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So far all of his decisions have been very well calculated. I think this is apart of his reveal, to either keep the focus on the story, or maintain some type of safety and appear to have disappeared into China's intelligence agency....the real point I think is to keep the focus on the reveal.

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If you watch the video - the interviewee says that he's been planning this for a few years. I bet this is more calculated than people would like to imagine.

Booz Allen said he was an employee for less than three months. That sounds really interesting, I thought he would have worked there for longer since he claims he was planning this for a long time and the reporter said he was in contact for months.

If you read what the Wash Post reporter said Snowden tried to get him to release the entire slide deck. Why couldn't he put it on the internet? It is also interesting to me that he said this required a lot of preparation. If he had the accesses he claimed he had copying classified slide decks would be risky for him but not something that would take a long time.

He also claimed that the NSA could track all emails in the USA and he (or an analyst not sure what he meant) could access the email of the president if he had the personal address. If that is the case, surely evidence of that type of deep telecommunications interception would be more important than PRISM especially since he raised that claim specifically to explain why he did it. With the access he had it would be easy to prove.

I don't know what to make of his decisions. Not saying he isn't who he said he is but I think there are a lot of unanswered questions.

In other government/megacorp settings, contractors can end up staying in the same position for years working for different companies. Back in the early 2000's I worked for a State government where some of the contractors had been around for twenty years working for Digital, IBM, Dell, HP, a half dozen companies you never heard of, etc.

There tends to be a small world around big organizations, as social proof is important for getting jobs and closing deals.

I'll just throw in my two cents: It seems pretty simple from my point of view. People switch between companies that win bids and contracts. Those companies now need to staff and they staff with the people from the companies that lost bids. The people that are picked up happen to know the systems that they're dealing with.

Also word gets around to which contractors look "hot" compared to others. They start getting resumes from people looking to jump ship.

Combine that with laws that stipulate some amount of contracting money must go to small minority owned businesses... yeah.

> Booz Allen said he was an employee for less than three months. That sounds really interesting, I thought he would have worked there for longer since he claims he was planning this for a long time and the reporter said he was in contact for months.

That actually makes me wonder if he actually is Edward Snowden. I mean... who could we possibly ask to check?

> If you read what the Wash Post reporter said Snowden tried to get him to release the entire slide deck. Why couldn't he put it on the internet?

Credibility, perhaps?

He worked for the intelligence apparatus in various other capacities. Booz Allen just had the misfortune of being the one who hired him recently when he decided to do this.

Taking classified data away from the organization in question may not be trivial. Email is probably monitored, using USB storage is probably not allowed, printers are probably monitored as well, CDR drives might not be readily available, internet access is probably quite limited and monitored.

On the other hand, he was apparently a system administrator of some sort so perhaps he had ways of getting data out of their system that other employees would not have had available to them.

If he was a systems admin, there were undoubtedly other system admins around to keep an eye on each other. If he got data out, he likely walked out with it physically in some way, or there was a severe breakdown in the network security.

> If he was a systems admin, there were undoubtedly other system admins around to keep an eye on each other.

Of course. The question is are sys-admins as effective at watching other sys-admins as they are at watching regular users? It seems reasonable that they are not, if only because sys-admins are more skilled than other users. Sys-admins likely also implicitly trust other sys-admins more than other users, not intentionally of course, but enough to bias their ability to see things.

That's why you frequently deploy moles who try to get away with something (e.g, with writing a password on a post-it), and seriously reprimand persons who do not report that.

All your personnel must be paranoid; you cannot get there with only the real break-in/data theft attempts, as those are too rare.

Also, you regularly shift the roles, turning an operator into a watcher and vice versa.

Finally, you cannot have someone teamed up with the same person for weeks, because they might befriend each other and start to let things slip.

> Booz Allen said he was an employee for less than three months.

I don't really get this Snowden guy. From what I've read about him, I don't see why someone like him would be given access to the whole picture in the way he claims to have had access to. Unless someone was positioning him with the intention that he would become a whistleblower /conspiracy

I just have a hard time buying that of all the people that have worked for the NSA, of all the people who must have had access to what he did, only one would become a big whistleblower. Either somebody dropped the ball in psych profiling Snowden, or this must have been intentional, right?

First of all, there have been several NSA whistleblowers that have spoken on this issue. William Binney even gave the CCC a copy of some code that was a similar model to what his team initially designed for the NSA. Second, his current job at a contractor is relatively new, but before joining Booz Allen he worked directly under an intelligence agency.

Where is it recorded that he worked directly under an intelligence agency? (Honest question; i've not found that.)

He worked for the CIA on IT security since approximatly 2004-2005.

In 2007 he was stationed in Switzerland (CIA), he left the CIA in 2009.

In 2009 he started to work for a private contractor in the U.S and Japan which had him stationed at a NSA facility.

I don't get all the media reports that he only been on the inside for 3 months. This adds up to 7+ years.

It all on his wiki page with footnotes to sources.

Another scenario is that the NSA (and friends) are just far looser with "secrets" than we would have imagined. It is incredible to me that the NSA has almost entry-level contractor employers -- who have little loyalty or long-term career aspirations within the NSA -- running the show. Simply incredible.

Indeed. This is not someone I would want to be wagering my modest chess skills against. His choices have been extremely well calculated, with a clear understanding of what is being sacrificed every step of the way. He gave an interview which may have been enough for folks with sources to figure out which hotel he was staying at. Checking out and going to an undisclosed location makes perfect sense.

Additionally the choice of Hong Kong and the timing is looking more and more careful to me. The fact that there is a temporary moratorium on extraditions and it is during the Sunnylands Summit cannot be calculations that escaped him.

One thing for sure... I would not want to be working for the State Department right now.

He planed this really well, I've been almost more facisnated with his execution then the story.

One if the most amazing things that some may not know (if you look through my submissions - I only have 3), he pressured the Post to publish by going to the Guardian. Even the Post consulted gov officials (which is understandable) prior to publishing.

If he continued to stay at that hotel, it would of been his folly I believe. I'm sure his anxiety level is off the charts, so to stick to these well calculated decisions is almost like hearing a Jason Bourne action flick.

"Reveal" is a verb, not noun, historically; that said, it seems many are copying many others, to cast reveal as a noun. Random observation.

It's odd, isn't it? -- Considering we have this perfectly good noun "revelation", whose connotations are, to my mind, more than apt. Oh well.

I don't think the words are equivalent. "Reveal" (as a noun, like it or not... :] ) carries connotations of showiness and intentional manufactured drama; it's the explicit act of making information available. A "revelation" on the other hand, is something that just happens, a sudden awareness of information (which may have previously been available).

if you want showiness and intentional manufactured drama, I would go with "unveiling".

This is a pet peeve of mine as well. Another common one is when people cast "addict" as a verb and inflect it to create "addicting", seemingly unaware of the perfectly adequate "addictive".

According to the dictionary, these are all valid forms but I just find them irksome for some reason.

Mine is "performant" used to mean pretty much anything you want it to mean. It might mean "high performance" (this algorithm is performant - highly performant is even funnier) or "performs better" (more performant).

I'm veering dangerously away from the topic with this, but according to Henry Hitchings, "'Reveal' has been used as a noun since the 16th century. Even in its narrow broadcasting context, as a term for the final revelation at the end of a show, it has been around since the 1950s."

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/author/henry-hitchings/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Hitchings

Just thought I'd throw my two cents in on that, since the history of English is a particular interest of mine.

Commenters at http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/63056/reveal-vs-r... say it appears in the 1973 OED, possibly originally from cinema.

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