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| This photo provided by The Guardian Newspaper in London shows Edward Snowden, who worked as a contract employee at the National Security Agency, in Hong Kong, Sunday, June 9, 2013. The man who told the world about the U.S. government’s gigantic data grab also talked a lot about himself. Mostly through his own words, a picture of Edward Snowden is emerging: fresh-faced computer whiz, high school and Army dropout, independent thinker, trustee of official secrets. And leaker on the lam. |
WASHINGTON
(AP) -- The man who told the world about the U.S. government's gigantic
data grab also talks a lot about himself.
Mostly
through his own words, a picture of Edward Snowden is emerging:
fresh-faced computer whiz, high school dropout, wannabe Green Beret,
disillusioned cog in a secret bureaucracy.
He's
retained an aura of secrecy despite sitting for several days of
interviews with The Guardian, someposted in online video. Snowden
combines an earnest, deeply serious demeanor with a flair for the
dramatic.
Snowden, 29, fled the U.S. for a
Hong Kong hotel last month to go public with top secret documents
gathered through his work in Hawaii as a contractor through Booz Allen
Hamilton with the National Security Agency, where he worked as a systems
analyst. He revealed startlingly voracious spy programs that sweep up
millions of Americans' telephone records, emails and Internet data in
the hunt for terrorists.
With the United
States considering criminal charges against him, Snowden told the South
China Morning Post he hoped to stay in the autonomous region of China
because and he has faith in "the courts and people of Hong Kong to
decide my fate."
He's also talked of seeking
asylum from Iceland or Russia. And he suggested the United States might
hire Chinese gangs to get him. The adversaries he's made by disclosing
secrets are so powerful that "if they want to get you, they'll get you
in time," Snowden told The Guardian newspaper of London, which first
reported his revelations.
Why would a man
"living in Hawaii in paradise and making a ton of money" decide to leave
everything behind, he asked. Because he realized that his computer
savvy was helping erect an ever-expanding "architecture of oppression"
and he believed the people must be told.
From a
secret location in Hong Kong, he told the newspaper: "The reality is
that I have acted at great personal risk to help the public of the
world, regardless of whether that public is American, European, or
Asian."
Snowden's leaked documents have had an
enormous impact. Some have questioned, however, his descriptions of his
power as a Booz Allen contractor and other details of his life.
For example, he said he was earning $200,000 a year. When Booz Allen fired him, they said his salary was $122,000.
"I,
sitting at my desk, had the authority to wiretap anyone, from you or
your accountant to a federal judge to even the president if I had a
personal email," Snowden told The Guardian on videotape.
Asked
by Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, about that comment, NSA Director Gen.
Keith Alexander said simply that it was false. "I know of no way to do
that," Alexander told senators in a hearing Wednesday.
Former
NSA and CIA director retired Gen. Mike Hayden called Snowden's claim
"absurd legally and technologically." Former NSA Inspector General Joel
Brenner also doubts it.
"I do not believe his
statement," Brenner said. "And if he tried, I believe he would be
discovered, stripped of his clearance, and summarily fired."
Brenner
said, however, that Snowden appears to have had extraordinary access to
things he should not have and that will be investigated.
Snowden
also raised eyebrows by declaring that in his job he "had access to the
full roster of everyone working at the NSA, the entire intelligence
community and undercover assets all around the world, the locations of
every station we have, what their missions are and so forth."
Guardian
journalist Glenn Greenwald, who first reported the phone-tracking
program and conducted the Snowden interviews, describes him as "very
steadfast and resolute about the fact that he did the right thing."
Jonathan Mills, father of Snowden's long-time girlfriend, Lindsay Mills, described him as "very nice. Shy, and reserved."
"He's
always had strong convictions of right and wrong, and it kind of makes
sense," said Mills, who said he was "shocked" when he heard the news
about Snowden.
In her blog, Lindsay Mills, a
dancer and art college graduate, writes of a boyfriend she refers to
only as "E." On Monday, she wrote that "at the moment all I can feel is
alone." She said her hand and been forced, that she was typing on a
"tear-streaked keyboard," and that "sometimes life doesn't afford proper
goodbyes."
Snowden told the South China
newspaper that he hasn't dared contact his girlfriend or family since
allowing his identity as the leaker to be revealed Sunday in The
Guardian.
His father, now retired from the
U.S. Coast Guard and living in Pennsylvania, told ABC News in a brief
interview that he was worried about his son and still processing what
had happened. Lonnie Snowden said he last saw his son two months ago,
over dinner.
Snowden's parents are divorced
and his mother, Elizabeth Snowden, declined to talk to reporters as she
left her Maryland home Monday morning.
Joyce
Kinsey, a neighbor living next to the gray clapboard condominium in a
quiet Ellicott City neighborhood, said Snowden's mother, whom she knows
as "Wendy," bought the condo more than a dozen years ago.
When
he was about 16, Snowden lived in the condo without his family for a
couple of years, Kinsey said. His mother would drop by with groceries
and a girlfriend visited every weekend. Kinsey recalled seeing Snowden
through the blinds, working on a computer "at all times of day and
night." She had the impression he was sort of a "computer geek."
Snowden
spent part of his childhood in Wilmington, N.C., before his family
moved to the Maryland suburbs of Washington, D.C., an area rife with
government workers. He attended public school in Anne Arundel County,
from elementary school through three semesters at Arundel High School in
Gambrills, according to a county school spokesman.
Snowden told the Guardian he didn't finish high school but studied computers at a Maryland community college.
He
wanted to be a Green Beret. Snowden served in the Army from June to
September in 2004 at Fort Benning, Ga., where he declared his intent to
qualify for the Special Forces, said Col. David H. Patterson Jr., an
Army spokesman. Snowden didn't complete basic training and was
discharged. The Army wouldn't give other details.
Snowden said he tapped his computer skills to get an information technology job at the CIA and rose quickly through the ranks.
Snowden
said he left the CIA in 2009 to begin working for a private contractor
that assigned him to a functioning NSA facility, stationed on a military
base in Japan.
