How Snowden was identified as Ars user TheTrueHOOHA

June 5, 2013

The Guardian and The Washington Post begin publishing top secret leaked NSA documents.

June 9

Edward Snowden reveals he's the leaker.

June 12, early afternoon

Reuters publishes a profile indicating that Snowden used to use the online username "The True HOOHA."

June 12, afternoon

Anthony DeRosa publishes an article noting that hundreds of posts were written on Ars Technica forums by a user named TheTrueHOOHA, with many biographical details that line up with Snowden.

June 12, Later afernoon

Business Insider and Buzzfeed both publish articles confirming that TheTrueHOOHA is Snowden, noting that he published photos of himself on Ars and elsewhere.

June 12, 8:33pm EST

Ars Technica reviews Snowden posts and publishes an article about Snowden's "life on Ars."

June 13-21

NY Times, LA Times, Washington Post, many others write about Snowden's activity on Ars.



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.

< TheTrueHOOHA> You guys can't say I look gay anymore. < User1> you look gay < TheTrueHOOHA> not anymore. I'm living in switzerland. i'm the straightest looking man inthe country < User2> rolpix < TheTrueHOOHA> as soon as my camera makes it here. :P < TheTrueHOOHA> you guys wouldn't believe how expensive shit is here, either < TheTrueHOOHA> you can't get tap water in restaraunts < User2> some examples, please < TheTrueHOOHA> they make you buy it in bottles < TheTrueHOOHA> glass bottles. 5 bucks a pop < User2> you buy the tap water? < TheTrueHOOHA> hamburgers are $15

The $15 hamburgers weren't even as good as McDonald's; they tasted "like greasy cardboard." Everything was written in French and measured in meters ("God I hate metric," wrote Snowden. "Why can't they use real numbers over here?"). The food packages had "kilojoules" listed on them. ("I'm not a battery!") Europeans couldn't even play movies right. ("They put an intermission in 300.")

Snowden logged on to the public IRC chat room with the same username he used across the Web: TheTrueHOOHA. The chat room was a place he would return to on dozens of occasions over his years in Switzerland, and his writings fill in details about the man who may go down as the most famous leaker in US history. Over the years that he hung out in #arsificial, Snowden went from being a fairly insulated American to being a man of the world. He would wax philosophical about money, politics, and in one notable exchange, about his uncompromising views about government leakers.

Four years later, Snowden took a job with a government contractor for the specific purpose of gathering secret information on domestic spying being done by the National Security Agency (NSA). In May, he hopped a plane to Hong Kong before the NSA knew where he was going. Once there, Snowden began a process of leaking top-secret documents to journalists. Snowden's first leak confirmed what activists had suspected but couldn't prove: there was a dragnet government surveillance program collecting information on every American's phone calls.

The chat logs are the most detailed view available into the formation of a man who has been hailed as a hero, and condemned as a traitor by leaders in his own country. In his public statements, Snowden is smooth and uncompromising, radiating intelligence. Snowden has insisted the focus remain on the leaked documents, not him. But he has also kept himself in the spotlight, speaking to three newspapers, doing live Q&As, and dribbling out more documents over time. Intentional or not, Snowden has maximized media attention. He is a Deep Throat for the social media age. Revealing American secrets is not enough; he has applied to be their chief interpreter as well.

An acerbic user, at home on #arsificial

IRC isn't Twitter. Much of the talk in chat channels isn't much more elevated than barroom banter, and Snowden's conversations as TheTrueHOOHA are no exception. But his personality and his beliefs do shine through. IRC chats can hold meaningful revelations about public figures, and Ars has used them as a reporting source before. Snowden was the kind of bar buddy willing to get into a political argument and never give up, even if he pissed off the whole room.

If IRC is a bar, then the #arsificial channel is the back room occupied by drinkers who feel the front is just too stuffy for them. Officially unofficial, #arsificial was created by users who chafed at the moderation in other Ars chatrooms. "This channel is unsupported and has no rules as such," reads an automated message sent to users upon entry. Unlike on other Ars channels, for instance, chatter veering into racism or sexism wouldn't get a user silenced. "Under no circumstances should anyone complain to #mods about conduct in this channel," read the entry message. "Anyone taking any complaint about #arsificial to #mods will receive a ban from #arsificial."



It was an online destination Snowden would return to dozens of times over the next four years, often remaining quiet for hours on end before engaging in bursts of dialogue. The chat snippets show a strident personality, and at times, the inchoate ideology of a man who would ultimately take drastic measures to fight government secrecy. In #arsificial, Snowden was frequently someone ready to go to the mat for his beliefs—even when no one was on his side.

And he could be abrasive. Snowden didn't short stocks just to make money—he did it because it was the right thing to do. He saw himself as a paladin of the markets, bringing "liquidity" to all. As for those who didn't agree with him about the rightness of the gold standard or the need to eliminate Social Security, they weren't just mistaken—they were "retards."

Four years ago, Snowden presented an image of always being sure of himself, sometimes to the point of seeming arrogant. He often thought he was the smartest guy in the room, and he let others know it.

The Ars IRC server doesn't log conversations, and there are no official transcripts of any discussions on that server. However, after learning that Snowden appeared to be an Ars user, we received chat logs from multiple longtime users who recalled IRC conversations with the user known as TheTrueHOOHA. That IRC user claimed he was the registered Ars user TheTrueHOOHA, who posted nearly 800 posts in Ars forums, including biographical information and photos that match Snowden.

Any handle can be adopted in IRC. However, such "identity theft," while theoretically possible, is unheard of. These IRC remarks—like the Ars forum posts—correlate precisely to publicly known facts about Snowden's life.

Life in Switzerland

By April, a few months into his Swiss adventure, the chats show that Snowden was warming to the country. "Yeah… It's pretty cool so far," he wrote. "The girls are gorgeous, too. Oh, and prostitution is legal."

He detailed cultural observations about Switzerland, and his travels elsewhere, to anyone who happened to be in the chat room. "Jesus christ are the swiss rich," he wrote. "The fucking mcdonald's workers make more than I do. They make like 50,000 franc a year."

< TheTrueHOOHA> the roads are 35 inches wide < TheTrueHOOHA> with 9000 cars on them, two tram tracks, and a bus lane < TheTrueHOOHA> and a bike lane < TheTrueHOOHA> i imagine mirrors get clipped off all the time < TheTrueHOOHA> I'm afraid I'd bump into someone and have to pay for it. < User3> do they have a large immigrant population doing the lower-class work? < TheTrueHOOHA> Yeah.lots of unidentifiable southeast asian people and eastern europeans who don't speak french or english < TheTrueHOOHA> but don't get me wrong -- this place is amazing < TheTrueHOOHA> it's like living in a postcard < User4> TheTrueHOOHA: where are you? .ch? < TheTrueHOOHA> it's just nightmarishly expensive and horrifically classist < TheTrueHOOHA> Yeah. Geneva, Switzerland < User4> wicked! < TheTrueHOOHA> Yeah... it's pretty cool so far

It was cool, but Snowden was often critical of the Swiss. An average visitor to Switzerland talks about how great the chocolate is; Snowden saw a country of overpaid racists.

He admired those who managed to survive on the margins of society. In Switzerland, it was the hardscrabble intelligence of the Nigerian refugees that impressed him. "It's that whole necessity thing," he asserted. "Motherfuckers have been there like eight months and speak all three languages. Not counting romansch, which doesn't count. Ever."

And he kept coming back to #arsificial to share his adventures and observations.

< TheTrueHOOHA> everybody hates gypsies apparently < User5> what's there not to hate about gypsies < TheTrueHOOHA> poor gypsies < User6> Gypsies are the niggers of Europe. If not worse. < User6> I honestly don't have anything against them... But everyone has such a kneejerk hateful reaction to them < TheTrueHOOHA> yeah, i see that ALL the time in switz. < TheTrueHOOHA> like, some crime happens ANYWHERE < TheTrueHOOHA> immediately "those goddamned gypsies!" < User6> [User5]: like I said, I didn't have much experience with them, besides seeing them dirty, begging on the streets. < TheTrueHOOHA> "it wasn't a gypsy" < TheTrueHOOHA> "oh, it must be those fucking muslims!" "no? then those goddamned africans!" < TheTrueHOOHA> i have never, EVER seen a people more racist than the swiss

jesus god they look down on EVERYONE. even each other. < TheTrueHOOHA> you know who i liked? < TheTrueHOOHA> the italians. man. friendly people. fucking crazy, but good people.