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specific NSA, CIA and Pentagon operations unknown to adversaries. These Level 3 documents are described by NSA executives as “the Keys to the Kingdom” because they could invalidate America’s entire intelligence enterprise if they fell into the hands of an adversary. And, as far as is known, prior to 2013, there had been no successful theft of any Level 3 documents.

Because of their extreme sensitivity, Level 3 documents were not handled by most of the private firms providing independent contractors. At Dell, Snowden had access mainly to Level 1 and Level 2 data (which he could, and did, download from shared sites on the NSA Net.) These lower level documents had whistle-blowing potential since they concerned NSA operations in the US. They did not reveal, however, sources that the NSA used in intercepting the military and civilian activities of foreign adversaries. Consequently, at Dell, while Snowden could find documents of great interest to journalists, he did not have the opportunity to steal far more valuable data, such as the Level 3 lists of the NSA’s sources abroad.

Snowden quit his job at Dell as a system administrator on March 15, 2013 to take another job working the NSA in Hawaii at Booz Allen Hamilton. Unlike other outside contractors that serviced the NSA, the firm he choose, Booz Allen specialized in handling the NSA’s Level 3 data.

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 the cut in pay, Snowden took that job. Snowden made no secret of one of his reason for this move. He subsequently told the South China Morning Post, as will be recalled, that he took it 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. And Booz Allen held those keys. "He targeted my company because we enjoy more access than other companies," Booz Allen 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 before taking the job at Booz Allen, 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 the job, he would have proximity to the computers in which the “lists” he sought of NSA global sources were kept. The main disadvantage, aside from a cut in salary, was that he would no longer be a system administrator. This change meant he would not have a system administrator’s privileges to bypass password restrictions or temporarily transfer data. Instead, as an infrastructure analyst, he would not have password access, at least during the two-month long training period, to the computers that he had not been specifically “read into,” which did not include those computers that stored the Level 3 lists. Access to these tightly-controlled compartments was limited to only a handful of analysts at the center who had a need-to-know.

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