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documents were not their illegality. Nor did the fact they were lawful actions stop him from taking highly-sensitive GCHQ documents referring to them. In his five weeks at this Booz Allen job, he also used this same newly-acquired “Priv Ac” at the NSA to steal files from the Israeli, Canadian and Australian intelligence services.

Jumping from one outside contracting firm to another for the purpose of penetrating other/r western intelligence services is not the conventional mission of a whistle-blowing. In the parlance of intelligence operations, an employee of an intelligence service who changes his jobs\ solely to steal the more valuable secrets of services is called an “expanding penetration.”

It is not possible to believe that Snowden did not know the damage that the highly-sensitive documents he was taking from the NSA and its allies. Even if they did not reveal any unlawful American activities, could do immense damage to Western intelligence. Indeed, he said as much once he got to Moscow. In respect to China alone, he told James Risen, the New York Times’ national security reporter, in October 2013 that he had had “access to every [NSA] target, every [NSA] active operation” that could turn out the NSA’s “lights” in China. He no doubt assumed that he had the same power to close down the NSA’s operations in Russia.

His choice to switch jobs did not come out of the blue. It was not based on serendipitously discovering the documents after he began working at Booz Allen. . It was a carefully calculated move. As he told Lana Lam, he knew in advance that by switching to the job at Booz Allen he would gain the opportunity to take the lists of NSA sources. He knew that the NSA’ secretive National Threat Operations Center’s chief business was, as its name suggests, countering direct threats from China, Russia and other adversary states, and that, to deal with these threats, the NSA had used sophisticated methods to hack into the computers of adversaries. The NSA was even able to remotely gain entry to adversary computers that were not hooked into a network. “It’s no secret that we hack China very aggressively,” Snowden later said from Moscow. He had a planned target: getting the lists of the enemy computers that the NSA hacked into.

He also knew he was undertaking s a dangerous enterprise. He would tell Poitras in Hong Kong that the NSA would literally “kill” to protect their secrets. He also said he could be seized in a rendition operation by the CIA in Hong Kong. He even foresaw the probability that he “would be in an orange jumpsuit, super-max prison in isolation or Guantanamo.”

He knowingly chose this course, despite the possibility of assassination or imprisonment, presumably because he believed the value of the secrets he would obtain by switching jobs outweighed the risk of imprisonment. Part of his calculus might have been the belief that the NSA lists, GCHQ documents and other material in his possession could give him great leverage, if he chose to exert it, in his future dealings with intelligence services (including the NSA.) If so, his choice to widen his access was also a choice to empower himself.

The second choice of consequence that Snowden made was to make Hong Kong his first stop. He had many other options. He could have remained in America, as almost all previous whistle-blowers in the past had chosen to do. If he did that, he would have to make his case in court (and, in that case, the level 3 documents he took might have been retrieved before they fell into unauthorized hands.) He could have also chosen to make a cross-border escape to a country that did not have an active extradition treaty with the United States. He could have, for example, taken a direct flight to Brazil, which has no extradition treaty with the United States. Brazil also had the advantage of being the home country of Glenn Greenwald, the journalist who he wanted to break the whistle-blowing story. As Greenwald seemed (at least to Snowden) hesitant to travel

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