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Did Snowden Act Alone? | 153

The Witting Accomplice Possibility

The witting accomplice scenario better fits with the principle in logic
called Occam’s razor, which suggests that when one is choosing
between alternative explanations, the one that requires the fewest
assumptions should be given priority. It would be relatively easy
to gain access to passwords if Snowden had the cooperation of an
insider at the center who had been read into the compartments or,
even better, if he had the cooperation of a system administrator with
the necessary PKI cards and shell keys to bypass the password pro-
tection. Such an accomplice could also help explain how Snowden
was able to get the job at the center in the first place, how he knew
in advance that he could find there the “lists” of the NSA sources in
foreign countries, and how he knew that there were security traps at
the center. Such a witting accomplice might even have prepared in
advance the “spiders” that Snowden used to index the files.

The witting accomplice scenario of course requires an unsettling
expansion of the plot. It means Snowden collaborated with one or
more insiders at the center to steal secret documents. It is not dif-
ficult to imagine, in light of the lax background checks for outside
contractors servicing the NSA, that there were others in the “geek
squad” who shared Snowden’s antipathy to NSA surveillance. Cer-
tainly, we know that Snowden found other NSA workers who were
willing to attend his anti-surveillance CryptoParty in December
2012. Some might be willing to offer Snowden help if he was willing
to go public. Indeed, if the geek culture produced one Snowden, why
wouldn’t it produce others? If such an accomplice lacked Snowden’s
willingness to flee to another country, he might have limited his par-
ticipation to supplying technical assistance. For his part, Snowden
might have agreed to divert suspicion from his accomplice by taking
sole responsibility for the crime when he went public.

All of this is theoretically possible, but no witting accomplice was
ever identified. The FBI, which was in charge of the domestic part of
the investigation of the Snowden case, questioned all of Snowden’s
co-workers at the center over the course of six months and failed
to find anyone who knowingly helped Snowden. If the accomplice
was an idealistic amateur, it is likely the FBI would have found him.

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