The speculation remains: Who helped Ed Snowden?
(originally posted 07.06.2016 on Google+)

Warning: As the headline already suggests, this post contains speculation, and please consider my disclaimer at the end.

In the last couple of days two new interesting Snowden-related stories emerged: The stepping down of Jacob Appelbaum from his positions in the Tor project -- triggered by several people going public with accusations of sexual and other misconduct[1]. And a Vice story[2] about FOIA released internal NSA documents regarding Snowden's claim that he raised concerns internally.

And these two stories are quite telling for one of the many Snowden-related open questions: Did he act alone (that's his own narrative) or was he only part of an operation (like I and many others assume)? And if it was an operation, whose one was it?

As I wrote often before, the main reason why I believe that it was an operation is because I consider Snowden technically incompetent, at least by far not skilled enough to be able to copy and take along 1.7 million top secret documents from the NSA undetected. I elaborated this a bit here[3] under the chapter "Did Edward Snowden act alone?". And here the new NSA documents provided new evidence, some internal emails were released showing that Snowden's job was at a helpdesk, responsible for end user support. I hope I don't offend anybody when I say that this is typically not the kind of job you would expect from a "genius among geniuses", a skilled hacker who is able to steal 1.7 million documents from one of the most powerful intelligence agencies of the world.

So if you, like I do, assume that Snowden didn't act alone, the next question is: Who helped him? Who instructed him from the background?
And here I see only two reasonable possibilities: Either Russian intelligence, or one or more skilled hacker.

Regarding the possibility that Russian intelligence was behind the Snowden operation, the recently released NSA documents contradict this a bit. There is still no evidence that Snowden raised serious concerns (like the Vice article suggests) -- I recommend this post[4] as a much more realistic interpretation of the documents. But it seems clear that Snowden at least made some suggestions that he is concerned, and I’m pretty sure Russian intelligence would have briefed him not to make such kind of “mistakes”.

So if Snowden didn’t act alone, and if Russia was not behind him, the only reasonable remaining explanation is that one or more skilled hacker helped him. And here the most obvious guess is Jacob Appelbaum. He is a good friend of Laura Poitras (whom, according to herself, Snowden contacted already in January 2013). He benefited from the documents. He is biased towards the NSA. He visited Hawaii in April 2013. He is technically very skilled. And, as we know from the accusations against him, he is most likely a very reckless and manipulative person. Everything would perfectly fit. But it is still complete speculation, of course.

Update: It should be noted that Catherine Fitzpatrick suspected Appelbaum to be behind the Snowden-NSA data breach from a very early stage in blogposts[5] and a (highly recommended!) book[6].

If you ask me how it likely happened, the best speculation is this:

While his work as a sysadmin, Snowden somehow got access to some top secret, but not very sensitive documents, like the slides about PRISM, BOUNDLESSINFORMANT, or XKeyScore. And then the tragedy began: Snowden read the documents and misinterpreted them (just in the same way the media did later). He was scandalized. He wanted to go public with it and contacted Poitras, and Poitras contacted Appelbaum (Appelbaum himself said he was involved by Poitras to help with the “source verification” in May 2013 -- I just assume it was just a bit earlier…). And then Appelbaum convinced Snowden to dig for more, and he instructed him how to do, how to hack. With his help, Snowden got access to the more sensitive stuff, like the Verizon 215 order, the ANT catalog, the NSA intercepts Wikileaks later published (I know the latter two were not attributed to Snowden, but it’s fair to assume it is from him), and much more. And he helped him to take the bulk documents along undetected.

That’s my theory, and I believe it is realistic because it doesn’t conflict with any known fact.

Disclaimer: I have no knowledge at all other than that what is publicly available. So again, what I write here is pure speculation, just my conclusions of publicly available facts. I make no accusations at all. I can be completely wrong, the whole Snowden story is such a mess that everything is possible. I never had any personal contact with Appelbaum, I confess that from what I know about him, I don’t like him, and I blame him for having lied about the documents several times, but this has nothing to do with why I write this.


[1] https://mic.com/articles/145279/jacob-appelbaum-digital-rights-activist-leaves-tor-amid-sexual-misconduct-allegations#.P6p9fJyq0
[2] https://news.vice.com/article/edward-snowden-leaks-tried-to-tell-nsa-about-surveillance-concerns-exclusive
[3] https://plus.google.com/+RolfWeber/posts/Ry26xSVRVo7
[4] https://www.lawfareblog.com/vice-snowden-fantasy
[5] http://3dblogger.typepad.com/wired_state/2013/07/jacob-appelbaums-data-trail.html
[6] https://www.amazon.com/Privacy-Not-Thee-Invincible-Transparency-ebook/dp/B00I2CJKI6/ref=cm_cr_arp_d_product_top?ie=UTF8