18 CHAPTER ONE The Great Divide “What you’ve seen so far is just the tip of the iceberg.” -- retired Admiral Michael McConnell, vice chairman of Booz Allen Hamilton On June 9, 2013, the Guardian, the British newspaper known for the quality and gravity of its reporting posted Snowden’s 12-minute video on its website. In it, Snowden identified himself as an infrastructure analyst at a regional base of National Security Agency that was located in Oahu, Hawaii. He revealed in a calm, unemotional voice that he had been the source for the stories in both the Guardian and the Washington Post. He said that he had supplied the secret, classified documents that the two newspapers had used in their scoops about domestic surveillance being conducted by the NSA, America’s enormous electronic surveillance agency. These sensational revelations had been, literally, the talk of the world, and now, in another major news event, the boyish-looking Snowden revealed his responsibility for what would turn out to be the largest theft of top-secret documents in the history of U.S. intelligence. In the video, Snowden was questioned by Glenn Greenwald, an American journalist living in Brazil who had broken the NSA story in the Guardian. What was his motive? Greenwald asked. Why did he do it? Snowden replied that he had become horrified by the NSA’s secret operations which, to him, represented a kind of distillation of the excesses of the American national security state, and he therefore made it his mission to blow the whistle. He believed that the public needed to be informed of the existence of a vast, secret surveillance operation directed against tens of millions of Americans that flagrantly violated US laws and was a grave threat to their privacy and their freedoms. Within hours of the release of that video on the Guardian website, Snowden was one of the most famous people in the world, celebrated by his supporters as a courageous whistle-blower. The Snowden interview in the video sub