Posted on 12/16/2013 5:11:38 AM PST by RoosterRedux
The head of the National Security Agency task force assessing the effect of leaks by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden said Sunday that Snowden took "the keys to the kingdom" when he left the U.S. earlier this year and was granted temporary asylum in Russia.
In an interview with CBS' "60 Minutes," Ledgett said that Snowden had taken "an exhaustive list of the requirements that have been levied against-- against the National Security Agency. And what that gives is, what topics we're interested in, where our gaps are. But additional information about U.S. capabilities and U.S. gaps is provided as part of that."
Ledgett told CBS correspondent John Miller, himself a former employee of the office of the Director of National Intelligence, that he would not dispute an estimation that Snowden had taken 1.7 million documents from the NSA's hard drives, using his security clearance to get around measures that blocked off access for typical employees.
"He did something that we call scraping," Ledgett said. "Where he went out and just went-- used tools to scrape information from websites, and put it into a place where he could download it."
(Excerpt) Read more at foxnews.com ...
He must have information on Obama. ‘Tis the season to share, Edward.
Who believes that their domestic info isn't being used by Bammy?
Snowden, do not trust them
You see how they treated Israel, you see how they treated the folks in Benghazi
stay put
I think Miller knows only what they want Miller to know. At this point, I believe Obama owns him. I did listen to him for a while...but now I think he’s just another Obama mouthpiece. In other words...he lies like the master.
Best to hang onto it until the 2014 races are heatrd up. Maybe even until 2016, if Hitlery’s name is mentioned at all.
Why should I believe anything these people say?
Tell me about it. I would be very interested to know if Mr. Snowden has any info in regards to the Kenyans place of birth.
He stole the keys to the rat hole!
Face it, America. The CIA and the NSA are just left wing think tanks filled with fruitcakes and intellectual imbeciles.
Or NSA gave away the keys. Obviously the system is broken. Give Bammy what a little of what he’s been giving us.
This is sounding more and more like Al Capone and his accountant. At least the movie version in The Untouchables.
The bottom line is that the eventual reform of the NSA will have to include the basic concept that “the enemy is not the American people”. The axiom to this is the exception of Americans who deal with the enemy, which runs headlong into the socialist concept of internationalism.
But, that makes sense. If someone holds loyalty to internationalism, by definition, they are disloyal to their nation.
By spying on Americans who are nationalists, the NSA has betrayed its purpose. So it must discontinue to do so. Either they are for the United States, or by trying to control it, they are enemies of the United States.
And all their rationalizations justifying their voyeurism do not amount to a hill of beans compared to that.
I’m guessing the Russians and Chinese got access to this in exchange for arranging his asylum. Frankly, I’m surprised that Snowden hasn’t already ended up on a slab. Maybe the one thing keeping him alive is the NSA’s desire to find out all that he has leaked.
I also think the General is right. If you give Snowden amnesty, next time someone will be tempted to do it bigger.
NSA doesn't store their data on websites in HTML. So I have no idea what this means. Probably a misquote. Scraping data from NSA's files is most likely what he is referring to. That should be impossible. Apparently it isn't.
What is shocking to me is that this could happen to NSA. Anyone who has built a communications system for the military knows that the requirements include absolute security of the encryption, decryption, transmission and storage of the communication data. Naturally this has serious implications for the design of both the system hardware and software.
Guess who monitors that development and is the final judge of your design for accomplishing that task.
You guessed it: NSA
At a minimum, Russia and China have copies of Snowden’s data.
Protecting Snowden will not change that.
He also has compatriots who are quite willing to go public with information, long into the future.
Love this quote by Alexander, “I think people have to be held accountable for their actions,” Alexander said. “Because what we don’t want is the next person to do the same thing, race off to Hong Kong and to Moscow with another set of data knowing they can strike the same deal.” Yea, but NSA is of course “above” all this accountability, right? Does the word hypocrite come to anyone’s mind?
No, I think Obama took ‘the keys to the kingdom’. Obama more than Snowden has shown our security holes and weakness as a country.
What the hell does somebody like Valerie Jarrett have access to? We’re screwed. We expose our failures and weakness near daily now.
Obama stands next to a fella who doesn’t even know sign language and has been accused of murder. Our Secret Service seems to land in a scandal every couple of months.
David Petraeus left the CIA in shame and that mess exposed our military, too, with Gen. John Allen. McCain had his picture taken with terrorists— one that eats human body parts.
I think we look like a bunch of inept fools to the rest of the world.
I don’t believe for a minute that China has any of these files. And I believe Russia knew everything in those files before Snowden lifted them.
Not only all the things you mention, but another way to protect sensitive data is that it be shared only on a need-to-know basis. How did 20-something Snowden get access to such highly-classified data?
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