Edward Snowden’s new book is out next Tuesday, but OODA Loop got an advance copy.  In the book, Snowden identifies two major catalysts that not only pushed him over the edge, but also informed his strategy for how he leaked the highly classified material.  One of them was a complete surprise.

The first catalyst was the announcement that the NSA was building a new massive datacenter in Bluffdale, Utah dubbed the Mission Data Repository and filling over 100,000 square feet with servers.  Snowden was disappointed that only journalist James Bamford took notice of the intelligence community needing that much storage space.

The second catalyst was a presentation by CIA Chief Technology Officer Gus Hunt at the GigaOM structure conference in NYC on March 20, 2013. Snowden had tuned into the live stream video to see if Hunt would discuss the CIA cloud project, an initiative for which Snowden had been involved in earlier iterations of the project.  Instead, Snowden was catalyzed by what he felt were detailed revelations about intelligence community spying on American citizens. Snowden was amazed at statements like:

• “At the CIA, we fundamentally try to collect everything and hold onto it forever.”
• “It is nearly within our grasp to compute on all human generated information.”
• “Technology is moving faster than law can keep up…”

The video of the event, which has only 300+ views (of which Snowden claims a dozen are his) is still available online and likely to be widely watched after the book release.

Snowden describes that after the media missed the story behind the story associated with these two events he decided that he would have to educate any journalists he worked with and couldn’t just anonymously leak documents.  This obviously, greatly impacted the way in which history unfolded around his actions.

Gus is a great friend and great American and we’ve cited the insights from this very presentation in our own material over the years.

Snowden is a divisive figure, but it is always interesting to study how someone’s OODA Loop is impacted by seemingly small events.  

You can watch Gus’ video below along with a copy of the Powerpoint deck.

Video

 

Buy the book – Permanent Record by Edward Snowden