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PROLOGUE On The Snowden Trail: Hong Kong 2014 The National Security Agency, or, as it now commonly called, the NSA, was created on October 24, 1952, in such a tight cocoon of secrecy that even the Presidential order creating it was classified “Top Secret.” When journalists asked questions about this new agency, Washington officials jokingly told them that the initials NSA stood for “No Such Agency.” The reason for this extraordinary stealth is that the NSA is involved in a very sensitive enterprise. Its job is to intercept, decode and analyze foreign electronic communications transmitted around the globe over from copper wires, fiber optic cable, satellite, microwave relays, cell phone towers, wireless transmissions and the Internet for intelligence purposes. In intelligence jargon, its product is called COMINT. This form of intelligence-gathering is particularly effective when the NSA’s targets are unaware of the state-of-the-art tools the NSA uses to break into their computers and telecommunications and decipher their enciphered messages. In the first week of June in 2013, the NSA learned that a huge number of its most secret files had been stolen. The suspect was Edward Snowden, a 29 year old civilian analyst at the NSA’s regional base in Oahu, Hawaii, who had fled to Hong Kong. The stolen documents revealed, among other things, the secret tools and capabilities that the NSA employed to do its job. According to a three-count criminal complaint filed by Federal prosecutors in the Eastern District of Virginia, Snowden had stolen government documents and violated the Espionage Act by the unauthorized and willful communication of national defense information to an unauthorized person. This was not a who-dunn-it mystery. On June 9", 2013, in an extraordinary 12-minute video made in a cramped hotel room in Hong Kong, Snowden identified himself as the person who had taken the NSA documents. Watching the video, the world saw a shy, awkward and sympathetic- looking, man wearing a rumpled shirt, rimless glasses and a computer geek-style haircut, passionately speaking out against the NSA’s violations of the law and, in a shaky voice, expressing his willingness to expose them. Snowden had an innocent, idealistic, principled look about him, and the world was ready to congratulate him for revealing the NSA's illegal collection of data inside the United States. But in fact, he stole a great deal more than documents relating to domestic surveillance. He had also stolen secret documents from the NSA revealing the sources and methods it employed in its monitoring of foreign adversaries. What made this theft even more extraordinary was that he got away with it. By the time it had been discovered in the first week of June 2013, it was not possible for the FBI, the Grand Jury or any other US agency to question him because he had fled the country. He went first to Hong Kong. Although it is economically autonomous, the city of 7.2 million is actually a special HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_020159