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operations, he could have done the entire operation at Dell. He even could have sent Poitras documents anonymously over his own TOR software and server. And he could have remained in his self-described “paradise” in Hawaii with his girl friend.
Yet he chose to move to Booz Allen he also greatly increased the risk of exposure because the auditing system at Booz Allen could trace back unauthorized copying (though not in real time.) Presumably he knew, as he later told Greenwald and Poitras, that stealing documents at the Booz Allen job meant that he would either go to prison or escape from America. He didn’t want to face prison time, so the job change required an escape plan. In keeping with the latter option, only about a week after he started work at the Booz Allen-managed facility, he submitted a request for a medical leave of absence.
We can safely assume that the reason for him to make this risky switch in employment was because he wanted something beyond the whistle-blowing documents. He wanted now to get documents that were not available at the Dell job. One such document he took was the top-secret Congressional Budget Justification Book for Fiscal Year 2013. This “black budget,” as it is called in Congress, contained the entire Intelligence Community’s priorities for, among other things, monitoring the activities of potential adversaries and terrorist organizations. It specified the money requested by not only the NSA, but the CIA, DIA, National Reconnaissance Office and other intelligence services. Snowden could not have considered the budget illegitimate, since is duly approved by both houses of Congress and the President. Nor could he objected to its secrecy since he himself had sworn oaths to protect all classified documents to which he was privy for the past eight years. If it was not for purposes of whistle-blowing, presumably he had another purpose for taking such a document. It certainly held value to other actors. “For our enemies, having it is like having the playbook of the opposing NFL team,” said CIA Deputy Director Morell in 2015. “I guarantee you that the SVR, the Russian foreign intelligence service, would have paid millions of dollars for such a document.” Unlike Ames, Hanssen and Pelton, Snowden was not after money. He sought documents that enhanced his power and importance.
He made no secret of this part of his motive after he got safely to Hong Kong. As will be recalled in answer to a question from the journalist Lana Lam about his motive for changing jobs, he answered that he took the Booz Allen job to get access to secret lists that were not available to him by working for Dell. These documents certainly increases his value to other nations since they included Level 3 lists revealing the NSA’s sources in Russia, China and other foreign countries.
Snowden also wanted more than NSA secrets. He used his new position, and widened access at Booz Allen, to go after secret documents 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 ability to pry secrets out of the allied of the NSA. “I had a special level of clearance, called ‘Priv Ac’,” he said. This “priv ac” status, he further explained, allowed him to request files from other 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 routers used by telecom companies in Asia. This GCHQ operation, as he himself recognized, 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

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