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The Crime Scene Investigation | 145

Hawaii. Nor would that data be forthcoming from Snowden, who
may be the only witness to the crime. By June 23, he was in a safe
haven in Moscow. Even though the grand jury case against Snowden
was cut and dry, it was also irrelevant because the United States does
not have an extradition treaty with Russia.

The purpose of the intelligence investigation went far beyond
determining Snowden’s guilt or innocence, however. Its job was to
find out how such a massive theft of documents could occur, how the
perpetrator escaped, and, perhaps most urgent, who had obtained the
unaccounted-for stolen documents from Snowden.

In his interviews with journalists in Moscow, Snowden studiously
avoided describing the means by which he breached the security
aperture of America’s most secret intelligence service. He only told
the journalists who came to Moscow to interview him, with a bit of
pseudo-modesty, that he was not “an angel” who descended from
heaven to carry out the theft. But the question of how Snowden
stole these documents may be the most important part of the story.
The NSA, after all, furnishes communications intelligence to the
president, his national security advisers, and the Department of
Defense, intelligence that is supposedly derived from secret sources
in adversary nations. If these adversary nations learn about the
NSA’s sources, then the information, if not worthless, cannot be
fully trusted. The most basic responsibility of the NSA is to pro-
tect its sources. Yet Snowden walked away with long lists of them.
In doing so, he amply demonstrated that a single civilian employee
working for an outside contractor, even one not having the neces-
sary passwords and other access privileges, could steal documents
that betrayed these vital sources. He also demonstrated that such a
massive theft could go undetected for at least two weeks.

If Snowden managed this feat on his own, as he claims in his
Hong Kong video, it suggests that any other civilian employee with
a perceived grievance against NSA practices or American foreign
policy could also walk away with some of the most precious secrets
held by U.S. intelligence. Such vulnerability extends to tens of thou-
sands of civilian contract employees in positions similar to the one
held by Snowden. The lone disgruntled employee explanation is
therefore hardly reassuring. If true, it calls into question the entire

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