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46 | HOW AMERICA LOST ITS SECRETS

and winter of 2012. Many of the documents he took off the NSANet revealed operations not only of the NSA but also of the CIA and the Pentagon. By taking them, he had come to a Rubicon from which there would be no return. He later explained in an e-mail to Vanity Fair from Moscow, "I crossed that line."

As far as is known, Snowden was not sharing documents with any other party prior to May 2013. He was not even yet in contact with Poitras, Greenwald, or any other journalists. Presumably, Snowden was collecting them on drives—despite the risks that possessing such a collection of secrets might entail—for some future use.

Why would Snowden jeopardize his career and, if caught, his freedom by undertaking this illicit enterprise? He might by now have had strong ideological objections to the NSA's global surveillance. As he said later in Moscow, "We're subverting our security standards for the sake of surveillance." Ordinarily, though, even ideologically opposed employees don't steal state secrets and risk imprisonment. If they are disgruntled, they seek employment elsewhere. Certainly, Snowden, with his three years' experience working for Dell, would have little problem finding a job as an IT worker in the booming civilian sector of computer technology. Instead, he sought to widen his access to NSA documents. This behavior suggests that he might have had another agenda. One possible clue to it is the first document he took: the NSA exam. The answers to the questions in it represented to him a form of tactical power. Those answers could empower him to obtain a more important job in the NSA itself that would allow him to burrow deeper into the executive structure of the agency. Holding such a job would unlock the door to documents containing the NSA's sources stored in areas not available to Dell contractors like himself.

His later actions demonstrated that he equated the possession of such secrets with personal power. For example, after he arrived in Moscow in 2013, he bragged to James Risen of the Times that he had access to secrets that gave him great leverage over the NSA. He told him specifically his access to "full lists" of the NSA's agents and operations in adversary countries could, if revealed, close down the NSA's capabilities to gather information in them.

Such a fascination with the power of government-held secrets

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