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278 | HOW AMERICA LOST ITS SECRETS

Snowden wanted more than just NSA secrets. He used his new
position and widened access at Booz Allen to go after secret docu-
ments from the intelligence services of Britain, Australia, New
Zealand, and Israel. He revealed this operation only after receiving
sanctuary in Russia. He told an interviewer that by moving to his
new Booz Allen job as an infrastructure analyst, he gained the abil-
ity to pry secrets out of the allies of the NSA. “I had a special level
of clearance, called ‘Priv Ac,’” he said. This “priv ac” status did not
allow him to bypass the password protection at sealed-off compart-
ments at the NSA, but it did allow him to request files from foreign
services cooperating with U.S. intelligence.

By way of example, he described one file from the British GCHQ
cipher service that he copied, stole, and provided to other parties. It
exposed a legally authorized British operation to collect electronic
data on terrorist matters in Pakistan by tapping into Cisco rout-
ers used by telecom companies in Asia. This GCHQ operation, as
Snowden knew, violated neither British nor American law. He told a
BBC interviewer in regard to that file, “What’s scariest is not what
the government is doing that’s unlawful, but what they’re doing
that is completely lawful.” So his criteria for taking such documents
were not their illegality. In his five weeks at this Booz Allen job, he
also used this same newly acquired “priv ac” at the NSA to steal files
from the Israeli, Canadian, and Australian intelligence services.

Jumping from one outside contracting firm to another for the
purpose of penetrating other Western intelligence services is not
the conventional mission of a whistle-blower. In the parlance of CIA
counterintelligence, the actions of an employee of an intelligence
service who changes his jobs solely to steal the more valuable secrets
of this service is called an “expanding penetration.” It is not possible
to believe that Snowden did not know the immense damage that
the highly sensitive documents he was taking from the NSA and its
allies could cause.

His choice to switch jobs did not come out of the blue. It was not
based on serendipitously discovering the documents after he began
working at Booz Allen. As he told Lana Lam, he knew in advance
that by switching to the job at Booz Allen, he would gain the oppor-
tunity to take the lists of NSA sources. He knew that the NSA’s

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