Glenn Greenwald, journalist who helped Edward Snowden expose NSA spying, once was a lawyer who owed

[jmowreader]

113. I have worked for the NSA

In the pre-Dubya days, even if we'd have wanted to spy on Americans we couldn't have because we didn't have the assets to do it.

Army strategic signals intelligence is run by NSA. Your equipment belongs to them, your pay comes from them, your tasking and mission comes from them, the award for best unit (the Travis Trophy, otherwise known as the Stanley Cup because it looks like the top foot of the Stanley Cup) is presented by DIRNSA, and your unit has an NSA address. Unfortunately, your drug test requirements come from both NSA and the Army, so we pissed in cups about once a month.

They require you to attend Operations Security training at least once a year if your site is in a Safe location, as listed in the Directory of SIGINT Facilities. Risky sites are trained every six months, and Dangerous sites every quarter. I worked at a Dangerous site. Most places are Risky. A lot goes into the determination, and the number of enemy agents is very high on the list.(I don't know if the Agency has a site in Vienna - this isn't a plausible deniability thing, I really don't know - but Vienna, for some reason, draws spies like honey draws flies so Vienna, peaceful Vienna, would have been Dangerous.)

One very long part of this training is in recognizing someone who works for the other side. There are several big indicators that someone is vulnerable to an approach.

The big one is financial problems. This goes two ways. One is debts no honest man could pay. The other is living beyond your means. Most spies are motivated by money.

Next is ideology, which is Jonathan Pollard's deal.

Another is revenge. There's a theory out there that Booz Allen was planning to get rid of Snowden before his probationary period was over, and he found out about it. I don't think revenge was the only factor here; with the amount of information he has, he couldn't have collected it all in just a couple of weeks.

The big one in Snowden's case is blackmail. Homosexuality, in the days the Army would throw you out without question for it, was a huge one..."you do what we say or we'll tell your commander you're gay" worked even if you weren't gay. Hetero sex worked too. Remember Clayton Lonetree, the Marine security guard who went to Leavenworth for letting the Soviets into the Moscow Embassy cipher room? He was screwing KGB majors without realizing who they were, and they threatened to expose him. Snowden's got colleges on his CV that deny he went there and who knows what else. If someone threatens to expose you if you don't go along and tells you you'll go to prison if you're exposed or even if you report contact, you'll likely go along.

Greenwald looks like a straight money approach; Snowden, some mix of blackmail and revenge.