| --- |
| title: "House Oversight: Estate Documents (Nov 12) (HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_019766)" |
| source: "House Oversight: Estate Documents (Nov 12)" |
| sourceUrl: "https://www.justice.gov/epstein" |
| date: "2026-01-01" |
| category: "House Oversight" |
| eftaNumber: "HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_019766" |
| ocrPages: 1 |
| ocrChars: 2522 |
| ocrElapsed: 0.0 |
| parseTier: "external-legacy" |
| engine: "engine undisclosed (ep-nov-12.greg.technology mirror)" |
| externalSource: "greg-ep-nov-12" |
| externalLicense: "not granted" |
| externalCredit: "ep-nov-12.greg.technology" |
| externalUrl: "https://ep-nov-12.greg.technology" |
| --- |
| |
| 278 HOW AMERICA LOST ITS SECRETS |
| Snowden wanted more than just NSA secrets. He used his new |
| position and widened access at Booz Allen to go after secret docu- |
| ments from the intelligence services of Britain, Australia, New |
| Zealand, and Israel. He revealed this operation only after receiving |
| sanctuary in Russia. He told an interviewer that by moving to his |
| new Booz Allen job as an infrastructure analyst, he gained the abil- |
| ity to pry secrets out of the allies of the NSA. "I had a special level |
| of clearance, called 'Priv Ac," he said. This "priv ac" status did not |
| allow him to bypass the password protection at sealed-off compart- |
| ments at the NSA, but it did allow him to request files from foreign |
| services cooperating with U.S. intelligence. |
| By way of example, he described one file from the British GCHQ |
| cipher service that he copied, stole, and provided to other parties. It |
| exposed a legally authorized British operation to collect electronic |
| data on terrorist matters in Pakistan by tapping into Cisco rout- |
| ers used by telecom companies in Asia. This GCHQ operation, as |
| Snowden knew, violated neither British nor American law. He told a |
| BBC interviewer in regard to that file, "What's scariest is not what |
| the government is doing that's unlawful, but what they're doing |
| that is completely lawful." So his criteria for taking such documents |
| were not their illegality. In his five weeks at this Booz Allen job, he |
| also used this same newly acquired "privac" 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 Western intelligence services is not |
| the conventional mission of a whistle-blower. In the parlance of CIA |
| counterintelligence, the actions of an employee of an intelligence |
| service who changes his jobs solely to steal the more valuable secrets |
| of this service is called an "expanding penetration." It is not possible |
| to believe that Snowden did not know the immense damage that |
| the highly sensitive documents he was taking from the NSA and its |
| allies could cause. |
| 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. As he told Lana Lam, he knew in advance |
| that by switching to the job at Booz Allen, he would gain the oppor- |
| tunity to take the lists of NSA sources. He knew that the NSA's |
| Epst_9780451494566_ 2p_all_r1.indd 278 |
| 9/30/16 8:13 AM |
| HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_019766 |
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