Streetwise Professor

Edward Snowden worked in Hawaii for Booz Allan Hamilton. By his own admission he took that job to get access to NSA databases, for the explicit purpose of stealing and revealing highly classified information.  He started working there in March, 2013.

We know, again by her own admission, that Laura Poitras was in contact with Snowden no later than January, 2013.  We also know that Poitras has a close, working relationship with Jacob Appelbaum.  Appelbaum shares a byline with her on a Der Spiegel interview with Snowden.

To give you an example, I just turned 30 and now that I’m halfway to death I…I uh just kidding…you can’t be halfway at 98%, but whatever happens it was murder…so…um…terrible…anyway…uh…I..I…I think it’s important to understand this…right.

I’m in Berlin right now because I had the really fucking awful unfortunate mistake of for my whole life dreaming to go to Hawaii, to go swimming with mantarays and dolphins and like all this other like you know unicorns and rainbows and all that stuff, right? We didn’t find any unicorns and rainbows; well, we actually found two rainbows but no unicorns. And uh, so I was in Hawaii in April for my 30th birthday. And 20 of my friends came. And it was like the most incredible thing I had ever experienced.

Like, if you want to feel loved, have 20 people fly for a really fucking long time to an island in the middle of an ocean, right, and to fly you there as a gift for your birthday. So I felt really loved and I felt like this is incredible, what a fantastic thing and what great friends, and I’m so lucky to have, you know, friends like this in my life.

Note particularly the lesson that Appelbaum attempts to convey with this story:

The problem with data retention is that it tells a story about you which is not necessarily true, and I’ve said this many times, but it is made up of facts, individual facts which may be correct, but the story that they tell depends on who’s telling the story. So the narrator of a story…So let’s say an analyst, looking at your data trial because of a grand jury, let’s say related to WikiLeaks, or let’s say to other things, the largest national security leak in human history. Well, can you imagine what that analyst is thinking, now that I’ve had the misfortune of finally living this childhood dream? Only to have two months later, a guy from Hawaii being stationed in Hawaii, leaking these documents. So here’s a great threat, I don’t actually trust that my country is a safe enough place. That I should wait around and see if justice still exists. So I came to Berlin because I thought it would be a much better place to write about some of the things that are taking place now.

He is trying to construct a counter narrative to explain his presence in Hawaii at the very time that Snowden was commencing his espionage.  To translate: “Don’t believe the obvious.  Don’t pay attention to anyone who says that I was in Hawaii to meet Snowden.  All of the circumstantial evidence is bullshit constructed by some NSA analyst.   I was there for my birthday with my wonderful friends and the manta rays.  Total coincidence that Snowden was there too.”

It is also quite revealing that he made these remarks in Germany.  The day before he left for Hawaii, he appeared on a panel hosted by Der Spiegel journalist Judith Horchert.  Der Spiegel has been a major outlet for Snowden/Poitras/Appelbaum revelations that have been targeted quite clearly at Merkel, who is currently in the middle of an election campaign.  Greenwald has promised that there would be future revelations that would be “explosive in Germany“:

Are new revelations from the NSA data trove going to drop in the next few days? Speaking on a political talk show on German public broadcaster ARD on Thursday night, Glenn Greenwald said he expected stories to appear in the coming days that would be even “more explosive” in Germany than reports previously published about cooperation between the National Security Agency and German intelligence authorities.

A lot of dots to connect here, folks.  Dots in time and space and persons.  Appelbaum, Snowden, Poitras, Greenwald; Hawaii and Germany; March-April, 2013.  The picture you get is pretty obvious.

Note: I’ve updated this post to incorporate an accurate transcription of Appelbaum’s remarks, in lieu of the machine generated transcription that was in the original post (though Appelbaum might have actually made more sense filtered through the machine!).  5 hours dealing with the Brazilian consulate over a visa issue (and no! it has nothing to do with Greenwald:-P)  left me a little weary and I took the lazy way out.  A huge thank you/hat tip to Catherine Fitzpatrick who provided the transcription in the comments, and I’ve pasted it into the post.  Please visit Catherine’s blogs Minding Russia and Wired State where she is giving the Snowden story intensive, extensive, and insightful coverage.