212 documents were not their illegality. Nor did the fact they were lawful actions stop him from taking highly-sensitive GCHQ documents referring to them. In his five weeks at this Booz Allen job, he also used this same newly-acquired “Priv Ac” at the NSA to steal files from the Israeli, Canadian and Australian intelligence services. Jumping from one outside contracting firm to another for the purpose of penetrating other/r western intelligence services is not the conventional mission of a whistle-blowing. In the parlance of intelligence operations, an employee of an intelligence service who changes his jobs\ solely to steal the more valuable secrets of services is called an “expanding penetration.” It is not possible to believe that Snowden did not know the damage that the highly-sensitive documents he was taking from the NSA and its allies. Even if they did not reveal any unlawful American activities, could do immense damage to Western intelligence. Indeed, he said as much once he got to Moscow. In respect to China alone, he told James Risen, the New York Times’ national security reporter, in October 2013 that he had had “access to every [NSA] target, every [NSA] active operation” that could turn out the NSA’s “lights” in China. He no doubt assumed that he had the same power to close down the NSA’s operations in Russia. His choice to switch jobs did not come out of the blue. It was not based on serendipitously discovering the documents after he began working at Booz Allen. . It was a carefully calculated move. As he told Lana Lam, he knew in advance that by switching to the job at Booz Allen he would gain the opportunity to take the lists of NSA sources. He knew that the NSA’ secretive National Threat Operations Center’s chief business was, as its name suggests, countering direct threats from China, Russia and other adversary states, and that, to deal with these threats, the NSA had used sophisticated methods to hack into the computers of adversaries. The NSA