Edward Snowden fired, Booz Allen Hamilton says

WASHINGTON – Consulting giant Booz Allen Hamilton said Tuesday that it had fired Edward Snowden “for violations of the firm’s code of ethics and firm policy” after the 29-year-old admitted he leaked secrets of the U.S. government’s surveillance programs to the news media.

The company said that Snowden, who had been assigned to a team in Hawaii for less than three months, was earning a salary “at a rate of $122,000.” Snowden claimed he made about $200,000, a figure that could have included overtime pay and other bonuses.

Snowden, a computer technician from Maryland who previously worked for the CIA and the National Security Agency, had been holed up in a sleek hotel in Hong Kong for weeks before checking out on Monday. His whereabouts are unknown.

He and his girlfriend moved out of their rented bungalow in a Honolulu suburb on May 1 after the owner told them he wanted to sell the property, a real estate agent told The Times. Neighbors in the middle-class Waipahu neighborhood said in interviews that the couple had lived there for a few months but kept mostly to themselves.

Snowden told Britain’s Guardian newspaper, which reported many of his leaks, that he had left Hawaii without telling his girlfriend where he was going.

News websites identified Snowden’s girlfriend Tuesday as Lindsay Mills, an acrobatic dancer who performed with local troupes in Honolulu and who described herself in her blog as a “a world-traveling, pole-dancing super hero.” Civil Beat, a Honolulu news site, reported that Mills had recently begun performing with the Waikiki Acrobatic Troupe “doing pole dancing and aerial acrobatics.”

The blog has since been taken down, but in a post published Monday, the day after Snowden admitted he was the leaker, Mills wrote with sadness about feeling suddenly left alone.

“For those of you that know me without my super hero cape, you can probably understand why I’ll be refraining from blog posts for awhile,” she wrote. “My world has opened and closed all at once. Leaving me lost at sea without a compass.”

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shashank.bengali@latimes.com

Twitter: @SBengali