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44 CHAPTER THREE Tinker “Tt’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.” —Snowden in Moscow, 2014 Edward John Snowden was born on June 21, 1983 in Elizabeth City, North Carolina. His parents, Lon Snowden and Elizabeth “Wendy” Barrett, according to their marriage records, wed when they were both 18 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 John Barrett, was an officer and rising star of the Coast Guard. While Edward Snowden was still a child, his grandfather would become not only an admiral but the head of the Coast Guard’s entire aviation service. Admiral Barrett would be the only grandfather, Edward Snowden would ever know. His paternal grandfather died before he was born in a fatal car crash. He had had a drinking problem and killed a woman in a prior car crash.) When Lon was transferred to a Coast Guard base near Baltimore in 1992, the family moved to Maryland. Lon bought a two-story house in Croften, Maryland, a residential community very close to the NSA’s headquarters building at Fort Meade. The two children, Edward, who was nine, and Jessica, who was 12, were enrolled in local public schools in Croften. Jessica was a top student. She graduated high school, completed both her courses at University of Maryland and went on to law school, where she graduated with honors. Unlike his sister, 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 medical illness. Brad Gunson, who knew him 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. Nor did Snowden receive home schooling or ever get a high school diploma. Instead, Snowden became the product of a broken home. His parents were entangled in a messy divorce fight until he was seventeen. By this time Jessica had her own apartment. When his HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_020196