This is garbage. There is easily enough information to uniquely identify him (lamb of god, religious convictions, recently left the NSA, social media), which calls into question the entire premise of the article.
Those details seemed to be highlighted almost, which means Id assume the journalist made them up to anonymise the hacker.
The NSA can ID him. It's not just the NSA he'd want to be anonymous from. "Famous" NSA Hacker guy - target for every wannabe braggart script-kiddie etc. He might be comfortable with the NSA knowing who he is and that he's talking the intercept but not comfortable with his local shopkeeper, his kid's grade-school teacher, priest knowing the same.
Thanks. It started feeling like Wired after a few paragraphs so I bailed. Filler piece I guess.
Are the leaks redacted originally? If not, all someone would have to do would be cross reference the linked slides with the originals.
Maybe he didn't want it comming up when HR departments do background checks.. But another possibility is that the real person that corresponds to the leaked messages isnt such a perfect shill, but he can't complain as this PR imposter never claimed to be him.
How so? I'm sure he revealed exactly as much as he intended to by his surroundings. He's not exactly leaking classified info, just contributing a personal opinion.