their secret messages, the NSA goes to extraordinary lengths to keep

4 | HOW AMERICA LOST ITS SECRETS their secret messages, the NSA goes to extraordinary lengths to keep them secret. Draconian laws protect this secrecy. In the first week of June 2013, the NSA learned that there had been a massive breach. Thousands of secret files bearing on com- munications intelligence had been stolen from a heavily guarded regional base in Oahu, Hawaii. The suspect was Edward Snowden, a twenty-nine-year-old civil- ian analyst at that base, who had fled to Hong Kong before the breach was discovered. According to a three-count criminal com- plaint filed by federal prosecutors in the Eastern District of Vir- ginia, Snowden had stolen government property and violated the Espionage Act by the unauthorized and willful communication of national defense information to an unauthorized person. He also likely violated the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act by entering com- puter systems illicitly. This was not a whodunit mystery. On June 9, 2013, in an extraor- dinary twelve-minute video made in a cramped hotel room in Hong Kong, Snowden identified himself as the person who had taken the © NSA documents. Watching the video, the world saw a shy, awk- © ward, and sympathetic-looking man wearing a rumpled shirt, rim- less glasses, and a computer-geek haircut, passionately speaking out against what he termed the NSA’s violations of the law and, in a shaky voice, expressing his willingness to suffer the consequences for exposing them. Snowden had an innocent, idealistic, principled look about him, and the world was ready to congratulate him for revealing the NSA’s alleged illegal collection of data inside the United States, But in fact, Snowden had stolen a great deal more than documents relating to domestic surveillance. He had also stolen secret documents from the NSA, the CIA, the Department of Defense, and the British cipher service revealing the sources and methods they employed in their monitoring of adversaries, which was their job. By the time the theft had been discovered, in the first week of June 2013, it was impossible for the FBI, a grand jury, or any other U.S. agency to question him because he had fled the country. His first stop, Hong Kong, the economically autonomous city of 7.2 mil- lion, is a special administrative region of mainland China. Under the | | Epst_9780451494566_2p_all_rt.zindd 4 ® 929N6 5:51 Pa | | HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_019492