I've supplied what I think is the main revelation from Vanity Fair's treatment of the Snowden story -- the main change in the narrative.
Now let's look at what other discrepancies and tid-bits we can get out of this article which is the first major piece on Snowden in some time -- because his own self-referential manifestos at Christmas or SWSX or even to ARD (which I mined) do not have much to offer for those interested in getting to the real story.
o Laura Poitras' age is given as 50. That's a first; it's not in Peter Maass' glowing report, etc. Secretcy nuts hate anyone knowing their birthdate because it makes it easier for records hunts, etc. BTW, a good question to ask is where Poitras went to school -- high school and possibly college before she went to the San Francisco Film Institute. It was likely in the Boston area where her parents, wealthy philanthropists who give to mental health research and seem to embrace some libertarian causes, have resided.
o Snowden is described as "angry" and very upset about the feds coming to look for his girlfriend and parents. But why didn't he wire this down better so they wouldn't come looking for him before his leak? Why would his mom start worrying? We are reminded once again that Snowden's mother has never spoken to the press, and we don't know a lot about their relationship. Let me suggest that if she put her computer nerd son in his own town house at the age of 15 -- something that most mothers would never do with a young teenager like that -- it was likely because they didn't get along to such a point that this became a solution for her.
o The exact date of Snowden's first communication to Greenwald is given -- December 1, 2012 -- although Greenwald has told this story 5 or 6 different ways, and in one version it even implies November and in another later in December. After a month of fruitless effort, Snowden stops banging on Greenwald and "next, in late January 2013" emails Laura Poitras. Ah. She didn't want to give us this date in the Maass story; somehow it has shown up in this story -- and again, possibly for some reason, as it "needs" to be that to prevent other implications of prior complicity or something. We still don't know if it's true, anyway.
o Rejection of Poitras as the main journalist and juggling of three journalists. Snowden sticks to the story that he selected Poitras second (after Greenwald) for his revelations because he knew she was persecuted; "I bet you don't like this sytem" he said. But then later he didn't select Poitras to be the first one to leak his stories. That's extraordinary, given everything she overcame to deal with him in the first place -- and the fact that it was she (with the by-line shared with Jacob Appelbaum) who did the first interview with him about himself and his motives (done in May online and published in June in the Guardian) - and later did get a by-line in the New York Times and elsewhere with these leaked Snowden documents. So that is one odd little detail to contemplate some more.
o Poitras met with Barton Gellman of the Washington Post in the West Village in "early February" 2013 to discuss Snowden. That's early! That gives them plenty of time to pass on to him their need to get that FISA court document and that Verizon metadata document.
o The story of the first meeting with Greenwald at the hotel in Yonkers tracks with Harding's version, although he garbles this a bit in his book.
o As we've heard before from Gellman and others, "Verax" first contacts Gellman in May about PRSIM and the gathering of data from Google, Microsoft and Facebook (for a good summary at least in Snowdenista terms of the differences between the two first stories, see here.) Snowden tried to get Gellman to fulfill his ultimatum to publish the story in May -- he was on some kind of timer, and we don't know why, maybe because he knew soon the feds would come looking for him.
o Vanity Fair highlights the fact that Snowden already asked the journalists to come to Hong Kong in May, and adds in an evaluation that the Guardian didn't trust Greenwald completely because even though he had worked for them for a year, he turned in columns from Brazil and they hadn't really socialized with him much. It was Gibson who decided Greenwald and Poitras needed adult supervision -- and we learn this from Harding, too, in the person of Ewan MacAskill - Vanity Fair plays up the hostility of MacAskill, a Scott, to the brash American Greenwald, and Poitras' horror at having any more cooks on this soup -- but this could be interpolation to sex up the story.
o Vanity Fair seems to track every other piece on Snowden's biography, but there is something new (I think) on Snowden's grandfather, father of his father Lon Snowden, who was named Lonnie Glenn Snowden. While VF doesn't come out and say it, it seems a safe bet that this grandfather was an alcoholic -- at the age of 32, he lost control of a car "in the dead of night" and killed his passenger. Then at the age of 36, he "lost control of his car" again and this time ran off a country road into a canal and was killed. Losing control of the car twice likely indicates alcohol abuse -- although of course, it could be some other condition -- epilepsy? Not likely.
Now what does this story remind you of? It reminds you of the drunk driver in Snowden's "epiphany" story, where he claims he had a major crisis of faith with the CIA, upon learning that they got a Swiss banker drunk, then set him up in a car accident so that he then had to cooperate with them in order to avoid prosecution. Some bloggers have said the story comes right out of a Hitchcock movie with exactly that scenario; the CIA and Swiss authorities deny the story (but then they would). In any event, Lon was only 7 when his father died -- so you can see the hallmarks of tragic psychiatric issues to come for this family; for one, he married right out of high school and then had his son the hacker at the age of 22.
I think this is new information, in which case the VF journos aren't as bad as I thought if they were able to pay a fee to one of those Internet services and get a record no one else succeeded in getting. Since many American males who become computer nerds suffer from these same parental issues of one kind another -- "where's dad" or alcoholism or drug abuse or "mom uses Internet as a babysitter" or whether -- there isn't really a lot to say about this. I personally haven't wasted much time mining the personal background of Snowden because my conviction is that there isn't much there of relevance to the espionage case.
o Vanity Fair, like others before it, never answers the question of how someone with epilepsy could be accepted into the armed services, and even the Special Forces program; VF really doesn't manage to answer -- although at least it asks -- the question as to how this drop-out without any degrees or finished accomplishments like army services could have gotten the CIA job, and security clearance. We're reminded to pay attention to the interest in Japan, and the University of Maryland campus in Japan. VF takes a stab at guessing that the CIA, like a lot of old agencies, had computer phobia and hired young savvy techies out of fear of alling behind, and that explains a lot. Oh, I dunno. Maybe.
o I wince as I read once again about poor Gen. Keith Alexander appearing at the July 2012 DefCon saying "You're going to have to come in and help us" to this audience of haters and hackers bent mainly on destruction of what the General stands for -- as a class.
o CIA source -- there seems to be one new former CIA source for this story who says something new never said by other former CIA sources: that the reason Snowden got the clearance was simply because he was so young that he didn't have a history.
o The story of Snowden's spat at his CIA job over the human resources software changes. We've heard three versions of this story before, remember, from the NYT's source, from the CIA officially, and from Snowden, as I recount in my book. I analyze it at length as exemplifying the "road rage" that geeks can get into when they don't get their way over bugs in software, especially brittle, self-absorbed narcissistic geeks (and quite a few of them are like that because they adapt themselves to machine code.)
The detail is added that when Snowden essentially hacked into this personnel form, his immediate boss "signed off on it," but another senior manager was furious. So now we learn that Snowden had one person on his side in this story, which we didn't know before. The senior manager put a negative comment in Snowden's record and this is the incident Snowden says "proves" that he can't work within the system. Except...what he was addressing here wasn't a civil rights or "whistle-blowing" type of issue, it was merely an issue of the NSA's own security, which ostensibly he was more concerned about (finding a hacking vulnerability) than his own senior manager.
o Another (or the same) "retired CIA" source was found by Vanity Fair who "made informal inquiries about Snowden in Geneva" and "says he sensed broad differences at work than just that bug story would lead us to believe. "Part of the problem was that he was too smart to be doing the job he was doing," this man suggests. "I think he would have liked to have been a player."
So wait. Somebody more concerned than others about the NSA's internal security is going to then smash it and leak all its security because he found the system couldn't be addressed from within? That's preposterous. Mr. Privacy just didn't like being challenged when he believed he was right, and went into a bug road rage as I explained. That's not being too smart; that's being too egotistical. There is never any evidence that he worked with superiors or any internal system to bring to attention any privacy rights concerns -- this is grafted on later. This story is not about privacy, it's about the NSA's own security -- which obviously Snowden has proven himself to be LEAST interested in -- duh.
Why is it that we never seem to get CIA leakers or former CIA sources who tell us what's really wrong about Snowden and what he did?
o For the first time we learn why he may have been motivated to leave Dell -- he was promoted to focus on clients other than the NSA in 2010! He got good at training people to avoid Chinese hacking -- being a hacker at heart himself and even with special extra hacker certificates from India. But what he was going to be assigned to do was dull -- encrypting the cloud and getting people to make stronger passwords. But if he didn't get to work with the NSA, he could achieve his ultimate plan. So then ultimately he was put back with the NSA if he moved to Hawaii - and he accepted that job and went there in April 2012, which is when Dell said later to Reuters he stole his first docs.
I bet Lindsay was happier in Maryland than Hawaii, despite her exotic pictures -- in any event, she didn't rush over there with him but "stayed behind to pack" and wrote angsty blogs.
o A new detail is provided about a "data backup sytem called EPICSHELTER". Oh dear, a back-up system grabbing whole swathes of file which then unscrupulous hackers can take from the back-up copy and not the original and avoid detection? If this machine could re-generate any NSA site's data again, it looks like a prime way for somebody to steal files.
o Snowden's main material for Vanity Fair is basically about exonerating any bad rap he got up til now, and arguing strenuously with independent poor reviews of himself -- he's a narcissistic, brittle, controlling personally prone to anger as we've seen even from his blog posts about his rage at the Japanese anime conference organizers. So when the NSA's deputy director Rick Ledgett, who has led the internal investigation on Snowden, says that Snowden never made any formal complaints using the existing system, Snowden rushes to call him a liar.
"The NSA at this point not only knows I raised complaints, but that there is evidence that I made my concerns known to the NSA's lawyers, because I did some of it through e-mail. I directly challenge the NSA to deny that I contacted NSA oversight and compliance bodies directly via e-mail and that I specifically expressed concerns about their suspect interpretation of the law, and I welcome members of Congress to request a written answer to this question [from the NSA].
This sounds like a lot of literalist distraction to me. About what, Edward?
He doesn't say. Complaints about metadata? Or the human resources web form? Surely you can tell us the TOPIC of your complaint if you really made it? The bit about complaining "through email" sounds a bit suspect merely because emails, even in a place like the NSA, can be deleted or not noticed and informal; was there no inter-office memo, with hard copies? When you make a serious complaint, that's what you need to do.
o Ledgett is quoted again as saying that Snowden downloaded the answers to his test sheet -- and I believe him. What would he achieve by lying about such a little thing, when the very huge thing of Snowden's hack itself already stands as such a big crime? Mike McConnell told the Wall Street Journal that because NSA rebuffed Snowden when he was turned down for a job promotion -- he wanted an even higher tanking -- he turned on them. That sure sounds plausible to me, seeing what a big deal he made out of the bug in the personnel form.
But the narcissistic Snowden -- who has hundreds of thousands of Vanity Fair readers that he could have been educating on some other issue related to his mission -- choses to bitch about this and claim Ledgett is lying that he cheated on his exam. Snowden answers with the inherent criminality of his tribe:
Of course I didn't cheat on the exam, although I'd argue being able to hack a hacking exmination probably makes you more, not less, qualified for the job, says Snowden. "This is just another artifact of a failed investigation, and I'm not sure why they trumpet it."
That's just gaspingly awful -- do you need any more evidence of the ethics-free hacker mentality that has bled into our government and is the reason for this kind of massive leak? "I get to break the law just because, because I'm superior to everyone else. No rules exist for me; I *am* the law," etc.
Not only do we not have any evidence that what Snowden had to pass was "a hacking examination" -- if there is even such a thing to get a job. Worse, he turns on the people he harmed -- BHA -- and accuses them of lying about him to butter up the NSA and ensure they keep their contracts. On McConnell's report, Snowden said "A Booz Allen executive wouldn't be in a position to know about NSA's internal hiring. I imagine he's trying to do an unrequested favor for the NSA in hopes they wouldn't ask Congress to bar Booz from bidding on future NSA contracts."
What a rat!
Of course a BHA executive whose job consists precisely of getting his contractors hired by the NSA might expected in fact to know something of what that internal hiring practice is. What's that all about?! And the NSA had too much at stake with BHA in other employees and contracts to cut relations with them. (I personally hate the contracting culture of our government and wish they'd reduce it drastically and create proper full-time, benefited, adequately compensated real government jobs with adult supervision and institutional controls because of the many cases of lax supervision and criminality in contractors.)
Snowden then claims that he turned down the job offer not because of the ranking but because he didn't want that particular job (and this version of the story is in Harding, too, with more detail -- except the story still stands about the cheating on the exam.)
o VF says Snowden had "almost all of his documents ready" by May 15. Why didn't he leave for Hong Kong earlier? Which documents was he still taking risks to get? VF says he downloaded the last on May 17th -- and his girlfriend left on a trip. In this version of the story, for the first time, we have Snowden leaving for Hong Kong then on the 18th of May -- not the 20th. Even allowing for the time difference of a flight, there's a day's difference here now. In this version, he goes straight to the Mira in Kowloon; we learn again that he used his own personal credit card under his own name ("so the government could immediately verify that I was entirely self-financed, independent and had, over time, withdrawn enough financial resources to survive on my own for years without anyone's assistance.")
Wow, that's a lot of cash to have. How was he able to put that much away, given things like his stock market loss of $20,000, even if he had housing and travel allowances that saved him money? More to the point, obviously WikiLeaks came in to help -- with the FPF fund -- and then the Russians. So what good was all this altruism for? Why -- again -- is Snowden introducing this self-serving little story now, when he's never had it before? It's also one of those flat statements for which Snowden is infamous -- "there's zero chance I'm working for the FSB" -- that he thinks merely by stating with a deep force of authority we're supposed to believe. Of course, there's no reason why the use of one's own credit card would signal non-affiliation with a hostile foreign government. Not only could cash be given instead of funds by wire, but an ideologue like Snowden could work with hostile parties for reasons of belief, not money.
Remember, he's not a good judge of what is damaging and what isn't; he's the damager.
And here's another instrumentation from Snowden -- using this VF article to fix the negative narrative on himself:
"My hope was that avoiding ambiguity would prevent spy accusations and create more room for reasonable debate. Unfortunately, a few of the less responsible members of Congress embraced the spy charges for political reasons, as they still do to this day. But I don't think it was a bad idea, because even if they won't say it in public, intelligence-community officials are regularly confirming to journalists off the record that they know with a certainty that I am not an agent of any foreign government."
They are? Hey, could one of them call me and do this for me?
o We learn that what he wanted from Gellman wasn't just a public key to verify the content of his information; he wanted cryptographic signature on the images of the slides so that he could prove they were from him by matching the keys.
o Gellman explains that he didn't go to Hong Kong when asked by Snowden -- because he didn't want to compromise himself as a journalist "And I have to maintain the lines of what is journalist relationship or opt for something else." Oh, so does he think that's exactly what Greenwald, Snowden and Appelbaum have with him -- "something else"? Well?
o The story of the flight to Hong Kong on May 31; the Rubik's Cube, etc. are all taken from Harding and other accounts, and don't match some of Greenwald's versions.
o We learn that Poitras moved from the W into the Mira to be closer to Snowden, and that he remained still in the Mira as of June 3rd; she even took McAskill's cell phone and put it in a refrigerator when Snowden "recoiled" at Ewan's opsec faux pas, bringing the cell phone into the room where the NSA could have supposedly used it to bug Snowden.
o A very odd detail -- and one surely not an accident. On the night of June 9th, when Snowden's interview filmed by Poitras was posted as a video on the Guardian, the journalists and Snowden were not together. Snowden remained alone at the Mira; the others remained at the W -- "the three journalists splayed themselves around Greenwald's room at the W" -- although Poitras was staying at the Mira by then. The video went live at 3:00 am. These are people who had stayed up all night working on the story -- what, they couldn't get a pizza and share this moment together since they were up anyway to see it?! Snowden actually *texted them on his computer* because he was in his own hotel and they were in theirs. Weird. Is this because Snowden went somewhere safe, i.e. as in "safe house," and they don't want to admit it? With the Russians? Or?
Later that morning, an enterprising reporter figures out a lamp in the picture is at the Mira, and goes looking for Snowden; he decides to leave just as Poitras is filming him -- it's now June 10th.
o Kris Hrafnsson's, Snowden's would-be Icelandic rescuer, who would have got him on a plane to Iceland and helped him with asylum, finds the Icelandic government stalls on his preliminary questions about such asylum -- and he goes public with an angry op-ed page. One-time WikiLeaks cadre Birgitta Jonsdottir criticized Hrafnsson for this, claiming that essentially, he killed Snowden's chances -- the op-ed forced the government's hand. The implication is that they might have acted quietly and stood up to the US.
o VF portrays Julian Assange as "desperatedly looking to be a player in the Snowden affair" -- as if he were a kibbitzer on the whole story. This is what I mean by instrument marks. Somebody wants to distance WikiLeaks from Snowden, especially because of WikiLeaks extensive Russian operation for years, but sorry, it's too late.
And it's ridiculous, of course, to pretend Assange and WikiLeaks are not crucial, given the humongous role that Sarah Harrison played in shepherding Snowden to the Russian consulate and then to Russia - and then staying with him there. So this is just a distraction. Snowden is quoted as saying that his views don't coincide with Assange's -- also in a faux distancing attempt that is hardly persuasive:
We don't share identical politics. I'm pro-accountability. I've made many statements indicating both the importance of secrecy and spying, and my support for the working-level at the NSA and other agencies. It's the senior officials you have to watch out for.
Actually, he's never made statements like this that I've ever seen, and this theme of "Ed Snowden, Earnest About the Importance of Spying" is also pretty threadbare. Both Harrison and Appelbaum, intimately connected to Snowden, introduced Assange at Chaos Computer Conference in December 2013. Vanity Fair also tries to make it seem as if Harrison and Snowden didn't get along at some basic room-mate level, i.e. he was a neatness freak and she left the dishes for him to wash. Again, this was likely planted merely to dispel speculation that they were sleeping together, and to distract from Snowden's ongoing relationship to WikiLeaks -- and their heavy connection to Russia.
o Lana Lam. Has this name always been known? I don't recall seeing it at all -- it wasn't on the South China Morning Post interview with Snowden to my recollection and I can't find it now. Anyone? This is big, because this is possibly a Russian name. Lam is a Russian last name; there's an artist with that last name; Lana is also Russian. The Russian-Chinese connection is complicated, but there are Russians in China historically and in modern times in Hong Kong. Maybe this is the figure who helped Snowden with liaisons to the Russian consulate? Or other things. This needs research.
o This article states that Snowden's passport was cancelled June 22 and he was nevertheless able to leave Hong Kong on the 23rd with it -- possibly because that's how China decided to roll. There were press waiting for him when he arrived in Moscow -- and as we know WikiLeaks tweeted about him. So who was the leaker? Jonsdottir complains about this, too, and think it was Assange "or one of his acolotyes". Harrison? Would she? Ultimately, Jonsdottir calls the involvement of WikiLeaks in Snowden's escape "a massive mistake."
But VF exonerates WikiLeaks of the leak on his travel plans, fingering instead Lana Lam, saying she was the one who published the news at 3:30 pm with "a blurry photograph." How did she find out? Is she connected to the Russian consulate, which was in the loop wiring down his departure/arrival issues? VF shows no interest in investigating Ms. Lam further -- I hope somebody does.
o We learn that Snowden was furious at Rusbridger (the Guardian editor) handing over his stolen documents to the New York Times -- he had done this as a back-up after also giving a set to ProPublica, a public interest investigative journalism outfit in New York. Snowden believed he had an explicit agreement with the Guardian which it broke over the NYT; he didn't want them to have it because of their delay of "nearly a year" in their 2005 story of Bush's warrantless wire-tapping.
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