Document discusses Snowden's mindset and historical context of secrecy without new actionable leads

68 Such a fascination with the power of government-held secrets has always been a core concern of radical libertarians. In his 1956 book The Torment of Secrecy: The Background and Consequences of American Security Policies, the sociologist Edward Shils brilliantly dissects the fascination with secrecy among individuals on all ends of the political spectrum who fear that government agencies will use covert machinations against them. In Shils’ concept, this anti- government counter-culture is “tormented” by the government’s possession of knowledge unavailable to them. Those who subscribe to this culture tend to believe that the agencies that hold these secrets, such as the FBI, CIA and NSA, can control their lives. The other side of this torment over others holding secrets is the belief that by obtaining such secrets will give individuals power over government. Snowden himself was concerned with a coming “dark future,” which he later described as follows: “[The elites] know everything about us and we know nothing about them — because they are secret, they are privileged, and they are a separate class... the elite class, the political class, the resource class — we don’t know where they live, we don’t know what they do, we don’t know who their friends are. They have the ability to know all that about us. This is the direction of the future but I think there are changing possibilities in this.” To change the “dark future,” someone would have to know the secrets of the “elites.” Snowden saw himself as one of the few individuals in a position to seize state secrets from those elites. He had both a SCI, or Sensitive Compartmental Information, clearance, a pass into a NSA regional base and the privileges of a system administrator. This position allowed him to steal state secrets—and whatever power that went with them. And if he moved to a position that gave him greater access, he would, in this view, amass even greater power. Whatever his actual agenda in 2012, we know that he tested possible reactions to a leak exposing NSA surveillance in the United States. He asked fellow workers at the NSA base in 2012, according to his own account: “What do you think the public would do if this [secret data] was on the front page?” He asked this question at a time when a large number of State Department and US Army classified documents had been posted on Julian Assange’s Wikileaks website. While these Wikileaks revelations of secrets were making front-page headlines, the NSA documents that Snowden had taken were far more explosive since they contained NSA intelligence secrets. And no NSA document had ever been published in the press in 2012. One reason why NSA documents remained secrets, as all intelligence workers at Dell were told when they signed their oath, was that the unauthorized release of communications intelligence documents could violate US espionage laws. Even so, there was no shortage of activists overseas, such as Assange, who would be willing to publish NSA documents revealing its global surveillance activities. And in answer to his rhetorical question, he no doubt knew that they would cause an immense reaction on the front page. Cyber punks, as these activists called themselves, tended to be hostile to the NSA since they believed (correctly) that it monitored their activities on the Internet. This anti- NSA view was well HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_020220