HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_019527.jpg

Thief | 39

ing. Its lack of windows and the dirt covering gave it the appearance,
when I viewed it in 2016, of an oblong-shaped anthill. Workers, both
military and civilian, entered through an exterior staircase in the
center of the mound. Even though it is above the ground, it is known
as the tunnel. Snowden 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 work-
ers would circulate a picture of a naked person that showed up on
their screens as part of the NSA’s surveillance of foreign suspects. He
explained, “You’ve got young enlisted guys, 18 to 22 years old [who
have] suddenly been thrust into a position of extraordinary respon-
sibility 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.”

He knew that copying any files, including photographs, was a vio-
lation of NSA rules. But he did not report this illicit activity to 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, “the fringe benefits of surveillance positions.”

Snowden 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 fig-
ure in the 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, though he no longer lived there). Paul was running
in the 2012 Republican presidential primaries, and Snowden made
a contribution of $500 to his election committee. Snowden’s attrac-
tion to Paul’s libertarian ideology was not that surprising. At the
core of Paul’s worldview was a deep hostility to the intrusion of the
government into private lives. Snowden shared this hostility, as was
clear from his Internet postings. Like other Libertarians, Snowden
believed that citizens should not be “shackled” by federal law. He
later addressed from Moscow via an Internet hookup a libertarian
gathering at which Ron Paul also spoke. “Law is a lot like medi-

Epst_9780451494566_2p_all_r1.z.indd 39 9/29/16 5:51 PM
HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_019527