| ® || Did Snowden Act Alone? | 153 The Witting Accomplice Possibility The witting accomplice scenario better fits with the principle in logic called Occam’s razor, which suggests that when one is choosing between alternative explanations, the one that requires the fewest assumptions should be given priority. It would be relatively easy to gain access to passwords if Snowden had the cooperation of an insider at the center who had been read into the compartments or, even better, if he had the cooperation of a system administrator with the necessary PKI cards and shell keys to bypass the password pro- tection. Such an accomplice could also help explain how Snowden was able to get the job at the center in the first place, how he knew in advance that he could find there the “lists” of the NSA sources in foreign countries, and how he knew that there were security traps at the center. Such a witting accomplice might even have prepared in advance the “spiders” that Snowden used to index the files. The witting accomplice scenario of course requires an unsettling expansion of the plot. It means Snowden collaborated with one or © more insiders at the center to steal secret documents. It is not dif- re) ficult to imagine, in light of the lax background checks for outside contractors servicing the NSA, that there were others in the “geek squad” who shared Snowden’s antipathy to NSA surveillance. Cer- tainly, we know that Snowden found other NSA workers who were willing to attend his anti-surveillance CryptoParty in December 2012. Some might be willing to offer Snowden help if he was willing to go public. Indeed, if the geek culture produced one Snowden, why wouldn’t it produce others? If such an accomplice lacked Snowden’s willingness to flee to another country, he might have limited his par- ticipation to supplying technical assistance. For his part, Snowden might have agreed to divert suspicion from his accomplice by taking sole responsibility for the crime when he went publi