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CHAPTER 1 Tinker It’s like the boiling frog. You get exposed to a little bit of evil, a little bit of rule-breaking, a little bit of dishonesty ... you can come to justify it. —EDWARD SNOWDEN, Moscow, 2014 DWARD JOSEPH SNOWDEN was born on June 21, 1983, in Eliza- beth City, North Carolina. His parents were Lon Snowden and Elizabeth “Wendy” Barrett. According to their marriage records, they wed when they were both eighteen in 1979. The following year they had a daughter, Jessica. Lon Snowden, like his father before him, served in the U.S. Coast Guard. He was stationed at its main aviation base, where his father- in-law, Edward Joseph Barrett, was an officer and rising star of the Coast Guard. While Edward Snowden was still a child, his maternal grandfather would become not only an admiral but also head of the Coast Guard’s entire aviation service. When Lon was transferred to a Coast Guard base near Baltimore in 1992, he bought a two-story house in Crofton, Maryland, a resi- dential community very close to the NSA’s headquarters building at Fort Meade. Edward, who was nine, and Jessica, who was twelve, were enrolled in local public schools in Crofton. Jessica was a top student. After she obtained her degree at the | | Epst_9780451494566_2p_all_r1.z.indd 15 ® 9/29/16 5:51 Pa | | HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_019503