Delphinium Books

Offering readers the best in quality literature

  • Home
  • About
  • Our Books
  • Blog
  • Submissions
  • Contact
  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Instagram

The Whistleblower’s Dilemma: Snowden

December 17, 2015

With a growing awareness of NSA wrongdoing eating at him like moral acid, Edward Snowden became a whistleblower-in-waiting. All he needed was to complete his understanding of what the NSA was doing and how it was doing it. To do that, he needed to see the agency’s raw surveillance repositories. With this goal in mind, he turned down a job offer to become an NSA government employee because, he explained later, the security clearance NSA offered him would not have allowed the file access he needed. Instead, in the spring of 2012 he took a job at Booz Allen Hamilton (BAH) and moved out of the “Tunnel” into BAH’s thirtieth-floor office in the Makai Tower in downtown Honolulu.

Snowden soon developed a reputation at BAH as a nonconformist who wore a hoodie around the posh office and kept a copy of the U.S. Constitution on his desk. His NSA assignments came with the agency’s highest clearance, allowing him entrée to NSA’s inner snoop-sanctum, where its raw-surveillance data was stored. Once there, Snowden discovered how the NSA was monitoring the entire U.S. telecommunications system, and how it was working closely with British intelligence. Most important, his clearance was so special that he could enter and leave NSA’s inner sanctum without leaving an electronic footprint. That “ghost user” privilege is one reason why the NSA is finding it difficult to know exactly which files Snowden downloaded.

“I realized they were building a system whose goal was the elimination of all privacy, globally,” Snowden said later. “To make it so that no one could communicate electronically without the NSA being able to collect, store, and analyze the communication.”

The last straw fell into place.

Filed Under: General Tagged With: BAH, Booz Allen Hamilton, Honolulu, NSA, Snowden, whistleblower-in-waiting. security clearance

Recent Posts

  • On the Line Between Memory and Invention Lies the Story by Kimberly Olson Fakih December 11, 2022
  • Six Thoughts on Historical Fiction by Don Zancanella, author of A Storm in the Stars August 8, 2022
  • Seeing Red – an essay by Margaret Hermes, author of The Opposite of Chance (available in paperback March 2022) April 20, 2022
  • In the Shadows of The Unknown Woman by Brooks Hansen October 18, 2021
  • Thoughts On Writing IN THE FIELD By Rachel Pastan August 3, 2021
  • Old Enough to Have Succeeded, but Also to Have Failed: on writing the short stories You Would Have Told Me Not To by Chris Coake available in paperback July 27, 2021 July 26, 2021

Categories

  • Delphinium Authors
  • General
  • New Books
  • News

Tags

1954 acceptance speech artists Austria autobiographical Books Booz Allen Hamilton bottoming out celebrity demotic Dostoyevsky dysfunctional Edward Snowden fame fiction fiction-writing Fitgerald Fuhrer George Elliot Germany Hemingway Historical Fiction holocaust imagination James Frey Jewish Karen Silkwood literature Memoir memoirist Middlemarch Nabokov Nazi Nazis Nobel Prize novelist novelists NSA Reading redemption Sobibor style World War II writers writing

Archives

  • December 2022
  • August 2022
  • April 2022
  • October 2021
  • August 2021
  • July 2021
  • May 2021
  • April 2021
  • February 2021
  • January 2021
  • December 2020
  • November 2020
  • October 2020
  • September 2020
  • August 2019
  • April 2019
  • February 2019
  • January 2019
  • December 2018
  • November 2018
  • October 2018
  • September 2018
  • August 2018
  • July 2018
  • June 2018
  • May 2018
  • April 2018
  • March 2018
  • February 2018
  • January 2018
  • December 2017
  • November 2017
  • October 2017
  • September 2017
  • August 2017
  • July 2017
  • June 2017
  • May 2017
  • April 2017
  • March 2017
  • August 2016
  • May 2016
  • April 2016
  • December 2015
  • November 2015
  • October 2015
  • April 2015
  • March 2015
  • February 2015
  • January 2015
  • October 2013

© 2023 · Delphinium Books. All rights reserved.