While working for spies, Snowden was secretly prolific online

REUTERS: While working for U.S. intelligence agencies, Edward Snowden had another secret identity: an online commentator who anonymously railed against citizen surveillance and corporate greed.

Throughout the eight years that Snowden worked for the Central Intelligence Agency and National Security Agency contractors, he posted hundreds of messages on a public internet forum under a pseudonym.

“I can’t hope to change the way things are going by overtly complaining, writing letters, or blowing things up,” Snowden wrote in 2003 in response to a discussion about corporate greed on the Ars Technica online forum.

“That’s not the way a good person does things. I will, however, do what I can with the tools that are available to me.”

New information discovered by Reuters about Snowden’s employment record, online postings and education comes as U.S. lawmakers grill intelligence officials about how a 29-year-old high school dropout managed to gain access to such top secrets as the NSA’s electronic surveillance programs.

According to sources briefed on the matter, Snowden was employed by an unidentified classified agency in Washington from 2005 to mid-2006, by the CIA from 2006 to 2009, when he primarily worked overseas, and by Dell Inc. from 2009 to 2013, when he worked in the United States and Japan as an NSA contractor.

He was also a prolific commentator on technology forum Ars Technica, posting approximately 750 messages using the screen name “The True HOOHA” from late 2001 to 2012.

Most of the postings were not political in nature; he dispensed advice about government careers, polygraphs and the 2008 stock market crash. He claimed to own the same gun as James Bond and posted glamour photos of himself. He jokingly compared the video console Xbox Live to NSA surveillance.

One of his postings, however, dealt with the now familiar issue of corporate compliance with government eavesdropping programmes. On 4 February, 2010, while working for Dell, Snowden commented on a discussion about a major technology company that allegedly was giving the U.S. government access to its computer servers.

“It really concerns me how little this sort of corporate behaviour bothers those outside of technology circles,” Snowden wrote. “Society really seems to have developed an unquestioning obedience towards spooky types.”

It is not clear if his former employers knew about his online persona. The CIA, NSA, Dell and Booz Allen Hamilton, which most recently employed Snowden declined to comment.

One former national security official said the government should have scrubbed his record harder but Stewart Baker, former general counsel for the NSA, said holding such views did not automatically disqualify someone for a sensitive government job.

“Maybe the government will have to look at that again but that’s a difficult thing to decide,” Baker said.

According to the sources, Snowden told employers he took computer classes at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, earned a certificate from the University of Maryland’s campus in Tokyo, and expected in 2013 to earn a master’s degree in computer security from the University of Liverpool in England.

A Johns Hopkins spokeswoman said she could not find a record of Snowden’s attendance but he may have taken correspondence courses for which records are not kept. A Maryland official confirmed Snowden attended at least one summer class. A Liverpool spokeswoman said Snowden registered for an online master’s degree in computer security in 2011, but did not complete it.