The sun sets late here in June, and outside the hotel window long shadows are beginning to envelop the city. But Snowden doesnt seem to mind that the interview is stretching into the evening hours. He is living on New York time, the better to communicate with his stateside supporters and stay on top of the American news cycle. Often, that means hearing in almost real time the harsh assessments of his critics. Indeed, its not only government apparatchiks that take issue with what Snowden did nextmoving from disaffected operative to whistle-blowing dissident. Even in the technology industry, where he has many supporters, some accuse him of playing too fast and loose with dangerous information. Netscape founder and prominent venture capitalist Marc Andreessen has told CNBC, If you looked up in the encyclopedia traitor, theres a picture of Edward Snowden. Bill Gates delivered a similarly cutting assessment in a Rolling Stone interview. I think he broke the law, so I certainly wouldnt characterize him as a hero, he said. You wont find much admiration from me. <\/p>\n
Snowden with General Michael Hayden at a gala in 2011. Hayden, former director of the NSA and CIA, defended US surveillance policies in the wake of Snowdens revelations. <\/p>\n
Snowden adjusts his glasses; one of the nose pads is missing, making them slip occasionally. He seems lost in thought, looking back to the moment of decision, the point of no return. The time when, thumb drive in hand, aware of the enormous potential consequences, he secretly went to work. If the government will not represent our interests, he says, his face serious, his words slow, then the public will champion its own interests. And whistle-blowing provides a traditional means to do so. <\/p>\n
The NSA had apparently never predicted that someone like Snowden might go rogue. In any case, Snowden says he had no problem accessing, downloading, and extracting all the confidential information he liked. Except for the very highest level of classified documents, details about virtually all of the NSAs surveillance programs were accessible to anyone, employee or contractor, private or general, who had top-secret NSA clearance and access to an NSA computer. <\/p>\n
But Snowdens access while in Hawaii went well beyond even this. I was the top technologist for the information-sharing office in Hawaii, he says. I had access to everything. <\/p>\n
Well, almost everything. There was one key area that remained out of his reach: the NSAs aggressive cyberwarfare activity around the world. To get access to that last cache of secrets, Snowden landed a job as an infrastructure analyst with another giant NSA contractor, Booz Allen. The role gave him rare dual-hat authority covering both domestic and foreign intercept capabilitiesallowing him to trace domestic cyberattacks back to their country of origin. In his new job, Snowden became immersed in the highly secret world of planting malware into systems around the world and stealing gigabytes of foreign secrets. At the same time, he was also able to confirm, he says, that vast amounts of US communications were being intercepted and stored without a warrant, without any requirement for criminal suspicion, probable cause, or individual designation. He gathered that evidence and secreted it safely away. <\/p>\n
By the time he went to work for Booz Allen in the spring of 2013, Snowden was thoroughly disillusioned, yet he had not lost his capacity for shock. One day an intelligence officer told him that TAOa division of NSA hackershad attempted in 2012 to remotely install an exploit in one of the core routers at a major Internet service provider in Syria, which was in the midst of a prolonged civil war. This would have given the NSA access to email and other Internet traffic from much of the country. But something went wrong, and the router was bricked insteadrendered totally inoperable. The failure of this router caused Syria to suddenly lose all connection to the Internetalthough the public didnt know that the US government was responsible. (This is the first time the claim has been revealed.) <\/p>\n
Inside the TAO operations center, the panicked government hackers had what Snowden calls an oh shit moment. They raced to remotely repair the router, desperate to cover their tracks and prevent the Syrians from discovering the sophisticated infiltration software used to access the network. But because the router was bricked, they were powerless to fix the problem. <\/p>\n
Fortunately for the NSA, the Syrians were apparently more focused on restoring the nations Internet than on tracking down the cause of the outage. Back at TAOs operations center, the tension was broken with a joke that contained more than a little truth: If we get caught, we can always point the finger at Israel. <\/p>\n
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