I accidentally stumbled into the premier showing of Snowden Live, which included a post-movie live interview with Oliver Stone, the two lead actors, and Ed Snowden piped in from Moscow.
In the interview Oliver Stone said that he was a dramatist, that it wasn’t his job to pick sides and convince anyone one way or the other but he just wanted to tell a story. And yet, the story he told was so ludicrously pro-Snowden that it’s hard to take that stance seriously. The character Edward Snowden as presented was a hand-picked super-genius hacker who quickly shot to the top echelons of US intelligence and used his elite access to expose the nefarious schemes of a handful of evil government insiders when they pushed him too far.
The reality, as I understand it, was that Snowden was a low-level administrator who used his security clearance and routine network access to scrape as much data as he could get his hands on over an 11 month period.
As an opinion piece I found it too far-fetched to take seriously its defense of Snowden. As a light drama I thought it was pretty good. It steered clear of any deeper issues so I can’t fault it for not being any deeper than that.
I believe the reality is he earned either north of $200,000 or on a salary “rated” at $122,000 - as a govmint contractor living with his girlfriend in Hawaii. And he was under 30.
I’d hate to think what the less “low-level” guys were on.
Interesting. WaPo fact check on the figure, I guess $122k comes directly from Booz Allen so I’ll accept that more readily than the Guardian reported figure. The cost of living in Hawaii is insane, $122k strikes me as pretty close to entry level for a network admin with a TS.
$200k would be a completely different story, as IT jobs don’t scale very well. That’d be indicative of a management position.