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Tinker | 19 own beefcake-style pictures, “So sexxxy it hurts” and “I like my girl- ish figure that attracts girls.” He approached a model agency called Model Mayhem, which recommended a photographer. He had some concern about that photographer because he, as Snowden wrote in a post, “shoots mostly guys.” Snowden said he was “a little worried he might, you know, try to pull my pants off and choke me to death with them, but he turned out to be legit and is a pretty damn good model photographer.” He posted the photographs on the Internet. The lack of any paid job offers dashed Snowden’s hopes for a model- ing career. Around this time, he began dating Lindsay Mills, an extremely attractive nineteen-year-old art student at the Maryland Institute College of Art. Jonathan Mills, Lindsay’s father, was an applications developer at the Oracle Corporation. According to him, Snowden met his daughter on an Internet dating site. Snowden and Mills had much in common. They both had divorced parents who gave them a great deal of latitude in conducting their personal lives. Both of them were keenly interested in perfecting their bodies through exercise ) and diet regimes. Mills’s only paid employment over the next eight © years would be as a fitness and yoga instructor in Maryland. When they first met, they both had ambitions to be models, and neither of them had inhibitions about posing provocatively for photographers. They both also had a desire to travel to exotic places, including cities in Asia. Mills had spent four month in Guilin, China, before meeting Snowden. As bleak as his prospects as a high-school dropout might have seemed, Snowden had an unexpected stroke of good fortune in the spring of 2006. The CIA offered him a $66,o00-a-year job as a CIA communications officer. “I don’t have a degree of ANY type. In fact, I don’t even have a high school diploma,” Snowden boasted in May 2006 on the website Ars Technica under his alias. He added, with only a slight exaggeration, “I make 70K.” How did Snowden get the job? The CIA’s minimum requirements in 2006 for a job in its clandestine division included a bachelor’s or master’s degree and a strong academic record, with a preferred GPA of 3.0 or better. The CIA needed technical workers in 2006. But even if Snowden | | Epst_9780451494566_2p_all_r1.z.indd 19 ® 9/29/16 5:51 Pa | | HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_019507