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16 | HOW AMERICA LOST ITS SECRETS University of Maryland, she went on to law school, graduating with honors. Unlike his sister, Edward Snowden experienced a string of failures in his education. In 1998, after only one year of classes, he dropped out of Arundel High School; according to school records, he stopped attending classes at the age of fifteen. He later attributed his absence from school to a medical problem, mononucleosis, but according to Robert Mosier, a spokesman for Anne Arundel County public schools, there is no record of any illness. Brad Gunson, who knew Snowden before he dropped out of high school, recalled in an interview with The Washington Post only that he had a high-pitched voice, liked magic cards, and played fantasy video games. Instead of completing a formal education, Snowden went his own way. Still in his teens, he became the product of a broken home. His parents were entangled in messy divorce proceedings until he was seventeen. By this time, Jessica had her own apartment. When his parents separated, Snowden’s mother bought a two-bedroom condo- minium in Ellicott City, Maryland. She moved Edward, along with his two cats, into the condominium, while she remained in the fam- ) ily house awaiting its sale. According to a condominium neighbor, © Joyce Kinsey, Snowden stayed home alone almost all the time. From what she could observe, he spent long hours in front of a computer screen. At the age of eighteen, while other teens his age went to college, Snowden was still living by himself, now devoting a large part of his time to playing fantasy games on the Internet. Posting under the alias TheTrueHooHa on a website called Ars Technica, he showed himself to be a passionate gamer. He was especially drawn to anime, a graphically violent style of Japanese animation. These anime games had by 2002 achieved a fanatic following in both Japan and the United States. He claimed special skills at Tekken, a martial arts fighting game. He even went to anime conventions in the Washing- ton, D.C., area. When he became a webmaster for Ryuhana Press, a website running these anime-based games, he described himself somewhat fancifully as a thirty-seven-year-old father of two chil- dren. The only truth in his description was that he was born on “the longest day of the year” (June 21). He wrote Internet posts under his TrueHooHa alias about how he | | Epst_9780451494566_2p_all_r1.z.indd 16 ® 9/29/16 5:51 Pa | | HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_019504