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24 | HOW AMERICA LOST ITS SECRETS

advantage of his compensation to live the high life. He gambled on
financial developments by buying and selling options, which are
contracts that allow speculators to bet on the directions of the mar-
ket without buying the actual stocks, bonds, or commodities. He also
bought a BMW sports car on which, he wrote, he disabled the speed
control so he could exceed the legal limit. He described in his posts
racing motorcycles in Italy and traveling around Germany with an
Estonian rock star (whom he did not further identify). He also con-
tinued his avatar life in Internet gaming; the alias he chose for that
was Wolfking Awesomefox. He also indulged in a fantasy gun sport
called Airsoft, a variation of paintball, in which participants used
realistic-looking pistols to splatter each other with paint.

Snowden’s good fortune came to an abrupt end in 2008. He suf-
fered a massive loss in his options speculations. He wrote in a post
that he had “lost $20,000 in October [2008] alone,” a sum that repre-
sented almost a third of his annual salary. He blamed the U.S. finan-
cial system, posting on Ars Technica that Ben Bernanke, the Federal
Reserve chairman, was a “cockbag.” He also bet against any further
rise in the stock market index, asking a user with whom he was chat-
ting on the Internet in December 2008 to “pray” for a collapse of
stock prices. When his correspondent asked him why he wanted him
to pray for a decline, Snowden responded, “Because then I’ll be filthy
fucking rich.” But Snowden lost this bet.

Snowden lashed out at others on the Internet over these setbacks.
He termed those who questioned his financial judgment “fucking
retards.” As with other setbacks, he blamed them on government offi-
cials in Ars Technica posts. Because the CIA was engaged in 2008 in
highly sensitive operations to gather banking data in Switzerland—
one of which Snowden later disclosed to The Guardian—any Inter-
net discussion by a CIA employee of financial losses could serve as a
beacon to an adversary intelligence service on the prowl for a source.
If any party was looking for disgruntled U.S. employees, Snowden’s
Internet chatter about bad choices in gambling could have aroused
its interest.

That Snowden used his TrueHooHa alias for these Internet post-
ings would not prevent a sophisticated espionage organization from

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