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Crossing the Rubicon | 47 has always been a core concern of radical Libertarians. In his 1956 book, The Torment of Secrecy: The Background and Consequences of American Security Policies, the sociologist Edward Shils brilliantly dissects the fascination with secrecy among individuals who fear that government agencies will use covert machinations against them. In Shils’s concept, this counterculture is “tormented” by the govern- ment’s possession of knowledge unavailable to them. Members of this culture tend to believe that the agencies that hold these secrets, such as the FBI, the CIA, and the NSA, can control their lives; they also believe that obtaining such secrets will give individuals power over government. Snowden himself was concerned with a coming “dark future,” which he later described as follows: “[The elites] know everything about us and we know nothing about them—because they are secret, they are privileged, and they are a separate class... the elite class, the political class, the resource class—we don’t know where they live, we don’t know what they do, we don’t know who their friends are. They have the ability to know all that about us. This is the direc- ) tion of the future but I think there are changing possibilities in this.” © To change the “dark future,” someone would have to know the secrets of the “elites.” Snowden saw himself as one of the few indi- viduals in a position to seize state secrets from those elites. He had a SCI (sensitive compartmented information) clearance, a pass into an NSA regional base, and the privileges of a system administrator. This position allowed him to steal state secrets and whatever power that went with them. And if he moved to a position that gave him greater access, he would, in this view, amass even greater power. Whatever his actual agenda in 2012, we know that he tested pos- sible reactions to a leak exposing NSA surveillance in the United States. He asked fellow workers at the NSA base in 2012, according to his own account, “What do you think the public would do if this [secret data] was on the front page?” He asked this question at a time when a large number of State Department and U.S. Army classified documents had been posted on Julian Assange’s WikiLeaks website. These WikiLeaks revelations made, as Snowden knew they would, front-page headlines. His “question” was only rhetorical. No covert NSA document had ever been published in the press as of 2012. One | | Epst_9780451494566_2p_all_r1.z.indd 47 ® 9/29/16 5:51 Pa | | HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_019535