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276 | HOW AMERICA LOST ITS SECRETS

The First Decision

The initial move that Snowden made in preparation for the Level 3
breach was switching jobs on March 15. Snowden chose to leave his
job as a system administrator at Dell to take one at Booz Allen as an
analyst in training. His motive could not have been money, because
it was a lower-paying position. At the time he made this choice, he
had already set up an encrypted channel with Laura Poitras for the
purpose of sending her secret material. But he did not have to change
jobs to send her important secrets. So what was his purpose in mak-
ing this fateful choice?

The job change was not necessary to expose NSA domestic activi-
ties. If he had only wanted to be a whistle-blower, there were ample
documents about the NSA’s activities already available to him on
the NSANet. He also had access at Dell to the administrative file
that contained the FISA court orders issued every three months to
Verizon. In addition, as the NSA’s damage assessment established,
before switching jobs, Snowden had already taken most of the docu-
ments pertaining to the NSA’s domestic operations that he could
have supplied to Poitras and Greenwald for whistle-blowing pur-
poses. Indeed, while still at Dell, he had told Poitras he had a copy
of Presidential Policy Directive 20, a document in which President
Obama authorized the NSA to tap into fiber cables crossing the
United States. Snowden described it to her as “a kind of martial law
for cyber operations, created by the White House.” True, he took a
more recently issued FISA order and PRISM presentation in April
after switching jobs, but he could just as easily have taken the Janu-
ary 2013 version of the FISA order from the administrative file of
Dell. It would have had the same explosive effect in the media.

Nor did he switch jobs to lessen the risk of getting caught. Actu-
ally, the change put him in far greater jeopardy. At Dell, he was rel-
atively safe from apprehension because he could take documents,
such as the Presidential Policy Directive 20, from access points at
the NSA shared by many of his peers, making it difficult to trace the
theft. Indeed, if he just wanted to expose the NSA’s domestic opera-
tions, he could have done the entire operation at Dell. He could even

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