Instead of being in the business of targeted surveillance, the NSA had moved into the business of mass surveillance Concluding that if he couldn’t serve his country by parachuting into dangerous places that he’d have to do it using his computing skills, he applied for security clearance and spent the year recuperating from his injuries while Uncle Sam crawled over his background, family, records and innermost thoughts. But a bad fall broke some bones and led to him being effectively invalided out of the service. The army flagged him as a possible special forces prospect and sent him off to Fort Benning for training. His parents, being navy folks, were not amused. His response was to join the army as a way of serving his country. Living, as he did, in the shadow of NSA HQ in Maryland, he felt the seismic shock of the 9/11 attacks on the US. The first pivotal moment in Snowden’s life was 11 September 2001.
Be sure and get in touch when you turn 18.” “Well, kid,” said the lab guy after a pause, “you’ve got my contact number. Snowden replied that he was currently pretty busy at high school. The man asked if he was looking for a job. It was a guy from Los Alamos thanking him for spotting the vulnerability, which they had now fixed. Nothing happened for a while then one day the Snowdens’ phone rang. So, being the kind of kid he was, he phoned the lab and left a message telling them about it. And in the process did us a great service.Īs a teenager, Snowden once visited the website of the Los Alamos nuclear research laboratory and noticed that it had a gaping security hole. It tells the story of how an intense, bright, serious boy from a patriotic, quasi-military family (father in the coast guard, mother working as a clerk at the National Security Agency) came to tell the world how his beloved country’s intelligence services had covertly pivoted from protection to mass surveillance in the name of national security. Well, eventually Snowden did, and this fascinating autobiography is the result. You have to start thinking about your permanent record.” “Pretty clever, Eddie,” he said, “but you should be using that brain of yours not to figure out how to avoid work, but to do the best work you can. He stopped turning in homework until one day his maths teacher questioned him and discovered his methods. So he analysed the marking system and realised that it could be “hacked”: if he just did the quizzes, he could get enough points to get by. At high school, he resented the way homework absorbed valuable time that he would have preferred to spend at a computer. In the old days, a good hacker was someone constantly on the lookout for better ways of writing code and there’s a sense in which the young Edward Snowden was one of those.
The work “hack” used to be a term of approbation among geeks, as a means of describing an elegant way of circumventing a difficulty that had defeated lesser minds.
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