Snowden didn't seem to have to work very hard to grab top secret classified government info.
Posted on 06/14/2013 11:49:16 AM PDT by null and void
The NSA leaker reportedly just walked out of work with some of America's big secrets on a thumb drive in his pocket
Snowden didn't seem to have to work very hard to grab top secret classified government info.
A week after Edward Snowden's leaks about National Security Agency surveillance and data-gathering were first reported, and four days after he revealed himself as the leaker, the news media is figuring out how the 29-year-old IT systems administrator managed his potentially huge data heist.
If you're concerned about national security, the new revelations will probably dismay you; if you appreciate leaking of government secrets, Snowden's technique is likely encouraging: Theft by thumb drive.
The NSA and other spy and military agencies have long known the dangers of the innocent-seeming portable USB flash drive. In October 2008, the NSA discovered that a thumb drive loaded with malware had infected the military's secure internal network. The Pentagon then (at least temporarily) banned the use of thumb drives — NSA commanders even reportedly ordered USB ports filled in with liquid cement.
But "of course, there are always exceptions," especially for system administrators, a former NSA official tells the Los Angeles Times. "There are people who need to use a thumb drive and they have special permission. But when you use one, people always look at you funny."
That doesn't appear to have fazed Snowden. Not only do investigators know he pilfered the top secret files on a thumb drive, they "know how many documents he downloaded and what server he took them from," a U.S. official tells the Los Angeles Times. They don't know how he accessed those files, but as a system administrator, Snowden had broad access to key parts of the NSA network — and, says Ken Dilanian at the Los Angeles Times, "presumably a keen understanding of how those networks are monitored for unauthorized downloads."
In any case, Dilanian says, "confirmation of a thumb drive solved one of the central mysteries in the case: How Snowden, who worked for contracting giant Booz Allen Hamilton, physically removed classified material from a spy agency famous for strict security and ultra-secrecy."
Didn't Snowden's behavior, or his decision to take unpaid leave just a month after starting his job in Hawaii, arouse any suspicions? Sort of, says Mark Hosenball at Reuters. According to Hosenball's sources, Snowden's prolonged absence "prompted a hunt for the contractor, first by his employer Booz Allen Hamilton and then by the U.S. government." Hosenball continues:
Government agents spent several days in the field trying to find Snowden, according to the source, but they were unable to do so before the first news story based on Snowden's revelations appeared in The Guardian and then in The Washington Post. The government did not know Snowden was the source for the stories until he admitted it on Sunday, the sources said. [Reuters][Snowden] was only on the job for around four weeks when he told his employers he was ill and requested leave without pay, the sources said. When Booz Allen checked in with him, Snowden said he was suffering from epilepsy and needed more time off. When he failed to return after a longer period, and the company could not find him, it notified intelligence officials because of Snowden's high-level security clearance, one of the sources said.
Some people believe Snowden is exaggerating his skill level and knowledge, as he apparently inflated his salary and spying capabilities, but in interviews with colleagues, Snowden comes out looking pretty smart. He had a reputation as a very gifted "geek," a source tells Reuters. "This guy's really good with his fingers on the keyboard. He's really good."
His prowess with computer networks isn't a surprise, says John Herrman at BuzzFeed, now that we've discovered he's "a member of a growing and increasingly powerful alumni group: The internet people." For a few years, and more than 800 posts, Snowden was a frequent contributor to Ars Technica forums — the successor to Usenet and precursor of Reddit — making him "a part of the internet's relatively small but powerful creative nucleus."
Once he opened his mouth, Snowden outed himself not just as the leaker but as an internet person, says Herman, and his forum persona "is instantly recognizable to anyone who spent time in a major forum in the early to mid-2000s."
He's a bit of a know-it-all, a bit of a troll, opinionated about both subjects he knows well and ones he doesn't. He unsubtly references his sex life, his security clearance, and his mysterious work. He was not shy about giving advice, which is probably the defining trait of the forum power user....A whole group of people out there are just like Snowden, says BuzzFeed's Herman, and that should make the NSA, and any organization with secrets, a little nervous. Because when you move from how to why, the answer is a little unsettling, Herman says: "This isn't about 'hacktivism' or some kind of unified cause. This is about the children of the internet coming of age."Most of the people he used to interact with are long gone — like Snowden, they grew up, and receded back into the real world. But he took with him the set of values he either learned or became comfortable expressing online: A keen interest in rights and speech, particularly where they concern the internet and privacy, suspicion of government and authority, a belief in both free markets and free-flowing information, and a set of cultural and aesthetic values that both set him apart from the mainstream and endear him to his people — the internet people. [BuzzFeed]
LOL!!!
Bought a 8GB microSDHC a while back for my phone. It came with 3 adapters. One was only as wide and thick as the USB plug and only 1 1/8” long. 64GB are available. Heck of a lot of data on a chip smaller than my thumbnail. Easy as the dickens to hide in one’s effects or person.
Ding ding ding! we have a winner!
It’s also a bad idea to carry on with a coworker over corporate email. Not only because some nosy admin might read, and discover this. But also because you might fumble finger the reply to and accidentally copy that to your entire group.
Yes, we laughed. The guy had to quit and work somewhere else. Every time he walked in we all chuckled. Even more embarassing he was married and she was one of the owners daughters. Mad mojo all around.
He did it with the help of traitors like Obama and Boehner who empower these people and now call them traitors... but for different reasons than ours...
Yes, I'm a network admin!
Mark
Scary permissions I had...
The really hilarious while horrifying thing about this whole mess is that it seems Congress has hobbled financial IT admins with Sarbanes-Oxley, and medical IT with HIPPA, while at the same time, it seems that the NSA had nowhere near the security requirements and controls of either.
Mark
Well, execdoofus1 HAD been complaining about his email read/not read status being messed up. He wasn’t very techy so I chalked it up to unfamiliarity with his mail client. This was ~20 years ago and we’d just gotten the mail system installed for execdoofuses.
I was young and impressionable. I never would have thought to read users mail so I didn’t think of anyone ELSE reading their mail. I mean. C’mon. They’re users. Users are lusers. Why destroy brain cells reading their mail? It’s like listening to conversations in the WalMart checkout lane. You lose IQ points doing that.
I was more careful after that. I very easily could have been fired over something I’d never done. The tricky part was catching the other guy w/o him knowing i’d been the one to do it. Turns out he’d been using another server as his own personal internet service provider. Using corporate equipment and bandwidth to run web sites for his own personal clients.
You are a hoot. Have made my afternoon.
It is horrifying. Now consider the real possibility that the IRS will have the ability to break through the HIPPA firewall.
Yeah, yeah, yeah...
Booting from paper or magnetic tape after first loading the registers using switches on a PDP-4.
Mark
If we really wanted Snowden back, why did the British warn the airlines NOT to fly him in as he would not be allowed entry...? Presumably, the British are our closest alley, would it follow that extradition would be MUCH easier from England than from Hong Kong? (Yes!)
Obama doesn’t want Snowden back, he wants him dead or gone or discredited.
In the meantime, some Shock-n-Awe in Syria. (Wag the Dog)
If you want to hear a chilling expose on PRISM, listen to the following interview of William Benny, a 40 year career NSA employee who becaame the director of 6,000 analysts in their intelligence area, and who was personally involved with PRISM under Bush.
Former Director of NSA Intelligence teveals the full extent of PRISM capabilities. MUST SEE!
Happy to help.
IF the thumb drive data liberation is true it either means he was an admin OR they have lax standards. Or he’s an uber hacker. Or some combo of the above. Most super sekrit systems have some sort of change control and database access logs.
Lax standards would seem to be out of place in that sort of organization. However, if the real goal is use of this for various and varying political agendas it would ‘help’ this cause to have lack of data accountability. And access to this data by various individuals who might be unaware of one anothers presence in this particular organization.
The latter might be why the elites and certain members of congress are laying eggs. The idea has run through their teeny little brains that the hooker they thought was THEIR hooker might have been seeing other johns on the side.
You just stepped in it. I still have a Curta calculator that I bought in 1970 that’s still in perfect working condition, in its original box, and with its original insructions. Now, beat that!
This article makes it out like he is some sort of genius, but it's not hard to bypass this stuff unless you are a normal user. You may have noticed that they KNOW he copied the files and that he copied them to a USB memory device. That is because if you actually DISABLE the security software that prevents people from copying files to such devices, alarms will go off on ever administrators PC in the place. However, if you simply override the rule that disallows said behavior with the required credentials (which most high level administrators would know), then no one would know until an audit was conducted.
I don't know if he's truly as smart as they are making him out to be, but what he did was a rather simple task for an administrative level person. You will also notice that he split as soon as he got the data and never came back... that's because he knew the next audit would finger him. He wasn't smart enough to actually circumvent the security software (and I don't know anyone personally who could pull off something like that), he simply used a built-in feature that allowed himself an exception to the rules that were in place.
how does one get a security clearance that high with a background that includes an extremely abrasive personality like described in this article. Generally, the first indication you are a hard-headed know it all gets your consideration red stamped forever. Sounds like they may have interviewed one person who just didn't like the guy or something.
Hey look below your post #55. Looks like a “Who’s the oldest IT Fart” contest.
He wins.
I remember punch cards but they were phasing out when I got into computers.
I did have a bitnet addy though.
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