By Luke Harding , The Snowden Files: The Inside Story Of The World’s Most Wanted Man – February 1, 2014 | Thanks to Golden Age of Gaia.

http://tinyurl.com/kd8n85v

In late December 2001, someone calling themselves TheTrueHOOHA had a question. He was an 18-year-old American male with impressive IT skills and a sharp intelligence. His real identity was unknown. Everyone who posted on Ars Technica, a popular technology website, did so anonymously.

TheTrueHOOHA wanted to set up his own web server. It was a Saturday morning, a little after 11am. He posted: “It’s my first time. Be gentle. Here’s my dilemma: I want to be my own host. What do I need?”

Soon, regular users were piling in with helpful suggestions. TheTrueHOOHA replied: “Ah, the vast treasury of geek knowledge that is Ars.” He would become a prolific contributor; over the next eight years, he authored nearly 800 comments. He described himself variously as “unemployed”, a failed soldier, a “systems editor”, and someone who had US State Department security clearance.

His home was on the east coast of America in the state of Maryland, near Washington DC. But by his mid-20s he was already an international man of mystery. He popped up in Europe – in Geneva, London, Ireland, Italy and Bosnia. He travelled to India. Despite having no degree, he knew an astonishing amount about computers. His politics appeared staunchly Republican. He believed strongly in personal liberty, defending, for example, Australians who farmed cannabis plants.

At times he could be rather obnoxious. He called one fellow-Arsian, for example, a “cock”; others who disagreed with his sink-or-swim views on social security were “fucking retards”.

His chat logs cover a colourful array of themes: gaming, girls, sex, Japan, the stock market, his disastrous stint in the US army, his negative impressions of multiracial Britain (he was shocked by the number of “Muslims” in east London and wrote, “I thought I had gotten off of the plane in the wrong country… it was terrifying”), the joys of gun ownership (“I have a Walther P22. It’s my only gun but I love it to death,” he wrote in 2006). In their own way, the logs form a Bildungsroman.

Then, in 2009, the entries fizzle away. In February 2010, TheTrueHOOHA mentions a thing that troubles him: pervasive government surveillance. “Society really seems to have developed an unquestioning obedience towards spooky types… Did we get to where we are today via a slippery slope that was entirely within our control to stop? Or was it a relatively instantaneous sea change that sneaked in undetected because of pervasive government secrecy?”

TheTrueHOOHA’s last post is on 21 May 2012. After that, he disappears, a lost electronic signature amid the vastness of cyberspace. He was, we now know, Edward Snowden.

Edward Joseph Snowden was born on 21 June 1983. His father Lonnie and mother Elizabeth – known as Wendy – were high-school sweethearts who married at 18. Lon was an officer in the US coastguard; Snowden spent his early years in Elizabeth City, on North Carolina’s coast. He has an older sister, Jessica. When Snowden was small – a boy with thick blond hair and a toothy smile – he and his family moved to Maryland, within DC’s commuter belt.

As his father recalls, Snowden’s education went wrong when he got ill, probably with glandular fever. He missed “four or five months” of class in his mid-teens. Another factor hurt his studies: his parents were drifting apart. He failed to finish high school. In 1999, aged 16, Snowden enrolled at Anne Arundel community college, where he took computer courses.

In the aftermath of his parents’ divorce, Snowden lived with a roommate, and then with his mother, in Ellicott City, just west of Baltimore. He grew up under the giant shadow of one government agency in particular. From his mother’s front door, it takes 15 minutes to drive there. Half-hidden by trees is a big, green, cube-shaped building. An entrance sign off the Baltimore-Washington Parkway reads: “NSA next right. Employees only.” The Puzzle Palace employs 40,000 people. It is the largest hirer of mathematicians in the US.

For Snowden, the likelihood of joining was slim. In his early 20s, his focus was on computers. To him, the internet was “the most important invention in all human history”. He chatted online to people “with all sorts of views I would never have encountered on my own”. He wasn’t only a nerd: he kept fit, practised kung fu and, according to one entry on Ars, “dated Asian girls”.

The 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq prompted Snowden to think seriously about a career in the military. “I wanted to fight in the Iraq war because I felt like I had an obligation as a human being to help free people from oppression,” he has said.

The younger Snowden was into computers, kung fu – and even tried his hand at amateur modelling. Photograph: © TheTrueHOOHA

The military offered what seemed, on the face of it, an attractive scheme, whereby recruits with no prior experience could try out to become elite soldiers. In May 2004, Snowden took the plunge and enlisted, reporting to Fort Benning in Georgia. It was a disaster. He was in good physical shape but an improbable soldier, shortsighted and with unusually narrow feet. During infantry training, he broke both his legs. After more than a month’s uncertainty, the army finally discharged him.

Back in Maryland, he got a job as a “security specialist” at the University for Maryland’s Centre for Advanced Study of Language. It was 2005. (He appears to have begun as a security guard, but then moved back into IT.) Snowden was working at a covert NSA facility on the university’s campus. Thanks perhaps to his brief military history, he had broken into the world of US intelligence, albeit on a low rung. The centre worked closely with the US intelligence community, providing advanced language training.

In mid-2006, Snowden landed a job in IT at the CIA. He was rapidly learning that his exceptional IT skills opened all kinds of interesting government doors. “First off, the degree thing is crap, at least domestically. If you ‘really’ have 10 years of solid, provable IT experience… you CAN get a very well-paying IT job,” he wrote online in July 2006.

In 2007, the CIA sent Snowden to Geneva on his first foreign tour. Switzerland was an awakening and an adventure. He was 24. His job was to maintain security for the CIA’s computer network and look after computer security for US diplomats. He was a telecommunications information systems officer. He also had to maintain the heating and air-con.

In Geneva, Snowden was exposed to an eclectic range of views. On one occasion, he gave an Estonian singer called Mel Kaldalu a lift to Munich. They had met at a Free Tibet event in Geneva; they didn’t know each other brilliantly well, but well enough for Snowden to offer him a lift. They chatted for hours on the empty autobahn. Snowden argued that the US should act as a world policeman. Kaldalu disagreed. “Ed’s an intelligent guy,” he says. “Maybe even a little bit stubborn. He’s outspoken. He likes to discuss things. Self-sustainable. He has his own opinions.”

The Estonian singer and the CIA technician talked about the difficulty pro-Tibet activists had in getting Chinese visas. Snowden was sceptical about the Beijing Olympics. Kaldalu said the Israeli occupation of Palestine was morally questionable. Snowden said he understood this, but viewed US support for Israel as the “least worst” option. Kaldalu suggested a “deconstructive” approach. The pair also discussed how rapid digital changes might affect democracy and the way people governed themselves.

At the time, the figure who most closely embodied Snowden’s rightwing views was Ron Paul, the most famous exponent of US libertarianism. Snowden supported Paul’s 2008 bid for the US presidency. He was also impressed with the Republican candidate John McCain. He wasn’t an Obama supporter as such, but he didn’t object to him, either.

Once Obama became president, Snowden came to dislike him intensely. He criticised the White House’s attempts to ban assault weapons. He was unimpressed by affirmative action. Another topic made him even angrier. The Snowden of 2009 inveighed against government officials who leaked classified information to newspapers – the worst crime conceivable, in Snowden’s apoplectic view. In January of that year, the New York Times published a report on a secret Israeli plan to attack Iran. The Times said its story was based on 15 months’ worth of interviews with current and former US officials, European and Israeli officials, other experts and international nuclear inspectors.

TheTrueHOOHA’s response, published by Ars Technica, is revealing. In a long conversation with another user, he wrote the following messages:

“WTF NYTIMES. Are they TRYING to start a war?”

“They’re reporting classified shit”

“moreover, who the fuck are the anonymous sources telling them this? those people should be shot in the balls”

“that shit is classified for a reason”

“it’s not because ‘oh we hope our citizens don’t find out’ its because ‘this shit won’t work if iran knows what we’re doing’”

NSA HQ Maryland

Snowden’s anti-leaking invective seems stunningly at odds with his own later behaviour, but he would trace the beginning of his own disillusionment with government spying to this time. “Much of what I saw in Geneva really disillusioned me about how my government functions and what its impact is in the world. I realised that I was part of something that was doing far more harm than good,” he later said.

In February 2009, Snowden resigned from the CIA. Now he was to work as a contractor at an NSA facility on a US military base in Japan. The opportunities for contractors had boomed as the burgeoning US security state outsourced intelligence tasks to private companies. Snowden was on the payroll of Dell, the computer firm. The early lacunae in his CV were by this stage pretty much irrelevant. He had top-secret clearance and outstanding computer skills. He had felt passionately about Japan from his early teens and had spent a year and a half studying Japanese. He sometimes used the Japanese pronunciation of his name – “E-do-waa-do” – and wrote in 2001: “I’ve always dreamed of being able to ‘make it’ in Japan. I’d love a cushy .gov job over there.”

Japan marked a turning point, the period when Snowden became more than a disillusioned technician: “I watched as Obama advanced the very policies that I thought would be reined in.” Between 2009 and 2012, he says he found out just how all-consuming the NSA’s surveillance activities are: “They are intent on making every conversation and every form of behaviour in the world known to them.” He also realised that the mechanisms built into the US system and designed to keep the NSA in check had failed. “You can’t wait around for someone else to act. I had been looking for leaders, but I realised that leadership is about being the first to act.” He left Japan for Hawaii in 2012, a whistleblower-in-waiting.

Snowden’s new job was at the NSA’s regional cryptological centre (the Central Security Service) on the main island of Oahu, near Honolulu. He was still a Dell contractor, working at one of the 13 NSA hubs devoted to spying on foreign interests, particularly the Chinese. He arrived with an audacious plan to make contact anonymously with journalists interested in civil liberties and to leak them stolen top-secret documents. His aim was not to spill state secrets wholesale. Rather, he wanted to turn over a selection of material to reporters and let them exercise their own editorial judgment.

According to an NSA staffer who worked with him in Hawaii and who later talked to Forbes magazine, Snowden was a principled and ultra-competent if somewhat eccentric colleague. He wore a hoodie featuring a parody NSA logo. Instead of a key in an eagle’s claws, it had a pair of eavesdropping headphones, covering the bird’s ears. He kept a copy of the constitution on his desk and wandered the halls carrying a Rubik’s cube. He left small gifts on colleagues’ desks. He almost lost his job sticking up for one co-worker who was being disciplined.

In Hawaii, by early 2013, Snowden’s sense of outrage was still growing. But his plan to leak appeared to have stalled. He faced too many obstacles. He took a new job with the private contractor Booz Allen Hamilton, yielding him access to a fresh trove of information. According to the NSA staffer who spoke to Forbes, Snowden turned down an offer to join the agency’s tailored access operations, a group of elite hackers.

On 30 March, in the evening, Snowden flew to the US mainland to attend training sessions at Booz Allen Hamilton’s office near Fort Meade. His new salary was $122,000 (£74,000) a year, plus a housing allowance. On 4 April, he had dinner with his father. Lon Snowden says he found his son preoccupied and nursing a burden. “We hugged as we always do. He said: ‘I love you, Dad.’ I said: ‘I love you, Ed.’”

“My position with Booz Allen Hamilton granted me access to lists of machines all over the world [that] the NSA hacked,” Snowden told the South China Morning Post, adding that this was exactly why he’d accepted it. He was one of around 1,000 NSA “sysadmins” allowed to look at many parts of this system. (Other users with top-secret clearance weren’t allowed to see all classified files.) He could open a file without leaving an electronic trace. He was, in the words of one intelligence source, a “ghost user”, able to haunt the agency’s hallowed places. He may also have used his administrator status to persuade others to entrust their login details to him.

Although we don’t know exactly how he harvested the material, it appears Snowden downloaded NSA documents on to thumbnail drives. Thumb drives are forbidden to most staff, but a sysadmin could argue that he or she was repairing a corrupted user profile and needed a backup. Sitting back in Hawaii, Snowden could remotely reach into the NSA’s servers. Most staff had already gone home for the night when he logged on, six time zones away. After four weeks in his new job, Snowden told his bosses at Booz that he was unwell. He wanted some time off and requested unpaid leave. When they checked back with him, he told them he had epilepsy (a condition that affects his mother).

And then, on 20 May, he vanished.

In December 2012, a reader pinged an email to Guardian columnist Glenn Greenwald, one of the more prominent US political commentators of his generation, based in Brazil. The email didn’t stand out; he gets dozens of similar ones every day. The sender didn’t identify himself. He (or it could have been a she) wrote: “I have some stuff you might be interested in.”

“He was very vague,” Greenwald recalls.

This mystery correspondent asked Greenwald to install PGP encryption software on his laptop. Once up and running, it guarantees privacy (the initials stand for Pretty Good Privacy) for an online chat. Greenwald had no objections. But there were two problems. “I’m basically technically illiterate,” he admits. Greenwald also had a lingering sense that the kind of person who insisted on encryption might turn out to be slightly crazy.

• © Luke Harding 2014. This is an edited extract from The Snowden Files: The Inside Story Of The World’s Most Wanted Man, by Luke Harding, published in the UK on Monday by Guardian Faber at £12.99; and in the US on 11 February by Vintage Books (excerpted by permission of Vintage, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.

Continued in Part 2, immediately below