on Snowden's "packed go-bag" is that he wanted to be ready to skedaddle