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Comment by larrywright | Hacker News Reader

I'll confess that I've followed this subject only partially, so I may be missing facts about what he had access to. Did he have complete access to everything at the NSA?

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You should do yourself a favor and follow this stuff very diligently, we are seeing the documented proof of the end of the illusion of American democracy and global freedom. We live now in a verified global police state under the NSA with no recourse against any of their abilities and a US executive branch that vehemently attacks anyone exposing their hegemony.

It is a sad state, that the world the conspiracy theorists have been crying wolf about for so long is now verified fact.

You should break your pills in half.

@wwhitman

>You should break your pills in half.

That's a content free ad hominem.

What he said is more or less correct, depending on where you draw the line.

For a lot of people massive warrentless wiretapping, against the constitution and the law, is what they'd call a police state.

You might be more forgiving, if you want (some people can justify anything), but you don't have to be rude about it.

Especially with a surname as thus. I doubt the original Whitman was in favor of extended government power abuse and mass surveillance.

Excuse me, other than chastise the guy for not being on top of the story, what can you offer in terms of how much access Snowden actually had? I've been reading reports on this stuff and nobody has ever said exactly what he did or didn't have access to with any kind of precision. I believe he had access to something. But everything? To the point where someone would say "how wouldn't he know?" without evoking laughter? However you feel about the guy, it is quite ridiculous to elevate Snowden to the point of omniscience.

I apologize if the written tone of that comment appeared chastising, I did not write it as such.

It was an honest recommendation that he follow this closely. There is history being revealed in this matter and everyone should be paying close attention.

At a minimum, everyone should be thinking critically about what it means to be an American and what one really stands for/believes in.

I think it is very interesting that so little attention is being called to what exactly his job was. It seems that the administration doesn't want to talk about it and greenwald isn't yet ready to drop that shoe.

Network penetration? If you can pick your enemies' locks, you can pick your employer's.

At his now famous video interview, he said that he had access to most things. He also said that he could even shut down most of NSA's monitoring system, if he wanted. Which strikes me as odd, that just a single analyst could have such power, but what do I know about spying agencies?

Throughout this whole thing, that's struck me as odd as well. They seem so careful with everything (even going to the length of having separate computers for accessing the internet and accessing internal systems, at least at the CIA), so I don't understand why any one person would have the keys to the whole kingdom.

Well, I guess a government agency, even if it's a spying agency, it's still a government agency. I think that hollywood has made a great job all these years, by making us believe that the NSA is somehow super-efficient and infallible. Works for scaring the crap out of your enemies!

This reminds me of this:

http://michaelgr.com/2008/12/29/overestimating-the-cia/

The Kryptos sculpture has been there for all to see for many years, and the man who designed it thought it would be decrypted in months.. Yet it still hasn't been fully decoded, including by the NSA and CIA (part of it publicly was, so we know that if they did they would probably tell us).

This tells me that they're probably very good at some things, but that we also shouldn't overestimate them (the hollywood effect).

It's my understanding he was a systems and/or network administrator. We've always got the keys to the systems.

Nope, no you don't. Have you worked in a place with more than one sys/net admin?

Internal security is often an afterthought. Even a neophyte hacker could find purchase in such fertile ground.

It's becoming apparent that describing Snowden's role at the NSA as a "regular/vanilla" analyst, or system administrator (media/government narrative) is an imprecise understatement.

There was a NYT story a couple of days ago which claimed that he was a NSA-trained 'hacker', he self-described as a 'infrastructure analyst', and a long time ago as a 'wizard.'

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/05/us/resume-shows-snowden-ho...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Snowden#Career

I know people who with just 'Analyst' as their titles have tech-PM'd MS Project implementations at large telco's, and others making stupid money in finance - it's also the title extraordinary spies are given in movies.

Well to be honest, I don't think anyone needs an article to understand that an analyst/admin/whatever working at NSA, has knowledge of computer security. It's kinda mandatory for people in these positions, even if they work for a small company.

Much more plausible from a CI perspective is that he had fairly massive help on the inside, combined with known incompetence at designing and enforcing internal controls in Today's NSA (vs. the NSA of the 80s).

I imagine there were people with access and knowledge inside NSA who didn't want to risk becoming whistleblowers themselves, and pointed him in the right direction or outright gave him stuff.

There is also the theory he is a CIA plant being used to undermine the NSAs encroachment on their business...

Here are a few things we know about the U.S. intelligence infrastructure:

* They couldn't find WMD in Iraq -- because they weren't there.

* They couldn't find bin Laden for 10 years.

* They thought Snowden was on a plane with Evo Morales -- and were wrong.

So, given these observations, I wouldn't be too surprised that one guy was able to get access. Like all big organizations, I'm sure the NSA & CIA have some amazing small groups capable to Bond-like performance.

But as a whole, they are probably a nightmare of incompetence. Therein lies the reason I'm not in favor of giving them Carte Blanche for domestic surveillance: they will fuck up on an epic scale with probability=1. It is only a matter of time until their infrastructure becomes a tool for some oppressive politician or bureaucrat. HUAAC 2.0.

I'm not a US citizen so I am not the one to judge its efficiency. Nevertheless I agree with the general idea of what you say. However it is highly peculiar if he legitimately had so much power. It doesn't matter if he is an uber-hacker or not, as some others point out. No government or agency would structure its hierarchy such that a simple cog in the machine could bring the whole thing tumbling down. Unless of course the high ranking officials are like the regular PHB's we know - clueless about technology issues.

> Unless of course the high ranking officials are like the regular PHB's we know - clueless about technology issues.

Bingo.

> They couldn't find bin Laden for 10 years.

I realize this puts me in tinfoil-hat territory, but I'm not sure this wasn't intentional. He was of greater strategic value while still "alive", both to the U.S. and to the jihadists. Moreover, he had serious health problems for the last decade, and quite possibly has been dead for years of natural causes. The rapid and secret funeral at sea also seemed odd, as well as the timing, just before the election.

I have no evidence, so I can't square that circle. But given the record of shady behavior (competent and otherwise) by the three-letter agencies, neither would it surprise me.

It's highly unlikely he had access to "everything" at NSA -- not even sure what that could mean. But he was apparently a higher-level employee than the simple sysadmin he's been portrayed as. There has been persistent speculation from the NY Times[1] and elsewhere about his job title of "infrastructure analyst", specifically that it would have given him access to a significant amount of highly-compartmentalized information.

[1]https://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/01/us/job-title-key-to-inner...

I also have a government job and I can tell you that the job titles don't mean anything really. I'm an IT Technical Specialist 2, but if we're using words that mean something I create iOS applications.

> I'm an IT Technical Specialist 2, but if we're using words that mean something I create iOS applications

Ha! That's what they want you to think! In reality you're a sleeper agent/hacker.

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