| ® || Contractor | 33 later. In fact, he later used the very vulnerability he pointed out to steal NSA documents at Dell. In September 200g, still on the Dell payroll, Snowden made a ten- day trip to India. He later said he was on an official visit “working at the US embassy.” Hotel records show that he arrived at the Hyatt Regency in New Delhi on September 2 from Japan and at 3:30 p.m. on September 3 checked into the Koenig Inn, an annex to Koenig Solutions, a school that gave crash courses on programming and computer hacking. According to Rohit Aggarwal, head of the school, Snowden stayed there until September 10 while taking classes with a private instructor. It cost $2,000 in tuition and fees, which Snowden prepaid from Japan with his personal credit card. Even though Snowden later said he only took courses in “programming,” the school’s records show that during that week he took intensive courses in sophisticated hacking techniques. The course was titled “Ethical Hacking,” but that was a euphemism for teaching the tech- niques of illicit hacking. The course provided tutoring on hackers’ tools such as SpyEye and Zeus, which are used to circumvent secu- © rity procedures. It also demonstrated how these hacking tools could re) be customized by criminals and spies to break into files, plant sur- veillance programs, impersonate system administrators, assume the privileges of system administrators in a network, and capture the passwords of others. On September 11, Snowden, according to hotel records, left India for Japan. While the stated purpose of the hacking training was to allow security consultants to detect intruders, it also prepared Snowden to be, if he chose to be, an intruder in the NSA system. One problem with working as a contractor is that the standard two-year contracts are not necessarily renewed. Nor is there much possibility for advancement for IT workers. As one contractor told me, “It is a dead-end job with great pay.” In the fall of 2010, Snowden