HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_020214.jpg

62 CHAPTER SIX Thief “We begin by coveting what we see every day” —Hannibal Lecter, The Silence of the Lambs In Hawaii in 2012, Snowden was living a very comfortable life. He was earning from Dell just over $120,000 a year. His housing allowance from Dell paid the rent on his 1,559 square- foot house. He had also leased a sporty car. Looking back at this period of life from Moscow, he said he had been “living in paradise.” He went to work five times a week, a 15 minute trip drive through a lush landscape with sugar plantations. After passing through security, he parked his car in a sprawling parking lot, and entered the underground part of the NSA base known as “the tunnel.” He said in describing the atmosphere, “You’re in a vaulted space. Everybody has sort of similar clearances, everybody knows everybody. It’s a small world.” He said that to relieve the tediousness of the work, every two months or so his fellow workers would pass around a naked picture that showed up on their screens. He explained: “You've got young enlisted guys, 18 to 22 years old [who] suddenly been thrust into a position of extraordinary responsibility where they now have access to all of your private records. In the course of their daily work they stumble across ... an intimate nude photo of someone in a sexually compromising position.” Snowden, as will be recalled, was no stranger to posting lewd photographs. Before he joined the CIA, he had posted pictures of himself mooning on the Internet. He also knew that copying any files, including photographs, was a violation of NSA rules. But he did not report this illicit activity at the NSA even though he later claimed that it occurred regularly. He joked in his Moscow interview with the Guardian that some of the nudes were “extremely attractive” and that viewing them was, as he put it, “a sort of the fringe benefits of surveillance positions.” Snowden also had an interest in American politics. He identified with the Libertarian Party, and at the NSA he made no effort to conceal his political support of its causes. He became an active partisan of Congressman Ron Paul, the leading figure in the Libertarian Party in 2012. “He's so dreamy,” Snowden posted on the Ars Technica site in March 2009 (just after he registered to vote in North Carolina.) Since Paul was running as a Presidential candidate in the 2012 Republican primaries, Snowden sent the Paul election committee a contribution of $500. Snowden’s attraction to the Libertarian ideology of Ron Paul was not that surprising. At the core of Paul’s libertarianism was a deep hostility to the intrusion of the government into private lives. Snowden shared this same hostility towards government authority, as was clear from his Internet postings. Like other libertarians, Snowden believed that citizens should not be shackled by HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_020214