27 June 2013
Joe Mullin
Ed Snowden was 23 years old when he moved to Geneva in 2007. Soon after arriving, he was looking for a taste of home.
It wasn’t that he was unhappy. Snowden’s life was becoming the adventure he’d been looking for. Moving to Switzerland hadn’t been his first choice—his dream picks were in Asia and Australia—but it certainly wasn’t bad. Hired by the CIA and granted a diplomatic cover, he was a regular old IT guy whose life was elevated by a hint of international intrigue.
Snowden would soon move into a four-bedroom apartment covered by the agency. He’d blow off parking tickets, citing diplomatic immunity. He’d travel the continent. He befriended an Estonian rock star (“the funniest part is he’s a SUPER NERD”), raced motorcycles in Italy, took in the Muslim call to prayer from his Sarajevo hotel room, and formed opinions about the food and the women in Bosnia, in Romania, in Spain.
But as his first spring dawned in Switzerland, it must have felt cold, foreign, and expensive. Two days after his arrival in Switzerland, Snowden logged onto #arsificial, a channel on Ars Technica’s public Internet Relay Chat (IRC) server. He’d been frequenting this space for a few months, chatting with whomever happened to be hanging out.