NSA has been recording ALL traffic since forever - or at least before the early 60s.
The only thing different today is instead of analog tape, it is recorded on digital media.
In the good ol days they had to tap physically into a line, then they moved on to catching loops between repeaters. Now they can catch signals off most anything via cell towers and taps into server backdoors - curtsy of M$.
Sat dump catching was new in the 60s. Now it is just routine.
This guy is a wacko and should never have been granted confidential clearances let alone Top Secret Whatever it is that he held. But then the days of million dollar security clearances are long gone.
Fleeing to China probably indicates he was turned by the PLA intel guys at some point. Will he return to the US? Maybe in a body bag, if the PLA ever lets him go, which if he was turned, they won't. All worried about US intel guys catching him he was ... wait til the PLA intel guys show him the real world.
As for any putative US prosecution, he will have signed a binding agreement for any disclosures making him eligible for $10K fine and 10 years hard time (no parole) (or that was what it was in the 60s).
Either way, he is going down.
Trouble is all the hard copy he took will do us all enormous damage and give the PLA still another leg up on the US especially hacking US servers.
my 2 copper pennies.
NEWSFLASH
I guess you’re okay with Big Brother snooping through everything you do, say, think or pray without a warrant
NEWSFLASH
It’s unconstitutional and unacceptable
NEWSFLASH
If you knew what was right, you would be outraged at the confirmation of what the founding fathers would never dream of in their worst nightmares.
NEWSFLASH
Why are some people more outraged at the leaker than at what was leaked? It’s amazing.
IMHO, we’re discussing 20 year old hi technology, which isn’t so hi-tech anymore.
The parties who are getting all fired up about this entire affair should have been fired up 7 years ago, and probably about 15 years ago.
Data mining off metadata is old school.
Cloud computing, the internals of new operating systems, and neural computing are the areas where policy today needs to be closely monitored to avoid extremely criminal and unconstitutional behaviors. It’s just the education level of the vast majority of political influence lags those issues by at least 20 years.