The Snowden Files: The Inside Story of the World's Most Wanted Man

2 CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE

In March 2012, Snowden left Japan and moved across the Pacific to Hawaii. At the same time, it seems he donated to his libertarian political hero Ron Paul. An ‘Edward Snowden’ contributed $250 to Paul’s presidential campaign from an address in Columbia, Maryland. The record describes the donor as an employee of Dell. In May, Snowden donated a second $250, this time from his new home at Waipahu, describing himself as a ‘senior adviser’ for an unstated employer.

Snowden’s new job was at the NSA’s regional cryptological centre (the ‘Central Security Service’) on the main island of Oahu, which is near Honolulu. He was still a Dell contractor. The centre is one of 13 NSA hubs outside Fort Meade devoted to SIGINT, and in particular to spying on the Chinese. The logo of ‘NSA/CSS Hawaii’ features two green palm trees set on either side of a tantalising archipelago of islands. The main colour is a deep oceanic blue. At the top are the words: ‘NSA/CSS Hawaii’; at the bottom, ‘Kunia’. It looks an attractive place to work.

He arrived on the volcanic island in the middle of the Pacific with a plan. The plan now looks insane. It was audacious, but – viewed dispassionately – almost certainly going to result in Snowden’s incarceration for a very long time and possibly for the rest of his life.

The plan was to make contact anonymously with journalists interested in civil liberties. Proven journalists whose credentials and integrity could not be doubted. And – though quite how this would happen was a little hazy – to leak to them stolen top-secret documents. The documents would show evidence of the NSA’s illegality. They would prove that the agency was running programs that violated the US constitution. To judge by what he later said, Snowden’s aim was not to spill state secrets wholesale. Rather, he wanted to turn over a selection of material to reporters and let them exercise their own editorial judgement.

To corroborate his claims about the NSA to a sceptical Fourth Estate would not only require lots of documents, Snowden realised. It would also take a preternatural degree of cunning. And a cool head. And some extraordinary good fortune.

Snowden’s new post was NSA systems administrator. This gave him access to a wealth of secret material. Most analysts saw much less. But how was he supposed to reach out to reporters? Sending a regular email was unthinkable. And meeting them in person was difficult, too: any trip had to be cleared with his NSA superiors 30 days in advance. Also, Snowden didn’t ‘know’ any reporters. Or at least not personally.

His girlfriend of eight years, Lindsay Mills, joined him in June on Oahu, which means ‘the gathering place’. Mills grew up in Baltimore, graduated from Maryland Institute College of Art, and had been living with Snowden in Japan. Aged 28, she had worked in a number of jobs – ballet dancer, dance teacher, fitness instructor and pole-dance specialist. Her biggest passion was photography. Mills took a regular photograph of herself – often wearing not much – and posted it on her blog. It was titled: ‘L’s journey. Adventures of a world-travelling, pole-dancing superhero.’

Snowden and Mills rented a three-bedroom, two-bathroom bungalow at 94-1044 Eleu Street, a sleepy, tree-lined neighbourhood in Waipahu, which was a former sugar plantation 15 miles west of Honolulu. It was a blue wooden property, comfortable but not luxurious, with no view of sea or mountains. The front yard had a small lawn, a Dwarf Bottlebrush shrub, some palm trees and a neighbour’s avocado leaning in. The rear had more palm trees, concealing it from the street and a knoll where teenagers furtively smoked.

A sticker on the front door – ‘Freedom isn’t free’, adorned with a Stars and Stripes – hinted at Snowden’s convictions. Neighbours seldom, if ever, spoke to him. ‘A couple of times I’d see him across the street and he nodded and that was it. My impression was that he was a very private person. He did his own thing,’ said Rod Uyehara, who lived directly opposite. A retired army veteran, like many in the neighbourhood, he assumed the young man with short hair was also military.

The island’s surroundings would have given Snowden plenty to brood about during his daily commute up Kunia Road. To the west of his bungalow cocoon lie the Wai’anae Mountains, the remains of an ancient volcano. The peaks are inhabited by menacing, bruised clouds: they have a tendency to suddenly replicate, blacken the sky and hammer the valley with torrential rain.

Behind him, to the south, was Pearl Harbor, the target of Japan’s surprise attack on 7 December 1941. A day of ‘infamy’, as Franklin Roosevelt put it, which caught America’s spymasters with their pants down and brought the US into the second world war.

At the time, ramping up intelligence capabilities, the chastened spooks built a vast tunnel complex in the middle of Oahu, and called it ‘the hole’. Originally intended as an underground aircraft assembly and storage plant, it was turned into a chamber to make charts, maps and models of Japanese islands for invading US forces. After the war it became a navy command centre and was reinforced to withstand chemical, biological and radiological attack.

Today it is known as the Kunia Regional Security Operations Center (RSOC) and hosts the US Cryptological System Group, an agency staffed by specialists from each branch of the military as well as civilian contractors. At some point the facility’s nickname changed to ‘the tunnel’.

Snowden’s bungalow was seven miles away, on the nearest housing estate – just 13 minutes, door to door. Largely deserted countryside stretches in between. It is not a beautiful drive. The two-lane highway dips and rises, flanked by high mounds of earth and tangles of weeds, which obscure the landscape. It is easy to feel boxed in. Occasionally you glimpse corn seed plantations and yellowing fields.

‘The tunnel’ had two main spying targets: the People’s Republic of China and its unpredictable, troublesome Stalinist satellite, North Korea. It was clear to everyone – not just NSA analysts – that China was a rising military and economic power. The NSA’s mission in the Pacific was to keep a watchful eye on the Chinese navy, its frigates, support vessels and destroyers, as well as the troops and military capabilities of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA). Plus the PLA’s computer networks. If penetrated, these were a rich source of data.

By this point Snowden was a China specialist. He had targeted Chinese networks. He had also taught a course on Chinese cyber-counterintelligence, instructing senior officials from the Department of Defense how to protect their data from Beijing and its avid hackers. He was intimately familiar with the NSA’s active operations against the Chinese, later saying he had ‘access to every target’.

The Japanese were no longer the enemy. Rather, they were among several prosperous East Asian nations whom the US considered as valuable intelligence partners. The NSA co-ordinated its SIGINT work with other allies in the region. Visitors to the subterranean complex included the new defence chief of South Korea’s security agency, the incoming boss of Thailand’s national security bureau and delegations from Tokyo. ‘The tunnel’ also tracked Thailand and the Philippines, supporting counter-terrorism operations there, as well as in Pakistan.

According to an NSA staffer who spoke to Forbes magazine, Snowden was a principled and ultra-competent, if somewhat eccentric, colleague. Inside ‘the tunnel’ he wore a hoodie featuring a parody NSA logo. Instead of a key in an eagle’s claws it had a pair of eavesdropping headphones covering the bird’s ears. His co-workers assumed the sweatshirt, sold by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, was a joke.

There were further hints of a non-conformist personality. Snowden kept a copy of the constitution on his desk. He flourished it when he wanted to argue against NSA activities he felt violated it. He wandered the halls carrying a Rubik’s cube. He also cared about his colleagues, leaving small gifts on their desks. He almost lost his job sticking up for one co-worker who was being disciplined.

The RSOC where Snowden worked is just one of several military installations in the area. Displays of US power abound. A giant satellite dish peeks from a hillside. CH-47 Chinook helicopters whump overhead. Camouflage trucks trundle by. Young men and women in uniform drive SUVs, sports cars and motorbikes. They go fast. As one Dodge Convertible’s bumper sticker put it: ‘Get in. Sit down. Shut up. Hold on.’

The RSOC is almost invisible from the road, the complex set back behind dogwood trees and a 10-foot-high metal fence topped with barbed wire. There is just one small, generic sign – ‘Government property. No trespassing’ – to indicate this is an official facility. Take the turn off and you roll down a hill to a guardhouse containing two navy guards in blue camouflage with pistols strapped to their thighs. Beyond the security barrier is a car park with more than a hundred vehicles, as well as several billboards warning against drunk driving. ‘006 days since the last accident,’ says one.

Given the number of vehicles, the dearth of people or buildings – just a few cabins – is puzzling, until you realise everyone is underground. They enter via a long, curious-looking, rectangular structure with an orange roof built into a steep hillside of brown earth. The gradient is so steep it’s a wonder the structure doesn’t slide down. Steps lead up the dark mouth. ‘The doors inside are huge. It’s like something out of King Kong. It takes ages just to get in,’ said a former air force officer who worked here.

Exfiltrating secret material from here would be a high-risk undertaking. It would require quite remarkable nerve.

In the regular blog written by Snowden’s partner, Lindsay Mills, Snowden makes the odd oblique appearance. She calls him E. He is very much an off-stage presence – a loyal boyfriend, certainly, but one who is prone to mysterious absences and disappearances. As in Switzerland, Hawaii Snowden is a man with a mask.

On just a couple of occasions, E poses with Mills in her weekly portraits, posted to Instagram. You don’t see his face. In one shot Snowden is on a beach, bent over, trousers rolled up to his knees. A flapping black winter coat hides his face. Probably he’s laughing, but it’s difficult to tell, and he reminds one of a Richard III impersonator. ‘A world where people move like ravens,’ Mills writes on her blog, noting: ‘a rare shot of E’. Someone points out that Snowden looks a bit like Quasimodo. Mills shoots back: ‘Don’t mess with E!’

Mills described the motivation for her blog: ‘Been shooting daily self portraits for several years now. They’re not just for mothers. I find it helps me work out my emotions and document my life. Not that anyone would be interested in it, but someday I may thank myself for these shots. Or hate myself – either way I’ll feel something. ’ The portraits are done in bright colours – a sort of artist’s diary – with Mills dressing up to capture a mood or an emotion. Many are coquettish. She meditates, hangs from trees or watches the Hawaii sunset.

Snowden kept himself apart from other staff during the 13 months he spent in Hawaii. He was by nature reserved but he had special reason to be guarded. If it came off, his leak would be the most significant since the Pentagon Papers, eclipsing the 2010 release of US diplomatic cables and warlogs by a disaffected US army private, Chelsea (formerly Bradley) Manning. It would lift the lid on mass surveillance, not just of millions of Americans but the entire world. But it was a big if. A slip on his part, a careless word, an unusual work request, a rogue flash drive, could arouse questions, with potentially catastrophic consequences.

Snowden was surrounded by spies dedicated to detecting hidden codes and patterns, to discovering secrets. If they discovered his, he would likely be quietly tried, convicted and jailed for decades, an anonymous geek who tried and failed to steal data from his employers. Little wonder Snowden appeared buttoned up.

Friends likened him teasingly to Edward Cullen, the vampire played by Robert Pattinson from the Twilight saga. Snowden was pale, enigmatic, solemn and seldom seen by day. He hardly ever appeared at social gatherings. ‘He would barely say anything and hang out on the side, sort of hovering. So it became a sort of game to involve him, like “Go Team Edward!”’ recalls one. ‘At a birthday party one night we prodded him into making an actual speech. It was about five words.’

Snowden did describe his life in Hawaii as ‘paradise’. This, certainly, was how the Honolulu Star-Advertiser also tells it, declaring on its masthead: ‘The pulse of paradise.’ What passed for news headlines – ‘Officials contemplate weekend harbor hours’, ‘Pacific aviation museum honors daredevil’, ‘Bush blaze doused on Maui’ – tended to boost the image of a tropical idyll.

But for Snowden there were few outwards signs of fun. No surfing, no golf, no lounging on the beach. ‘He was pale, pale, pale, pale, as if he never got out in the sun,’ the friend says. (In contrast, Barack Obama, who has a sister on Oahu, gives every impression of savouring the beaches, the surf and the shave ice, the local version of a snow cone.)

Compared to Snowden, glued to his laptops, his partner Lindsay Mills was a social butterfly. After arriving in Hawaii she joined Pamela and the Pole Kats, a group that trained and performed using poles. It was not stripping – they did athletic performances at the Mercury, a hipster bar in downtown Honolulu, once a month. Mills also participated in street performances on the first Friday of each month.

Despite her outward sociability, though, Mills remained a puzzle to some acquaintances in Hawaii. She half-hid behind huge sunglasses. She did not volunteer much personal information. Many were unaware she even had a boyfriend. She didn’t appear to have a job – that is, beyond her photography and dancing – yet drove a new SUV. The source of her prosperity was another riddle.

Pam Parkinson, who founded the pole group, introduced Mills to the Waikiki Acrobatic Troupe, a dozen or so dancers, jugglers, tightrope walkers, fire-breathers and hula-hoopers who gathered a few times a week.

On Sundays they practised till sunset at a park overlooking the beach in Waikiki. Mills thrived among this bohemian bunch, though by the standards of her new friends she was straight-laced. ‘She wouldn’t laugh at a sex joke,’ one recalled. Terryl Leon, co-ordinator of the troupe, said Mills was new to acrobatics but determined to improve. ‘She was working a short acrobatic sequence. I’d give her tips on form and technique. She was a bit reserved. Very pretty, attentive, alert, focused and co-operative.’

Snowden on occasion collected Mills from practice but seldom got out of the car or spoke to her friends. ‘She didn’t really talk about him,’ one said. One exception was when Snowden was away for a prolonged spell and Mills lamented the difficulty of long-distance relationships. The troupe gossiped about her friendship with her ‘acro-partner’, a young muscular man named Bow. But, as Mills’s blog made clear, she remained devoted to E.

E himself, meanwhile, was still biding his time at the NSA. Behind his quiet, unassuming surface, his disenchantment and anger with his employers was growing.

Ed Snowden was not the first person from inside the NSA to be disillusioned by what he discovered there, and by the dark trajectory of US security policy after 9/11. Snowden had watched closely the case of Thomas Drake. Drake, a US air force and navy veteran, was an executive at the NSA. After the 9/11 attacks, he became unhappy with the agency’s secret counter-terrorism programs – in particular, an intelligence-collecting tool called TRAILBLAZER. Drake felt it violated the fourth amendment against arbitrary searches and seizures.

Drake decided to raise his concerns through all the right channels. He complained to his NSA bosses. Using a prescribed framework for whistleblowers, he also testified to the NSA’s inspector general, the Pentagon and before the House and Senate congressional oversight committees. Finally, in frustration, he went to the Baltimore Sun. This ingenuous approach didn’t work. In 2007 the FBI raided his home. Drake faced 35 years in jail. Only in 2011, after four years of anxiety, did the government drop the major charges, with Drake pleading guilty to a minor misdemeanour. He was put on probation.

For Snowden, Drake was an inspiration (the two would later meet). The punitive way the authorities hounded Drake convinced Snowden, moreover, that there was no point in going down the same path. He knew others who had suffered in similar circumstances. They included an NSA employee who jokingly included a line in an email that said: ‘Is this the PLA or the NSA?’ Snowden told James Risen that inside the NSA ‘there’s a lot of dissent – palpable with some even.’ But that most people toed the line through ‘fear and a false image of patriotism’, construed as ‘obedience to authority’.

As an outside contractor, working for Dell, Snowden wasn’t entitled to the same whistleblower protections as Drake. Even if he had reported his concerns over NSA surveillance nothing would have happened, he later told Risen. He believed his efforts ‘would have been buried forever’, and that he would have been discredited and ruined. ‘The system does not work. You have to report wrongdoing to those most responsible for it.’

Snowden had lost faith in meaningful congressional oversight of the intelligence community. Instead, Congress was part of the problem, he felt. In particular he was critical of the ‘Gang of Eight’, the group of congressional officials who are notified about the most sensitive US intelligence operations.

By December 2012, he had made up his mind to contact journalists. Asked at what moment he had decided to blow the whistle, Snowden says: ‘I imagine everyone’s experience is different, but for me, there was no single moment. It was seeing a continuing litany of lies from senior officials to Congress – and therefore the American people – and the realisation that that Congress, specifically the Gang of Eight, wholly supported the lies that compelled me to act. Seeing someone in the position of James Clapper – the director of national intelligence – baldly lying to the public without repercussion is the evidence of a subverted democracy. The consent of the governed is not consent if it is not informed.’

In March 2013, Clapper told the Senate intelligence committee that the US government does ‘not wittingly’ collect data on millions of Americans. The statement was untrue, as Snowden would reveal and Clapper would himself later admit. It was also perhaps a felony.

By his account, one document in particular pushed Snowden over the edge. He stumbled upon a classified 2009 report by the NSA’s inspector general – the same person to whom Drake had complained. Snowden had been carrying out a ‘dirty word search’: he was spring-cleaning the system to remove material that shouldn’t have been there. When he opened the document he couldn’t stop himself from reading it.

The report was a detailed 51-page account of how the Bush administration had carried out its illegal wiretapping program following 9/11. The program, codenamed STELLAR WIND, involved the collection of content and metadata from millions of Americans without a warrant. Some of the facts about the wiretapping scandal had emerged a few years earlier, but nothing like the whole story. For Snowden this was incontrovertible proof that senior US officials were breaking the law. Without, he learned, any repercussions at all. ‘You can’t read something like that and not realise what it means for all of the systems we have,’ he told the New York Times.

In Hawaii, by early 2013, Snowden’s sense of outrage was still growing. But his plan to leak appeared to have stalled. He faced too many obstacles. To get access to a final tranche of documents Snowden required greater security privileges than he enjoyed in his position at Dell. Clapper made his ill-fated appearance before the Senate in March. The same month Snowden took a new job with the private contractor Booz Allen Hamilton, yielding him access to a fresh trove of information. According to the NSA staffer who spoke to Forbes, Snowden turned down an offer to join the agency’s Tailored Access Operations, a group of elite hackers. He had entered the final tense weeks of his double life.

Snowden’s last workplace was in downtown Honolulu. It is a shiny, corporate contrast to the RSOC bunker. It occupies the 30th floor of Makai Tower, on Bishop Street, in the financial district. The reception has beige furnishings, framed vintage maps and a television, volume low, tuned to Fox News. Instead of a windowless canteen filled with buzz-cut soldiers, Booz Allen Hamilton staff in suits and Hawaiian shirts stroll through a sunlit courtyard of fountains and choose from dozens of restaurants. The nearest pub, Ferguson’s, isn’t exactly rowdy: it offers bacon-wrapped dates, baked Brie and red pepper tzatziki.

Booz Allen Hamilton’s chairman and president, Ralph Shrader, made complacent assurances about security on the company blog: ‘In all walks of life, our most trusted colleagues and friends have this in common. We can count on them. No matter what the situation or challenge, they will be there for us. Booz Allen Hamilton is trusted in that way. You can count on that.’

Snowden may have allowed himself a wry smile. He was counting on his new employer not to suspect anything. Snowden was reaching the point of no return. Elements in the US government, he knew, would see his actions as a cyber version of Pearl Harbor, a sneak attack. For it to come from within, from a supposed ‘traitor’, would make the wrath all the worse. That Snowden saw it as an act of patriotism, a defence of American values, would soften Washington’s vengeance not a bit.

Snowden’s own name was an apposite one for a man engaged in such risky enterprises. In the 1590s in Britain, John Snowden, a Catholic priest, became a double agent working for Lord Burghley, Queen Elizabeth’s lord treasurer. The historian Stephen Alford describes this Snowden as ‘subtle, intelligent and self-assured’. His job was to spy on Catholic emigrés on the continent who were consorting with the Spanish and plotting against Elizabeth. Snowden used ciphers, secret letters and other tricks. The Elizabethans called such men ‘intelligencers’ or ‘espials’; what they got up to was espiery. (The French term espionage only came into use from the 18th century onwards.)

But Edward Snowden, the modern-day espial, could not use his true name if he was to reach out to the US reporters who worked on national security, and who so far had no clue that Snowden existed. To make contact with them he would need a codename. Given the gravity of what he was undertaking, TheTrueHOOHA seemed jejune. Snowden came up with something new. He chose the handle ‘Verax’, a classical Latin adjective meaning ‘truth-telling’. The word verax is rather rare. It crops up in Plautus, Cicero and Horace. It is used particularly of oracles and supernatural sources.

Snowden intended to become just such a prophetic voice from deep inside the intelligence community. As with his real surname, his codename had a history: two obscure British dissenters also called themselves ‘Verax’. One was Henry Dunckley, a 19th-century Baptist social critic who used the nom de plume in the Manchester Examiner. The other was Clement Walker, a 17th-century Somerset parliamentarian during the English civil war who was eventually locked up and died in the Tower of London. Significantly, verax is also an antonym of mendax. Mendax means ‘deceiving’ and was the handle used by Julian Assange of WikiLeaks when he was a young Australian hacker. WikiLeaks, with their electronic mass-leaking of US army files from Afghanistan, and of State Department diplomatic cables from all over the world, had recently plunged the US administration into uproar. Perhaps Snowden’s allusion was deliberate.

Outwardly, his life continued as before. Read with hindsight, his girlfriend’s blog entries seem poignant. On 1 March, Mills writes that she will be an ‘international woman of mystery’ and that her Friday show later the same evening has a ‘007’ theme.

The performance goes well. Three days later she writes: ‘When I was a child most of my friends would play dress up and fantasize about being a princess, superman or pickle rancher (I have some weird friends). I would imagine being a spy. Running down sewer tunnels to escape treacherous enemies, eavesdropping on important adult conversations, and giving a full report to General Meow. So getting the opportunity to play a Bond and a babe for even a few minutes during my performance on Friday was very fulfilling. And the spy high of Friday night must have subconsciously stuck in my brain, for the following evening E and I randomly pick Skyfall for our date night movie.’

Eleven days later, on 15 March, there is news: ‘We received word that we have to move out of our house by May 1. E is transferring jobs. And I am looking to take a mini trip back East. Do I move with E, on my own, to Antarctica?… For now I’ll spin my magic ball and see where I land.’

On 30 March, in the evening, Snowden flies off to the US mainland. Over the next couple of weeks he attends training sessions at Booz Allen Hamilton’s office near Fort Meade; various intelligence agency contractors have offices next door to SIGINT city. His new salary is $122,000 a year plus a housing allowance. On 4 April he has dinner with his father. Lon Snowden says his son seemed preoccupied and nursing a burden. ‘We hugged as we always do. He said: “I love you, Dad.” I said: “I love you, Ed.”’

In mid-April, Mills and Snowden get the keys to their new Hawaii home. It’s two streets away from their old one.

Mills writes: ‘My favourite part of moving is the pre-unpacking stage where I can roll around big empty rooms in soft window light (I may have been a cat in my former life). We took time to envision what each room could look like once we crammed our things in them. And even discussed hanging silks in the two-story main room.’

Snowden makes a valedictory appearance in her photo-blog. The pair arrange themselves on the bare floor of their home. Mills, in a striking blue dress, lies on her back and smiles at him; as ever, Snowden’s thoughts are inscrutable since the camera only records the back of his head. His glasses are abandoned several feet away. What is going through his mind?

In the second half of April, Mills travels home to the east coast of the US herself. She cruises antique shops with her mother, helps redecorate her family house and sees old friends. In early May she returns to Honolulu. She blogs about feeling torn between two different worlds. Snowden, meanwhile, is settling into his new job at Booz.

Or so it appears. In reality, Snowden is probably scraping the NSA’s servers. ‘My position with Booz Allen Hamilton granted me access to lists of machines all over the world [that] the NSA hacked,’ Snowden told the Washington Post, adding that that was exactly why he’d accepted it.

Months later, the NSA was still trying to puzzle out what exactly happened; Snowden hasn’t fully explained how he carried out the leak. But as a systems administrator Snowden could access the NSA’s intranet system, NSAnet. This was set up following 9/11 to improve liaison between different parts of the US’s intelligence community.

Snowden was one of around 1,000 NSA ‘sysadmins’ allowed to look at many parts of this system. (Other users with top-secret clearance weren’t allowed to see all classified files.) He could open a file without leaving an electronic trace. He was, in the words of one intelligence source, a ‘ghost user’, able to haunt the agency’s hallowed places. He may also have used his administrator status to persuade others to entrust their login details to him. GCHQ trustingly shares its top-secret British material with the NSA, which in turn makes it available to an army of outside contractors. This meant Snowden had access to British secrets, too, through GCHQ’s parallel intranet, GCWiki.

Although we don’t know exactly how he harvested the material, it appears Snowden downloaded NSA documents onto thumbnail drives. The method is the same as that used by Manning, who downloaded and sent to WikiLeaks a quarter of a million US diplomatic cables on a CD marked ‘Lady Gaga’ while working in a steamy field station outside Baghdad.

Thumb drives are forbidden to most staff. But a ‘sysadmin’ could argue that he or she was repairing a corrupted user profile, and needed a backup. The thumb drive could then be carried away to bridge the ‘airgap’ that existed between the NSA system and the regular internet.

Why did nobody raise the alarm? Was the NSA asleep? Sitting in Hawaii, Snowden could remotely reach into the NSA’s servers, some 5,000 miles away in Fort Meade, through what was known as a ‘thin client’ system. Most staff had already gone home for the night when Snowden logged on, six time zones away. His activities took place while the NSA napped. Plus Snowden was extremely good at what he did – he was an ‘IT genius’ in the words of Anderson, his friend from Geneva – so he was able to move undetected through a vast internal system.

After four weeks in his new job, Snowden tells his bosses at Booz he is feeling unwell. He wants some time off and requests unpaid leave. When they check back with him he tells them he has epilepsy. It is the same condition that affects his mother Wendy, who uses a guide dog.

And then, on 20 May, he vanishes.

Mills’s blog reflects some of the pain and anguish she felt on discovering that E had walked out of her life. By 2 June it becomes clear something has gone very wrong.

She writes: ‘While I have been patiently asking the universe for a livelier schedule I’m not sure I meant for it to dump half a year’s worth of experience in my lap in two weeks’ time. We’re talking biblical stuff – floods, deceit, loss… I feel alone, lost, overwhelmed, and desperate for a reprieve from the bipolar nature of my current situation.’

Five days later Mills removes her blog. She also wonders publicly about deleting her Twitter account. A creative body of work stretching back over several years, it includes dozens of photos of herself, and some of her E.

‘To delete or not to delete?’ she tweets. She doesn’t delete.