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own beefcake-style pictures, “So sexxxy it hurts” and “I like my girl-
ish figure that attracts girls.” He approached a model agency called
Model Mayhem, which recommended a photographer. He had some
concern about that photographer because he, as Snowden wrote in
a post, “shoots mostly guys.” Snowden said he was “a little worried
he might, you know, try to pull my pants off and choke me to death
with them, but he turned out to be legit and is a pretty damn good
model photographer.” He posted the photographs on the Internet.
The lack of any paid job offers dashed Snowden’s hopes for a model-
ing career.
Around this time, he began dating Lindsay Mills, an extremely
attractive nineteen-year-old art student at the Maryland Institute
College of Art. Jonathan Mills, Lindsay’s father, was an applications
developer at the Oracle Corporation. According to him, Snowden
met his daughter on an Internet dating site. Snowden and Mills had
much in common. They both had divorced parents who gave them a
great deal of latitude in conducting their personal lives. Both of them
were keenly interested in perfecting their bodies through exercise
© and diet regimes. Mills’s only paid employment over the next eight ©
years would be as a fitness and yoga instructor in Maryland. When
they first met, they both had ambitions to be models, and neither of
them had inhibitions about posing provocatively for photographers.
They both also had a desire to travel to exotic places, including cities
in Asia. Mills had spent four month in Guilin, China, before meeting
Snowden.
As bleak as his prospects as a high-school dropout might have
seemed, Snowden had an unexpected stroke of good fortune in the
spring of 2006. The CIA offered him a $66,o00-a-year job as a CIA
communications officer. “I don’t have a degree of ANY type. In fact,
I don’t even have a high school diploma,” Snowden boasted in May
2006 on the website Ars Technica under his alias. He added, with
only a slight exaggeration, “I make 70K.”
How did Snowden get the job? The CIA’s minimum requirements
in 2006 for a job in its clandestine division included a bachelor’s or
master’s degree and a strong academic record, with a preferred GPA
of 3.0 or better.
The CIA needed technical workers in 2006. But even if Snowden
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