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76 | HOW AMERICA LOST ITS SECRETS

When Snowden applied to Booz Allen earlier in March 2013, the company had no opening for a system administrator at the National Threat Operations Center, an NSA unit in which it dealt with Level 3 data. It did have an opening for an infrastructure analyst, a lower-paying job involving maintaining the computer technology necessary to monitor threats. Despite a cut in pay, Snowden took that job. "Snowden was an IT guy, not a SIGINT analyst," a former NSA Signals Intelligence officer pointed out. "He was working as a contracted infrastructure analyst for NSA's Information Assurance arm, . . . [which, ironically as it turned out] protects classified U.S. communications from potential intruders." Steven Bay, the manager at Booz Allen who hired and supervised Snowden, recalled that the first "red flag" came up soon after Snowden began he training, when "Snowden began asking about a highly classified mass-surveillance program" to which Snowden did not have access (although Bay did). In retrospect, Bay realized that Snowden had applied for the job for a specific reason. "He targeted our [Booz Allen] contract directly," Bay said. "Somehow he figured out that our contract, and what we did on that contract, were the types of gates he needed to get access to."

Snowden subsequently told the South China Morning Post that he took this job to "get access to lists of machines all over the world the NSA had hacked." If so, he was after the keys to the NSA's kingdom of global surveillance. Booz Allen held those keys. "He targeted my company because we enjoy more access than other companies," Booz Allen's vice-chairman Michael McConnell said with the benefit of hindsight. As a result of the theft, he appraised, "an entire generation of intelligence was lost." McConnell, a former NSA director, was in a position to know.

Snowden's sudden career change had both advantages and disadvantages for the enterprise he was planning. The main advantage was that he would have proximity to the computers in which were kept the "lists" he sought of NSA global sources. The main disadvantage, aside from a cut in salary, was that he would no longer be a system administrator. This change meant he would no longer have privileges to bypass password restrictions or temporarily transfer data. Instead, as an infrastructure analyst, he would not have pass-

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