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77 CHAPTER NINE The String-Puller “It wasn’t that they put it on me as an individual — that I’m uniquely qualified [or] an angel descending from the heavens — as that they put it on someone, somewhere.” --Edward Snowden in Moscow, 2013 Downloading NSA documents was not Snowden’s only rogue activity while working at the NSA for Dell in 2012. Three weeks after the Crypto party, Snowden began anonymously contacting a high-profile journalist, He used the same alias “Cincinnatus” that he used with Sandvik, and to advertise the Oahu Crypto Party. The journalist to whom he wrote On December 1, 2012, was Glenn Greenwald, the previously-mentioned Rio-based columnist for the Guardian. Greenwald had not always been an activist journalist. Up until 2004, Greenwald was a litigation lawyer at the elite New York firm of Wachtell, Lipton, and Rosen & Katz. He was also an entrepreneur owning part of Master Notions, a company which, among other things, had a fifty percent financial interest in the pornographic website HJ (an acronym which originally stood for “Hairy Jock.”) All did not go well with this enterprise. In 2004, Greenwald became involved in an acrimonious law suit with his other associates in HJ. As a result, he had a number of open legal judgments filed against him, including an $85,000 lien by the IRS. After resigning from his law firm in 2005, he moved to Rio de Janeiro and began a new career as a blogger for the Internet magazine Sa/on. He wrote fierce, and often brilliant, polemics against US government surveillance and other perceived intrusions on personal privacy The extent of his bitter antagonism to the activities of the “surveillance state,” as he called it, was reflected in the title of his 2007 book, How Would a Patriot Act? Defending American Values from a President Run Amok. His position on surveillance was unrelenting, even when it came to the president. “By ordering illegal eavesdropping, the president had committed crimes and should be held accountable for them,” Greenwald wrote. | When Barack Obama became President in 2009, Greenwald also attacked him for breaking the law by “ordering illegal eavesdropping.” Because of his opposition to President Obama, he contributed money to the libertarian campaign of Ron Paul, the same candidate to whom Snowden gave money. In August 2012, he had transferred his provocative blog, which had amassed a following of nearly one million readers (including Snowden), from Sa/on to the Guardian. The British newspaper also had a powerful anti-surveillance position, having first published the Wikileaks documents that had been illicitly leaked by Private Bradley Manning and published by Assange in 2010. HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_020229