In March 2012, a 28-year-old federal contractor named Edward Snowden first reported to the National Security Agency’s Kunia Regional Security Operations Center on the Hawaiian island of Oahu. Though he would later hatch a complex plan to leak highly classified intelligence documents, Snowden’s original contract was for a straightforward task: detect and thwart Chinese hacking of U.S. government operations.
The mission was urgent. Chinese cyber attacks against the U.S. were on the rise, and by the end of that year, attacks from China accounted for more than 40 percent of the world’s activity, according to a study by Akamai Technologies. In the depths of the Kunia base — a decrepit former Navy Armory that NSA employees nicknamed “The Tunnel” — a team of NSA experts focused on what top defense officials had called “China’s cyber thievery.”
By then, Snowden was well versed in China’s hacking operations. In 2010, when he worked at the NSA’s Pacific Techni
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