I added a section to my book for the next edition on Snowden in Japan, and I'm publishing it here for now. Comments and corrections welcome.
3. Snowden in Japan
Starting as a teenager, Edward Snowden developed a keen interest in Japanese culture, specifically in anime, or cartoon animation. He even took Japanese language lessons for more than a year and identified himself as a Buddhist when he later applied to the Army. Like a lot of young nerds on the Internet, he was drawn to the familiar exoticism of online comic books – the strangely Western-looking Asian cartoon characters with large, round eyes who combined super-hero adventures with emotional romanticism. Snowden even went to work for an anime publishing house called Ryuhana Press, located in Ft. Meade, Maryland. (The website closed in 2004 but can be accessed in the Wayback Machine .)
On his web site, Snowden created an anime persona – an older father of two children – and talked about his love for the role-playing martial arts game Tekken, which he was said to be good at:
Welcome to the Book of Ed, your stay here should be a religious experience, I assure you. ...probably about Tekken, for now, anyway.
I like Japanese, I like food, I like martial arts, I like ponies, I like guns, I like food, I like girls, I like my girlish figure that attracts girls, and I like my lamer friends.
That's the best biography you'll get out of me, coppers!
His virtual calling card contained the following information – but like a lot of kids he forgot to change his actual birthdate to match his fake age:
Name: Ed Snowden
AKA: Edowaado, Phish, The True HOOHA
Ryuhana Job Title: Editor/Coffee-Boy
Age: 37
DOB: 6/21/83, The Summer Solstice, the Longest Day of the Year
Fighting Styles: Ni-Ten Ichiryu, Muay Thai, Brazilian Juijitsu, Girly Biting and Scratching
Theme Song: The Natural Playboy
Accessory Fetish: Colored Sunglasses (Purple)
Children: Two sons: Lashawnda and Tamiqua; Ages 11 and 12 respectively.
Among the links he featured on the front page of his website on June 20, 2002, I saw the old web site of Lum the Mad – the persona of a famous game designer named Scott Jennings. I caught up with Lum in Second Life, where his avatar is named Lum Lumley, and asked him if he had ever chatted with Snowden online or knew anything more about him than what we were seeing the press, mainly on Ars Technica. He said he had never heard from Snowden at all. Later, he mentioned on his Facebook:
I'm not sure what is weirder, that Edward Snowden was apparently a Lum the Mad reader who had a link on his ancient website, or that I was told this by a still-extant Prokofy Neva.
His friends had great fun with the idea, with one of them quipping in game lingo, “Now that you mention it, he camped a Russian airport like he was waiting for the Ancient Cyclops to spawn.”
Another said with unwitting insight, referencing a popular role-playing game infamous for its exploiters, “ Did he learn his morals from Ultima 4? Can this be traced back to RG?!”
The young Snowden also attended Otakon, the largest East Coast gathering of anime fans, in Ft. Meade in 2002. He wrote an aggressive fanboy’s post about it
I had a blast at Otakon, after rubbing anti-inflammatory on my bottom to remove the swelling the prices for admission and parking gave me. I hope the Orioles explode in an iridescent fireball of unparalleled beauty. I would say the high point of Otakon was Saturday night's Karaoke room with Karaoke Kate's rendition of "Voices" from Macross Plus. I had planned to do "The Natural Playboy" from Bust a Move, but time constraints told me to take a hike. I was also able to play one of the better Tekken players around (the guy from Kazuya Mishima.com) and actually get beaten (which is an accomplishment, I assure you). I also got to get scolded by angry, frustrated volunteers who really shouldn't be allowed in public to begin with as well.
Did anyone else ask a volunteer for help? I got sick of them and declared jihad on them, myself. Perhaps you guys should check the alternate entrances in MAT3K! Bwahahah! (I came in through an air vent).
Sounds like a typically impatient , fussy nerd (what incident set him off and got him scolded? what frustrated or angered the volunteers and why did he clash with them?). but at least he had some awareness, as he then wrote:
...I really am a nice guy, though. You see, I act arrogant and cruel because I was not hugged enough as a child, and because the public education system turned it's wretched, spikéd back on me.
Let the record show it…
Could a spiteful Snowden have made contact with more hard-core hackers bent on hacking the NSA or even Russian intelligence at Otakon or some similar mass conference? It would be the perfect milieu for either type of recruitment as there are swarms of talented coders into anime, part of a decidedly anti-establishment alternative culture, lovers of Ron Paul and libertarian extremism or other online anarchist ideologies of the sort promoted by Julian Assange.
But good luck trying to pick out his contacts – 26,000 people typically flock to these gatherings every year. And not only are there numerous conferences like this around the world making tracking difficult, the people in this alternative culture bristle at the remotest hint of any accusation that they – even with their anti-government views – have anything to do with hacking governments, let alone foreign espionage. In other words, it’s an ideal setting for hostile foreign spies to work given that sort of cover (and that is likely a reason for the NSA or CIA to show up there as well).
Reuters reported that Snowden “stated in a resume that he went to computer-related classes at Johns Hopkins University, a Tokyo campus of the University of Maryland and the University of Liverpool in Britain.” A University of Maryland spokesman did confirm that Snowden had studied at the university’s campus “in Asia” but declined to give more details. There is a campus in Tokyo but it’s not clear when Snowden was there. As for Liverpool, it’s not clear if he actually travelled there, as a spokeswoman for that institution said Snowden did not complete the course.
Snowden clearly wanted to use his computer skills to get a job that would take him to Japan. In an article titled “Edward Snowden is a Huge Nerd.” reporter Joe Coscarelli found a comment Snowden wrote on the Ars Technica forum:
In another post titled, "Has anybody considered working as IT security in Japan?" Snowden inquired about finding a job overseas. "All things considered, American certificates, especially in internet security, should prove to be extremely attractive," the user wrote. "There have also been a couple studies that show out of qualified applicants, blondes are hired more often in Japan." And later: "I summon your soapbox-strength opinions! Surely you can't be too busy debating gun control and dug-up bodies! I'm but a wee slip of a man who desperately searches for a scrap of interesting reading material! I want to expatriate! I want to expatriate with flair and clandestine meetings!
Snowden left the CIA in 2009 and began work for Dell, a private contractor, inside an NSA facility on a US military base in Japan.
Aside from the anime circuit, there is the related “hacker spaces” and “maker” movements – networks of nerds interested not just in computer code but hardware engineering and tinkering with various gadgets. The international hacker spaces movement is one that Jacob Appelbaum vigorously supports, and has spoken on this platform. The hacker/maker club at MIT, where Chelsea Manning and her then-boyfriend, as well as her controversial supporter David House all mingled -- possibly with Aaron Swartz – is also a place where Appelbaum intersected. Could Snowden have hung out at the Tokyo Hacker Space? There isn’t any evidence of him showing up in this close-knit community, but there are tons of geek conferences in Tokyo – notable W3C, the consortium that manages the World Wide Web, where convergences may have occurred. These should all be looked at – it seems possibly that while posted abroad without old friends or family, he would have looked at these types of hacker environments for activities and friendship – depending on how tightly there were controls on off-base activity in his job.
The several people with whom he edited the anime magazine back in Ft. Meade do not seem to be related to Japan itself, and they do not seem to intersect with him later, or with the hacker movements.
The Japanese media has turned up various people including an American ex-pat with whom Snowden was in touch online or in person, but as can be expected, they bristled, too, at the insinuation that they could have had anything to do with helping or harboring him.
Yet it was in Japan that Snowden began hacking the NSA – and there are some who believe he had help. What prompted him then and there to begin his fateful odyssey?
In a story date-lined June 9, 2013, the Guardian wrote:
Three weeks ago, Snowden made final preparations that resulted in last week's series of blockbuster news stories. At the NSA office in Hawaii where he was working, he copied the last set of documents he intended to disclose.
That would put the date at May 19, 2013, the day before Edward left his temporary rental home, to which he had moved with his girlfriend on May 1, and boarded a plane to Hong Kong. The Guardian story makes it seem as if Snowden did all his hacking at once around those dates and grabbed the files and ran.
Yet in August 2013, Reuters reported that Snowden had begun his unauthorized downloads in April 2012, a year earlier than reported, while working in Dell in Japan:.
Snowden downloaded information about eavesdropping programs run by the NSA and Britain's Government Communications Headquarters, and left an electronic footprint indicating when he accessed the documents, said the sources, speaking on condition of anonymity.
(I could add here that Jacob Appelbaum also made a trip to Hawaii in April 2012 – he mentioned snorkeling for his birthday on his Twitter feed – although evidence of their interchange in person or online before March and then May 2013 has not been discovered.)
Representative Michael McCaul, chairman of the House Committee on Homeland Security, has indicated his belief that Snowden had foreign help:
“Hey, listen, I don't think ... Mr. Snowden woke up one day and had the wherewithal to do this all by himself,” he said.
“I personally believe that he was cultivated by a foreign power to do what he did,” McCaul said.
Asked whether he thought Russia was that “foreign power,” McCaul said, “You know, to say definitively, I can't. I can't answer that.”
The direct fingerprints of such a power --- Russia or China – may not have been found – yet -- on the Snowden affair. But those who deny the tremendous advantage these hostile authoritarian regimes have gained from Snowden, or even the possibility of Snowden’s recruitment would likely insist on an impossibly high standard of proof. After all, we have seen how even President Putin’s own admission that Snowden met with Russian diplomats in Hong Kong wasn’t enough for WikiLeaks, the ACLU’s Ben Wizner, or other “Snowdenistas.”
If indeed, Japan is where Snowden began hacking (and we don’t know that yet for sure, we only have Dell’s word for it at this point), then much closer examination of his life there is in order by those who know Japanese and know the scene in Tokyo.
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