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CHAPTER 2

Secret Agent

Sure, a whistleblower could use these [NSA computer vulner-abilities], but so could a spy.
—EDWARD SNOWDEN, MOSCOW, 2014

THE SUDDEN TRANSFORMATION of Snowden in 2006 from a night watchman on a university campus to an employee for the CIA provided him with a powerful new identity and one much closer to the avatars he adopted for his fantasy games. It was bur-nished so deeply in his self-image that he cited it eight years later, in exaggerated fashion, in Moscow. When Brian Williams, then an NBC anchorman, began an hour-long television interview with Snowden in 2014 by saying, “It seems to me spies probably look a lot more like Ed Snowden and a lot less like James Bond these days,” Snowden approvingly smiled and told him, “I was trained as a spy in sort of the traditional sense of the word.” Snowden further con-firmed his interviewer’s point, stating, “I lived and worked under-cover overseas—pretending to work in a job that I’m not [in]—and even being assigned a name that was not mine.”

In reality, Snowden’s employment at the CIA was far more pro-saic. When he joined the CIA, he did not have the required experi-ence in maintaining secret communication systems, so the CIA sent

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