Was Snowden hero or traitor? Perhaps a little of both [View all]
By Nate Fick January 19 at 12:55 PM
Nate Fick is CEO of the cybersecurity software company Endgame, and a Marine Corps veteran of Afghanistan and Iraq. He is the author of “One Bullet Away: The Making of a Marine Officer.”
A catastrophic data breach. Russian complicity. Blundering institutions. Distrust of government. Reading Edward Jay Epstein’s gripping and devastatingly even-handed account of Edward Snowden, “How America Lost Its Secrets,” provides a Faulknerian reminder, during these days ringing with the same themes, that “the past is never dead. It’s not even past.”
Epstein’s revelations hit hard and don’t stop. Snowden could not have acted alone, since he didn’t have access to the secret compartments from which he took the most sensitive documents. Vladimir Putin personally authorized Snowden’s exfiltration from Hong Kong to Moscow. Snowden turned over to journalists only 58,000 of the 1.7 million documents he “touched,” the vast bulk of which had nothing to do with domestic surveillance but rather covered America’s overseas spy network, including its most sensitive sources and methods.
Epstein struggles to paint a factual portrait of Snowden without it feeling like an ad hominem attack: high school dropout, described by a classmate as having a high-pitched voice, liking the Magic card game, playing fantasy video games, owning two cats and using the online moniker Wolfking Awesomefox. Snowden washed out of Army training in 2004, worked briefly as a security guard at the University of Maryland and then got a job as, of all things, a CIA telecommunications support officer. Two years later, he received an unfavorable evaluation from his superior and was forced to resign. He then went to work for Dell as a National Security Agency contractor in 2009. As a system administrator, he had both the privileges to access vast amounts of data and the mandate to transfer it to backup servers — the perfect cover for a whistleblower or a spy.
On June 9, 2013, a video of Snowden was posted on the website of the Guardian. Shot in a Hong Kong hotel room, the disclosure begins with “My name is Ed Snowden,” and goes on to detail how the NSA was spying on U.S. citizens. Snowden comes across as calm, compelling and articulate. Overnight, he became a global celebrity and, to much of the world (including many Americans), the lead standard-bearer for data privacy and personal freedom in the digital age.
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