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Openly gay from his early teens as a young man, Manning was harassed, bullied and, having been passed back and forth between relatives, virtually homeless on several occasions. He enlisted in the U.S. Army in 2007, encouraged to do so by his father to qualify for military educational benefits, where he was harassed, bullied and ostracized again. Then, like Snowden, without any visible credentials to explain his success, he was sent to an advanced Army training unit, where he was trained as an intelligence analyst, and received a coveted Top Secret clearance for Sensitive Compartmental Information, which was precisely the same clearance that Snowden had received. There are approximately 1,000 people with this security clearance, making them members of a very exclusive club.

Real security analysts who, as usual, would only speak off the record, have explained this pattern as intentional, not accidental.It seems that marginalized people, and especially those who have unusual lifestyles that subject them to prejudice and abuse, are unusually sensitive to potential threats, both real and imagined. This sensitivity makes them adept at ferreting out threats and identifying dangerous behaviors.In effect, then, the American security establishment is actually sorting for people with these kinds of backgrounds, and puts them to work looking for security breaches and potential threats.

So, the presence of two such “fragile” personalities in the middle of two separate spectacular security failures may not be an accident at all. It may be a side effect of an intentional government policy, one that has led to unfortunate consequences. The problem with hiring paranoids to protect America’s secrets is that it is impossible to determine what those paranoids are going to be paranoid about.

In Snowden’s case, it appears that his secretive personality was outraged by the invasions of privacy he observed during his tenure a s security specialist. As someone charged with protecting America’s secrets, he found himself working for an organization that was systematically stripping Americans of their privacy, the very privacy that was the cornerstone of Snowden’s unusual life, working way above his educational and experiential achievements, a weak link waiting to break.

Read more at http://guardianlv.com/2014/05/ed-snowden-wants-to-come-home-and-why-the-us-needs-him-back/#rxs4WTQObxLIcHZS.99