A lengthy profile in the New York Times of former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, who recently leaked information about the agency's secret domestic spying program, paints the young man as an self-driven but drifting autodidact.
From Mr. Snowden's friends and his own voluminous Web postings emerges a portrait of a talented young man who did not finish high school but bragged online that employers "fight over me."…"Great minds do not need a university to make them any more credible: they get what they need and quietly blaze their trails into history," he wrote online at age 20.