FROM RUSSIA WITH LOVE
EDWARD SNOWDEN’S resume is brief but compelling, even when propped up on a fake Edward Snowden Twitter account. “I am responsible for leaking the existence of Prism and XKeyscore,” it says laconically. “Formerly CIA, Booz Allen Hamilton. Will code for money.”
While Prism is the code name for the illegal mass electronic surveillance programme run by the US National Security Agency (NSA) from 2007 to till Snowden spilled the beans, (and possibly even after that), XKeyscore is the secret system it used to search and analyse Internet data on any foreigner who caught its fancy.
The efficacy of Snowden’s fake CV can be judged from the fact that it has got him several job offers just three months after he exited the transit zone of the Sheremetyevo Airport and entered Moscow, never mind that there were no glowing references from his former employers, Messrs CIA and Booz Allen Hamilton.
Pavel Durov, the Mark Zuckerberg of Russia, was ready to sign him up for Vkontakte, the Russian Facebook. MeetAtTheAirport.com upped the ante with a $100,000 offer to tweet for it.
The 30-year-old whistleblower starts his new job this month, reportedly for a “large Russian website”, but for now, there are no further details.
Like, for instance, whether it will enable him to amass mountains of classified information on which global leaders the KGB is wiretapping currently. The public, especially his Twitter followers, will be keen to know, given that his stint as a NSA contractor is still producing the most damaging revelations about the Barack Obama government.
The disclosures that NSA snooped on foreign governments — friends and foes alike — have set in motion diplomatic snubs and enquiries. Last month Germany summoned the US ambassador to Berlin to ask about the wiretap on Chancellor Angela Merkel’s phone, and at a EU summit in Brussels, European leaders demanded an investigation.
(The Snowden on the fake Twitter account is offering even more sensational revelations: “I can confirm that Barack Obama worked for the CIA in the ‘80s, helping to stage a coup against the Fiji government.”
An even more apocalyptic promise says: “On November 22, in cooperation with journalists from around the world, I will reveal who really killed President John F. Kennedy.”)
To go back to the actual Snowden and his life and current times, there is quite a bit of information available, despite the iron curtain in his asylum country Russia.
He has been buying grocery at supermarkets, taking a cruise on the Moscow river after having ditched his trademark glasses and conservative shirts for scarlet Tshirts, and probably watching Gravity. “Sandra Bullock is so hot.” (That’s the fake Twitter once again.)
Besides all this, he has been writing, no, not his memoirs, yet, but letters and manifestos.
It’s the old-fashioned letter that he wrote (instead of an email) to the German government and chief federal prosecutor that has brought him back to public eye once again.
Till May, few people outside his professional and social circles knew about Snowden, a 30-year-old computer specialist who suffered from nothing more virulent that idealism. He wanted to take part in the Iraq war because he felt he had “an obligation as a human being to help free people from oppression”. He was also a Buddhist and his father described him as “a sensitive, caring young man” who was also a “deep thinker”.
The deep thinking did not make itself manifest during his earlier jobs. In 2007, while working for CIA in Geneva, where he looked after computer network security, he came across the seamier side of CIA life.
Agents allegedly got a Swiss banker drunk and arrested for drunken driving so that they could then bail him out and recruit him.
After dancing with the CIA for two years, Snowden landed a job with Dell. The work at an NSA facility inside a military base in Japan gave him glimpses into the work of the agency and was perhaps the turning point.
It must have been here that the thought to become a whistleblower took root. As a planned first step, he left the cushy job that paid him almost $200,000 and opted for a substantially less-paid assignment as a consultant with NSA contractor Booz Allen Hamilton.
The Kunia Regional SIGINT Operations Centre in Hawaii however made up for the $18,000 paycut. As an “infrastructure analyst” purportedly tapping into international Internet and telephone traffic, he had access to a wealth of classified information and in the three months that he stayed there, Snowden worked like a beaver, compiling a dossier on NSA’s illegal activities.
Then in May, he dived off into the deep end.
The first disclosures were made in 2012 after he decided “I don’t want to live in a society that does these sort of things … I do not want to live in a world where everything I do and say is recorded”.
However, they were anonymous revelations. But in 2013, despite fears of the “harmful effects” his outing would have on his family, he decided to shed the anonymity to protect his colleagues from coming under suspicion.
It was like saying adieu to normal life and entering the murky world of espionage fiction. He went underground in Hong Kong, fearing he would be killed and his family intimidated. He appealed to nearly two dozen governments for asylum but was rejected.
Even a country as anti-US as Cuba said it would not allow his plane to land.
In desperation Snowden headed for Ecuador but changed his plan and touched down in Moscow instead, spending 37 days in the airport’s transit zone till succour came, finally.
How did he cope with all of it? Being a fugitive, charged with espionage and theft, and facing the bleak prospect of never being able to return home?
His girlfriend Lindsay Mills, a ballet dancer who lived with him in Hawaii, kept a low profile throughout the hullabaloo, except for one burst of publicity when the media came across her blog.
“My world has opened and closed all at once,” said the blog post attributed to her. “Leaving me lost at sea without a compass. As I type this on my tear-streaked keyboard I’m reflecting on all the faces that have graced my path. The ones I laughed with. The ones I’ve held. The one I’ve grown to love the most. And the ones I never got to bid adieu.
“But sometimes life doesn’t afford proper goodbyes.”
Only Snowden’s father Lon, a former coast guard, was publicly vocal in his support, defending him against the charges of being a spy and traitor.Lon was also the one to visit his son in Moscow last month, expressing parental relief that the one-year asylum offered by Russian President Vladimir Putin would lessen the possibilities of Snowden’s assassination.
“I felt that this is the best place for him, this is the place where he doesn’t have to worry about people rushing across the border to render him,” Lon Snowden said. “It’s not going to happen here.”
“My feeling is that, unless the attitude within our government changes dramatically — and that at a minimum is going to require a change of administration and that’s going to be in several years — that Russia is the place for him to be at the current time.”
Subsequent developments have proved Lon Snowden right. When Der Spiegel published an open letter by Snowden, similar to the letter to the German government, it triggered yet another uproar in the US.
All Snowden had said was that “citizens have to fight against the suppression of information about affairs of essential importance for the public”.
“Those who speak the truth are not committing a crime.”
However, that has been interpreted by American officials as a plea for clemency and rejected outright.
“He’s done this enormous disservice to our country,” a vituperative Dianne Feinstein, head of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said. “I think the answer is no clemency.”
“He needs to come back and own up,” added Senate Intelligence Committee chairperson Mike Rogers. “If he believes there are vulnerabilities in the systems he’d like to disclose, you don’t do it by committing a crime that actually puts soldiers’ lives at risk in places like Afghanistan.”
So what will Snowden do next? Will he now head for Germany to testify before the Bundestag on the Obama government’s German targets? Or will he grovel?
One thing is sure. Whatever he does, he will continue to hit those headlines.
One year after he put America’s NSA out of joint by leaking deadly spying details, whistleblower Edward Snowden continues to make ripples