Conventional Ignorance
I see a lot of people trying to make something out of the fact that Edward Snowden didn’t graduate from high school. They would be amazed at the number of people in Mensa who didn’t see the point in hanging around for a piece of paper after they had gotten everything they thought was necessary from a training program.
Snowden was making a six figure salary with his GED, so a lot of other people weren’t worried about diplomas. He had something more important than a high school or college diploma to a military contractor – he had a security clearance. It costs a lot of money for a contractor to get a security clearance for someone, so they don’t worry about paper credentials.
Snowden was at the right place at the right time. When he went into the Army, he chose Special Forces and was accepted. Special Forces get a higher clearance than the Infantry. Even though they released him as a result of his injuries in training, he left with an honorable discharge.
That made him acceptable to the CIA which often works with Special Forces, where his clearance would have been elevated. Even though he started as a security guard, the CIA was undergoing a rapid expansion due to the GWOT™ so he was given an opportunity to move up, and chose computers. The military gives everyone intelligence and aptitude tests, so his bosses at the CIA knew what Snowden could learn to do.
Snowden learned his trade on the job, so when contractors were brought in to take over the computer operations, they hired him with a decent bump in salary. He was then established as a contract employee with known skills and the always important security clearance. That’s how he made his way to where he was when he left.
Given what he did, he obviously was good at his job, with or without paperwork and student loans from any educational institutions.
Oh, yes, Lambert noted that a piece in the LA Times reports that Snowden can’t be extradited from Hong Kong for disclosing classified information. The ‘high school dropout’ seems to know what he’s doing.
[Full disclosure: My first experience with computers was teaching myself COBOL ISAM programming with an IBM reference manual. It isn’t easy, but it can be done when the military doesn’t want anyone to know they are doing something that requires computers.]
6 comments
Having taken the military aptitude tests myself, I have no doubt that they showed a high aptitude for this youngster. That said, I don’t think he’s as smart as he *thinks* he is. He was smart enough to figure out that they’d catch him, and go to ground in a (relatively) safe country before they did, but I don’t think he’s thought much further than a month ahead, two months at most. Idealism (and short-term time horizon) of the young. I was that young once. Then I learned the hard way. Sigh.
Note that it’s normal that extradition treaties don’t include espionage/spying as a reason for extradition. It would be quite embarrassing if one of your spies managed to escape to your country barely ahead of a dragnet for his rear, and then you were required by treaty to turn your spy right back over to the country he escaped from. If the guy was just an average joe, the Hong Kong government would turn him over quietly in a back alley just to avoid embarrassment, no need for extradition proceedings. But now that he’s a world-wide celebrity of sorts, that’s a bit more difficult. They might have to allow him to stay even though my bet is that he’s somewhat of an embarrassment to them. But the loss of face from meekly handing him over would be even more embarrassing. Hmm…. yes, he definitely chose well, clearly had at least *some* understanding of Confucian culture.
The Obamabots are now chortling that he explained things wrong to Greenwald. What I saw, though, was the inevitable result of trying to simply things for a naive audience, sometimes the audience makes some assumptions based on what you said and rather than spend the next half hour trying to correct them about some triviality, you shrug and move on. If he’d gone into full technical details of what did what, everybody’s eyes would have glazed over and it would have turned into a jumble of technicalese to most people. The general gist — a giant dragnet sucking in huge piles of data — remains the same regardless of the difficulties of explaining that sort of technology in a short video for a news journalist and general audience who are not computer experts.
As I’ve heard it said, extradition is nothing but something you need when extra guests are coming. I suspect Snowden will one day tire of Hong Kong, and then the story may get interesting.
FWIW, I heard a piece on BBC World Service radio the other day in which they interviewed an immigration lawyer based in Hong-Kong. There is a text version at:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-china-22837599
One thing I recall from the broadcast was the lawyer noting that the Hong Kong is not allowed to extradite if there is reason to believe the suspect will be tortured, and that the treatment of Bradley Manning would be considered torture. So, if Hong Kong wants to block extradition, they can do so.
If they don’t, then (as the story notes), they need only wait until Snowden’s visa expires and then ship him somewhere else (assuming they can find him!).
Best
Jim
I don’t think he believes he will be free, ever again, Badtux. He realizes that at some point he will be hauled before a court, but he wants to get his side of the story out first.
Steve, David Cameron has already warned airlines not to bring him to Britain. He is still trying to deal with Julian Assange, and not being very successful,
Jim, I trust Hong Kong to do what is best for Hong Kong, no matter what. Having just been caught hacking into US defense contractors again, the Chinese government is not likely to acquiesce to any demands from the US in the near future. At the moment Snowden is good joss, tomorrow he may be a demon.
Especially hilarious was when the Washington Post activated Walter Pincus’s cryocoffin and trotted him up to pontificate on the situation, something they do only when the situation warrants because of the wear and tear of continually putting Pincus under then reviving him for the next “situation”. Walter Pincus is, of course,a long-time CIA asset and CIA mouthpiece who they use to give the unofficial CIA line on things as well as being older than dirt (he’s been working for the Washington Post for as long as I’ve been alive, sheesh!). The same U.S. news media that uncritically repeated disinformation about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq appear to be equally inclined to uncritically repeat disinformation about the things Snowden revealed. If I didn’t know better, I’d think that our U.S. news media was completely corrupt mouthpieces of the intelligence services. Naw, couldn’t be, right? 😈
I was wondering about Snowden’s choice of media to use to release what he wanted to release. Since he was in a position to know, I assume he went with organizations that weren’t currently being monitored. I thought the Washington Post was an odd choice, but it would seem that they are so far in the tank for the MIB that they don’t bother to watch them anymore. He probably had the Guardian relay to the Post, to avoid any problems.