It wasn’t that they put it on me asan individual—that I’m uniquely

CHAPTER 7 String Puller It wasn’t that they put it on me asan individual—that I’m uniquely qualified [or] an angel descending from the heavens—as that they put it on someone, somewhere. —EDWARD SNOWDEN, Moscow, 2013 D OWNLOADING NSA documents was not Snowden’s only rogue activity while working at the NSA for Dell in 2012. Three weeks after the CryptoParty, Snowden began anonymously contact- ing a high-profile journalist. He used the same alias, Cincinnatus, that he used with Sandvik and to advertise the Oahu CryptoParty. The journalist to whom he wrote on December 1, 2012, was Glenn Greenwald, the previously mentioned Rio-based columnist for The Guardian. Greenwald had not always been an activist journalist. He had been a litigation lawyer at the elite New York firm of Wachtell, Lip- ton, Rosen & Katz. He was also an entrepreneur, owning part of Master Notions, a company that, among other things, had a 50 per- cent financial interest in the pornographic website HJ (an acronym that originally stood for “Hairy Jock”). All did not go well with this enterprise. In 2004, Greenwald became involved in an acrimonious lawsuit with his other associates in HJ. As a result, he had a number | | Epst_9780451494566_2p_all_r1.z.indd 59 ® 9/29/16 5:51 Pa | | HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_019547