A grinning Snowden answering a question about moles in the NSA in the film made by Laura Poitras released in May 2013.
In continuing to contemplate my compendium of material on Edward Snowden and his WikiLeaks enablers Julian Assange, Jacob Appelbaum and Laura Poitras, I keep coming back to the question of what Snowden was doing in March-April 2013. As I noted in this post, when you contemplate the scenarios for the leak particularly at the Independent, the possibility opens up that his digital trail may have been discovered, and that the claim by the NSA source that he didn't leave a trail could be a false decoy; or only what those particular sources know -- and they may not know everything and may not be up to day.
Nuclear Diner has a concise but full timeline for Snowden personally and his co-conspirators. She writes:
March 2013: Poitras convinces Greenwald to listen to Snowden. Snowden joins Booz Allen Hamilton on work for NSA [link added 2]. [2] Reuters says this was in April, with training sessions for “a week or two” at Fort Meade, Maryland. [2]
Late March or early April, 2013: Greenwald begins communicating directly with Snowden.
April 2013: Snowden is assigned to an NSA facility in Hawaii. [2]
In my compendium, I wrote:
Snowden first came to Hawaii to work for Dell. Then he left Dell to go to Booz Allen Hamilton where he worked less than three months as BAH tells us in a terse statement on their web site after these events.
The Times is the only source I've seen (correct me if I'm wrong) that posits a segue between Dell and BAH where his hacking for the ultimate great revelation starts at Dell, and gives him reason then to move to BAH. The Times writes:
In what may have been his last job for Dell in Hawaii, he was responsible for the security of “Windows infrastructure” in the Pacific, he wrote, according to people who have seen his résumé. He had enough access there to start making contacts with journalists in January and February about disclosing delicate information. His work for Dell may also have enabled him to see that he would have even more access at Booz Allen
And as I noted in my post about the hackers converging in Hawaii from dredging up Snowden's pole-dancing girlfriend's blog from April 1, about Edward's flight on Saturday, March 30:
Flight was the theme of my weekend. Okay, who am I kidding? Flight is the theme of nearly all my recent days. Maybe I just have hollow bones! E flew off Saturday evening giving me six hours to kill before I had to pick up DucatiD from the airport. Luckily Hawaii has good food and friends to pass the time. With E soaring through the sky and friends dropped off, I snuggled to sleep in my empty home. Only to start Sunday circus with another airport pickup — taxi license in my future?
Remember, as the South China Morning Post originally reported, Snowden joined Booz, Hamilton Allen in March 2013 deliberately to hack more?
Then in the next entry, Snowden's girlfriend writes:
Just me and turtle for the next week or two. If you don’t have a house turtle I highly recommend procuring one. They are comforting and make a house feel like a home. And I will surely need his snuggle powers this month with all that is going down. April is turning into spring cleaning on crack — houses, travel, relationships — and the month hasn’t even begun! E is leaving tomorrow for two weeks of business on the mainland. If you know of any fun slumber parties going down over the next two weeks count me in! There may be a ticket to the east coast with my name on it somewhere in those two weeks or potentially later in April/early May (you know I’m a last minute decider). On top of mainland adventures there is this pesky task of moving.
So these two entries indicate "business on the mainland" -- not a trip to Maui. Yet he might have combined both, and not told her. There's also her own reference to a trip to Maui as well -- but that's not until an entry on September 21.
As we know, the hackers' crew were in Maui in late March/early April. We know that Jacob Appelbaum and his friends Moxie Marlinspike and Christine Corbett were all in Maui, and possibly Poitras (the journalist referenced in the diary -- or that might have been Xeni Jardin) and others.
Did they meet?
The Spring Break of Code organized rather hastily starting in January 2013 (when Snowden first made contact with Poitras) by Moxie Marlingspike ran from March 23 to March 31.
Appelbaum tweeted (and later mentioned in his speech in Berlin trying to create the alibi for the coincidence) that his friends treated him to a trip to Hawaii for his birthday, which is April 3. Obviously, he did get to Hawaii before his birthday because he tweeted about diving on March 30; we know that the Spring Break of Code attendees overlapped with Appelbaum because of Claudine Colbert's instagram picture of Appelbaum in Hawaii on April 6 amidst exotic flora.
People joke (or?) about his cutting underseas Internet cables and of course there is his cryptic comment, "Subsurface 3.0.2-79-g218fd994eea9". Maybe this is a geocode and maybe somebody smarter than me can get it to work here or someplace like this
Having witnessed myself in person at the Whitney Museum how Appelbaum distributed a list of coordinates where one could find NSA cables (!) and presumably disable them, maybe he was looking for one!
In any event, there were a few days when Snowden and Appelbaum could have overlapped -- a day or two. I hope the people investigating all this are checking his departures and arrivals carefully...
What was most likely on the mainland in Ft. Meade (the location of the NSA) was some kind of orientation or training.
As we know if we were paying attention, the feds were hunting for Snowden even before he published his article because Booz, Allen evidently reported him missing. But what would make them report his disappearance to the NSA, unless they had also found evidence of his hacking? Would someone who left on sick leave automatically trigger a fear of a security breech by the fact of their being missing alone?
And why the need to go missing, anyway? That is the mystery to me. If we posit that there is a conspiracy, and Snowden went and joined BHA in order to hack better and hack more according to a wish list either of his own making or given to him by Greenwald, Poitras or Appelbaum, singly or together, then why would he risk the entire thing by disappearing -- and then showing up in Hong Kong and publicizing himself?
People speculating about this on hackers' forums often say that they think he feared he would be killed by the CIA/NSA or the Illuminati or WHOEVER, and that's why he decided to go public.
Reuters reports the following about this period:
Snowden already had a Top Secret clearance before he joined Booz Allen in April, two sources said, adding that he likely obtained that clearance - which involves passing a polygraph exam - when he previously worked for the Central Intelligence Agency.
For his first week or two with Booz Allen, Snowden attended training sessions near Fort Meade, the Maryland military installation where NSA headquarters is located and where numerous agency contractors have offices.
After that, Snowden moved to take up his assignment with a company team based at the NSA installation in Hawaii. He was only on the job for around four weeks when he told his employers he was ill and requested leave without pay, the sources said.
In each case this trip is described, it is always "week or two". His girlfriend says "week or two". Reuters says "week or two". Why aren't they precise?
Is it because he made two trips -- one clandestinely to contact Appelbaum and other hackers in Maui, and the other as part of his official emploment training, to Ft. Meade on the mainland?
Why does this matter?
Well, now that we know that Snowden contacted the Russians much earlier than when was originally reported (by Greenwald, Poitras, and Appelbaum, none of whom mentioned this at all in any of their reports), it's possible there are earlier meetings among all or any of them.
And the reason that matters is not only because if they lie or omit facts about one thing, they can do it about lots of other things; what matters is that they may have created a wishlist for Snowden to hack. Greenwald might not have had an informed opinion about what would be useful to hack, but Appelbaum would, and then Greenwald could have commented on whether a news story could be made out of it or not.
What they needed, obviously, from the perspective of their movement's imperative (the movement to attack what they viewed as "the surveillance state") was evidence that the NSA spied directly on citizens for no good reason. They have not yet shown this. But they have created the impression that they have shown this by having Greenwald put out story after story that sounds as if the NSA reads your mail indiscriminately. Actually, they haven't been able to prove this, and certainly have no cases. Screening of cell phone call metadata or keyword searches even through held overseas Internet traffic is not that.
Would they have bent over backward not to seem as if they were directing him, so as not to look like the co-conspirators they look like now? I think Appelbaum wouldn't have bothered because he is extreme, and also more than any of them lives in a virtual world; next after him in radicalism and virtuality comes Poitras. Greenwald is savvy and a lawyer and knows how to lawfare his way out of any tight situation and would always try to maintain that plausible deniability required.
If journalists were really pursuing this story properly, they would be trying to get information now out of BHA as to what the dates were of their training or orientation for Snowden, and whether they found a digital audit of his leaking.
They would be trying to get the airlines to talk or be at least checking flight times and trying to see if they could find any other intersections between Appelbaum and Snowden.
Knowing how much Poitras relied on Appelbaum for encryption stuff, I can't believe she didn't let him in on the secret of Snowden immediately; indeed, she has implicated him by saying in interviews that he helped her with the comms involved in maintaining contact with Snowden and getting his stuff out.
And the reason I think they did meet before they broke their own story, and met in Hawaii, is because I think they needed to have a face-to-face meeting to make sure Snowden was the real thing.
Maybe Jake had to sit with Ed at a laptop and watch him use his credentials to log on to the NSA's servers to believe him. It's not like he could say, "Go on Team Viewer and let me watch you hack the NSA's servers."
Or was the sojourn at BHA merely planned all along as something very short to get in and out and get what had already been identified to take?
But what happened? Why did he have to go AWOL and only create more suspicion, then flea to Hong Kong? Reuters reported this:
When Booz Allen checked in with him, Snowden said he was suffering from epilepsy and needed more time off. When he failed to return after a longer period, and the company could not find him, it notified intelligence officials because of Snowden's high-level security clearance, one of the sources said.
Back in June, Politico's Josh Gerstein reported that Gen. Alexander said in a briefing that Snowden obtained the information about the FISA court and Verizon and the metaday from his training in Hawaii, at the Threat Operations Center, from a special server there -- not from training in Ft. Meade (as originally incorrectly reported). That was the very first story that Greenwald ran. Did he or any of the others know that access to this information became available during trainings, and that was the time to grab it?
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