| --- |
| title: "House Oversight: Estate Documents (Nov 12) (HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_020214)" |
| source: "House Oversight: Estate Documents (Nov 12)" |
| sourceUrl: "https://www.justice.gov/epstein" |
| date: "2026-01-01" |
| category: "House Oversight" |
| eftaNumber: "HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_020214" |
| ocrPages: 1 |
| ocrChars: 2862 |
| 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" |
| --- |
| |
| 62 |
| CHAPTER SIX |
| Thief |
| "We begin by coveting what we see every day" |
| —Hannibal Lecter, The Silence of the Lambs |
| In Hawaii in 2012, Snowden was living a very comfortable life. He was earning from Dell |
| just over $120,000 a year. His housing allowance from Dell paid the rent on his 1,559 square- |
| foot house. He had also leased a sporty car. Looking back at this period of life from Moscow, |
| he said he had been "living in paradise." |
| He went to work five times a week, a 15 minute trip drive through a lush landscape with sugar |
| plantations. After passing through security, he parked his car in a sprawling parking lot, and |
| entered the underground part of the NSA base known as "the tunnel." He said in describing the |
| atmosphere, "You're in a vaulted space. Everybody has sort of similar clearances, everybody |
| knows everybody. It's a small world." He said that to relieve the tediousness of the work, every |
| two months or so his fellow workers would pass around a naked picture that showed up on their |
| screens. He explained: "You've got young enlisted guys, 18 to 22 years old [who] suddenly been |
| thrust into a position of extraordinary responsibility where they now have access to all of your |
| private records. In the course of their daily work they stumble across ... an intimate nude photo |
| of someone in a sexually compromising position." Snowden, as will be recalled, was no stranger |
| to posting lewd photographs. Before he joined the CIA, he had posted pictures of himself |
| mooning on the Internet. He also knew that copying any files, including photographs, was a |
| violation of NSA rules. But he did not report this illicit activity at the NSA even though he later |
| claimed that it occurred regularly. He joked in his Moscow interview with the Guardian that |
| some of the nudes were "extremely attractive" and that viewing them was, as he put it, "a sort of |
| the fringe benefits of surveillance positions." |
| Snowden also had an interest in American politics. He identified with the Libertarian Party, and |
| at the NSA he made no effort to conceal his political support of its causes. He became an active |
| partisan of Congressman Ron Paul, the leading figure in the Libertarian Party in 2012. "He's so |
| dreamy," Snowden posted on the Ars Technica site in March 2009 (just after he registered to |
| vote in North Carolina.) Since Paul was running as a Presidential candidate in the 2012 |
| Republican primaries, Snowden sent the Paul election committee a contribution of $500. |
| Snowden's attraction to the Libertarian ideology of Ron Paul was not that surprising. At the core |
| of Paul's libertarianism was a deep hostility to the intrusion of the government into private lives. |
| Snowden shared this same hostility towards government authority, as was clear from his Internet |
| postings. Like other libertarians, Snowden believed that citizens should not be shackled by |
| HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_020214 |
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|
