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ment. Snowden next introduced Sandvik, who took the podium and discussed the work of the Tor Project, stressing the importance of expanding the Tor network. Following their presentations, Snowden and Sandvik took questions from the audience.

The Oahu CryptoParty, according to Sandvik, ended about 10:00 p.m. No one objected to Mills’s making a video of the meeting, even though it was dedicated to the idea of protecting personal privacy. The video was not posted on the Internet, so presumably Snowden wanted it for his own purposes. Afterward, Sandvik went to a local diner called Zippy’s for a late dinner. She left Hawaii two days later.

Not all the hacktivists that Snowden invited were able to attend. Parker Higgins, for example, a prime mover in the Electronic Frontier Foundation and founder of the San Francisco CryptoParty, wrote back to him that he was unable to attend the December CryptoParty because of the high price of the airfare that month between San Francisco and Honolulu. He added that he would try to attend Snowden’s next CryptoParty, which was scheduled for February 23, 2013. (Higgins would make headlines in 2013 by flying a chartered blimp over the NSA’s secret facility in Utah and photographing it from the air.)

Snowden’s double duty continued: downloading secret documents while remaining in touch with some of the leading figures in the Tor Project under his various aliases. He also continued to invite activists to his CryptoParties, and he openly advertised them on the Internet until 2013. The CIA’s former deputy director Morell, who reviewed the security situation at the NSA in 2014 as a member of President Obama’s NSA Review Committee, found that the NSA in the post–Cold War age had encouraged its technical workers to freely discuss challenges that arose in its computer operations. “The idea was to spread knowledge and learn from the successes of others,” Morell wrote, “but it created enormous security vulnerability, given the always-existent risk of an insider committed to stealing secrets.” According to a former intelligence executive, this new “open culture,” exemplified by largely unrestricted entry to the NSANet by civilian contractors, fit the culture of the young civilians on the “geek squads” who now ran the NSA’s computer networks.

It was remarkable that even in such an “open culture,” Snowden’s

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