The Guardian says, for example:
In 2003, he enlisted in the US army and began a training program to join the Special Forces. Invoking the same principles that he now cites to justify his leaks, he said: "I wanted to fight in the Iraq war because I felt like I had an obligation as a human being to help free people from oppression".
while Politico says:
“His records indicate he enlisted in the Army Reserve as a Special Forces Recruit (18X) on 7 May 2004 but was discharged 28 September 2004. He did not complete any training or receive any awards,” the spokesman said.
Read more:
http://www.politico.com/story/2013/06/edward-snowden-army-discharge-92486.html
But still going with the Guardian:
After that, he got his first job in an NSA facility, working as a security guard for one of the agency's covert facilities at the University of Maryland. From there, he went to the CIA, where he worked on IT security. His understanding of the internet and his talent for computer programming enabled him to rise fairly quickly for someone who lacked even a high school diploma.
By 2007, the CIA stationed him with diplomatic cover in Geneva, Switzerland. His responsibility for maintaining computer network security meant he had clearance to access a wide array of classified documents.
That access, along with the almost three years he spent around CIA officers, led him to begin seriously questioning the rightness of what he saw.
He left the CIA in 2009 in order to take his first job working for a private contractor that assigned him to a functioning NSA facility, stationed on a military base in Japan. It was then, he said, that he "watched as Obama advanced the very policies that I thought would be reined in", and as a result, "I got hardened."
The individual responsible for one of the most significant leaks in US political history is Edward Snowden, a 29-year-old former technical assistant for the CIA and current employee of the defence contractor Booz Allen Hamilton. Snowden has been working at the National Security Agency for the last four years as an employee of various outside contractors, including Booz Allen and Dell.
The "various outside contractors" must be at least one more than Dell and Booz. But the PRISM presentation had a date on it of 2013, and the Boundless Informant presentation includes information from April 2013. So these must have been downloaded from Booz.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/interactive/2013/jun/06/verizon-telephone-data-court-order
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/06/us-tech-giants-nsa-data
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/08/nsa-boundless-informant-global-datamining
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/interactive/2013/jun/08/nsa-boundless-informant-data-mining-slides
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/interactive/2013/jun/08/boundless-informant-nsa-full-text
The Boundless Informant documents show the agency collecting almost 3 billion pieces of intelligence from US computer networks over a 30-day period ending in March 2013. One document says it is designed to give NSA officials answers to questions like, "What type of coverage do we have on country X" in "near real-time by asking the SIGINT [signals intelligence] infrastructure."
Note that the Boundless Informant documents released have 2012 dates, so the text of the story must refer to some other unreleased documents -- or their reporters have gotten it wrong again.
Maybe they were used for new employee orientation?
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