Journey to ‘ghost user’
EDWARD JOSEPH Snowden was born on June 21, 1983. His father Lon was in the US Coastguard and he grew up the Baltimore and Washington DC area.
In his early 20s, his focus was on computers. To him, the internet was ‘‘the most important invention in all human history’’.
The 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq prompted him to join the military ‘‘to help free people from oppression’’.
He was in good physical shape but was shortsighted and had unusually narrow feet. During infantry training, he broke both his legs. The army discharged him.
A series of jobs in IT led him to a career as a contractor based in Hawaii where found out how allconsuming the National Security Agency’s surveillance activities are: ‘‘They are intent on making every conversation and every form of behaviour in the world known to them.’’
He also realised that the mechanisms built into the US system and designed to keep the NSA in check had failed. ‘‘You can’t wait around for someone else to act. I had been looking for leaders, but I realised that leadership is about being the first to act.’’
A new job with private contractor Booz Allen Hamilton, made him one of around 1,000 NSA ‘‘sysadmins’’ allowed to look at many parts of this system. He could open a file without leaving an electronic trace. He was, in the words of one intelligence source, a ‘‘ghost user’’, able to haunt the agency’s hallowed places.
It appears Snowden downloaded NSA documents on to thumbnail drives. Thumb drives are forbidden to most staff, but a sysadmin could argue that he or she was repairing a corrupted user profile and needed a backup. Sitting back in Hawaii, Snowden could remotely reach into the NSA’s servers. Most staff had already gone home for the night when he logged on, six time zones away. After four weeks in his new job, Snowden told his bosses at Booz that he was unwell. He wanted some time off and requested unpaid leave. When they checked back with him, he told them he had epilepsy (a condition that affects his mother).
And then, on 20 May, he vanished.