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Wall Street Journal, December 30, 2016

The Fable of Edward Snowden

As he seeks a pardon, the NSA thief has told multiple lies about what he stole and his
dealings with Russian intelligence.

EDWARD JAY EPSTEIN

Of all the lies that Edward Snowden has told since his massive theft of secrets from the
National Security Agency and his journey to Russia via Hong Kong in 2013, none is
more provocative than the claim that he never intended to engage in espionage, and was
only a “whistleblower” seeking to expose the overreach of NSA’s information gathering.
With the clock ticking on Mr. Snowden’s chance of a pardon, now is a good time to
review what we have learned about his real mission.

Mr. Snowden’s theft of America’s most closely guarded communication secrets occurred
in May 2013, according to the criminal complaint filed against him by federal prosecutors
the following month. At the time Mr. Snowden was a 29-year-old technologist working
as an analyst-in-training for the consulting firm of Booz Allen Hamilton at the regional
base of the National Security Agency (NSA) in Oahu, Hawaii. On May 20, only some six
weeks after his job there began, he failed to show up for work, emailing his supervisor
that he was at the hospital being tested for epilepsy.
This excuse was untrue. Mr. Snowden was not even in Hawaii. He was in Hong Kong.
He had flown there with a cache of secret data that he had stolen from the NSA.
This was not the only lie Mr. Snowden told. As became clear during my investigation
over the past three years, nearly every element of the narrative Mr. Snowden has
provided, which reached its final iteration in Oliver Stone’s 2016 movie, “Snowden,” is
demonstrably false.
This narrative began soon after Mr. Snowden arrived in Hong Kong, where he arranged
to meet with Laura Poitras, a Berlin-based documentary filmmaker, and Glenn
Greenwald, a Brazil-based blogger for the Guardian. Both journalists were longtime
critics of NSA surveillance with whom Mr. Snowden (under the alias Citizen Four) had
been in contact for four months.
To provide them with scoops discrediting NSA operations, Mr. Snowden culled several
thousand documents out of his huge cache of stolen material, including two explosive
documents he asked them to use in their initial stories. One was the now-famous secret
order from America’s Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act court requiring Verizon to
turn over to the NSA its billing records for its phone users in the U.S. The other was an
NSA slide presentation detailing its ability to intercept communications of non-American
users of the internet via a joint program with the FBI code-named Prism.
These documents were published in 2013 on June 5 and 6, followed by a video in which
he identified himself as the leaker and a whistleblower.

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