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Comment by jordigh | Hacker News Reader

Ed was a Booz Allen Hamilton employee only for a couple of months. He wasn't even out of his probation period as an employee. It's really amazing that in such a short time he was able to siphon all this information out of the NSA.

I wonder what more information could he have collected if he had spent a longer time contracting for the NSA. I wonder how much more about the NSA we could know if people who have dedicated their entire careers to the NSA would whistleblow.

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If you want to put on your tinfoil hat for a second, consider the fact that Snowden started his career in the military, then moved to CIA, then moved to Booz Allen.

It's entirely possible that Snowden is an ongoing CIA op to discredit their rival NSA as part of a turf war.

It's also entirely possible that unicorns are real.

But while the above possibility is merely unlikely, this possibility is logically impossible (using the definition of unicorn from philosophy). Quite a difference.

Both are absurd points to make. Just because something is theoretically possible in some version of the universe doesn't mean it's worth discussing without any real evidence. Tinfoil hat or not.

I really don't think it's an unreasonable possibility. It's a known fact Snowden worked for CIA and even received deep cover training while working in Geneva. Much of his behavior is not that of a hapless IT admin, but someone well trained in HUMINT operations.

He comes from a multigenerational military family. That's the kind of background that breeds strong loyalty to the state, and the exact kind of background from which the CIA recruits its top spies.

I find it almost implausible that someone with that kind of loyalty would suddenly resign from the CIA after they invested so much in him, only to jump ship to a private contractor. If his reasons for leaving the CIA were purely moral, why would a private contractor ameliorate any of those concerns? It seems more likely the CIA sent him to Booz Allen.

But hey, it's all a big conspiracy right? Don't believe anything you read on the Internet, except what Ed Snowden tells you.

People in the IC often "jump ship" to private contractors. Be it for better pay, hours, or whatever. I don't find it hard to believe that Snowden would go to a private contractor. No conspiracy there.

It's just as likely he was operating on direct orders from the president himself because he feared the power of the NSA and needed the public against it!

That's the thing about conspiracies, when there is no proof or reasonable cause you're free to just make up whatever you want.

Remember when it was a conspiracy theory that the NSA was reading all your emails?

Would the CIA willingly do so much damage to the US? Surely there are other ways to sabotage the NSA instead of doing something as high profile as leaking NSA documents to the public. Besides, I think leaking classified documents of other intelligence agencies is something no agency does, because an escalation of this sort would be disastrous for both agencies involved.

Last thing CIA would do is reveal them. All leverage is lost. They would instead hold them hostage.

Who knows, in today's political climates, anything and everything will be done

Has he really done that much damage? People are more afraid of the NSA than ever. One could argue that's exactly what they wanted.

I don't think the majority of people in the US are afraid, but aware.

The kind of person with a deep loyalty to the S̶t̶a̶t̶e̶ constitution actually sounds like the kind of person who may try and sunlight what they perceive as an unconstitutional system. Especially if they feel they will be remembered as a patriot for it.

Besides, the private sector pays a lot better than the CIA, and nobody is free from the gravitas of wealth.

Don't get our hopes up.

What else could he be? Don't have the time to enumerate all the reasons but if you entertain this option then a very happy news and silver lining follows ...

> tinfoil

You mean thinking and arriving at conclusions not blared from approved media outlets?

> You mean thinking and arriving at conclusions not blared from approved media outlets?

Nah, cynical one-upmanship by a bunch of people who consider Tom Clancy to be a good author.

That feels not impossible, but unlikely.

If Snowden were a CIA deep-cover operative against another US institution, couldn't they have found him a better safe-house than in Russia?

Having no experience with the CIA, maybe I just vastly under-estimate the amenities of Russian safe-houses. ;)

Haven't Snowden's leaks hurt the CIA a little too much to be considered collateral damage?

Possibly someone inside the NSA had some dirt on someone inside the CIA and retaliation ensued to keep people at the NSA busy...

> It's entirely possible that Snowden is an ongoing CIA op to discredit their rival NSA as part of a turf war.

It's a shame that snowden's CIA background isn't talked about very often.

He did the majority of his data siphon over many months during his time as a system administrator as a Dell contractor [1]. He was only a Booz Allen Hamilton employee for 3 months [2], one of which where he was actually on the job (and ostensibly siphoning docs until his last day).

(According to reports; we haven't heard an official account yet.)

1. http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/08/us-govt-snowden-a...

2. http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/06/whistleblower-who...

I think he spent years working for the CIA beforehand. He probably came in pretty well versed. Plus, you can pick up a lot if you're paying attention.

Or what damage a normal spy could have done...

What makes him different than a normal spy? It's just the adversary he worked for was the public. I'd say "instead of an enemy of the U.S. Government," but I'm hard pushed to separate that distinction somehow. The NSA's behaviour would seem to point to its considering the U.S. people as enemies of the state... rather than the people being the state and themselves being the enemy.

I suppose it's not beyond belief that Snowden _could_ have been a CIA operative the entire time he was in the NSA and "blowing his cover" by going public was just the endgame to move scrutiny of CIA projects to NSA projects. Of course, there's a thousand conspiracy theories. What if that wasn't the endgame? What if "defecting" to Russia is still part of a bigger operation?

Just to be clear, I have no evidence supporting this theory, nor do I believe he's any more than he suggests. But we'd all do well to evaluate what and why we trust the things we do from time to time.

Or is doing.

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