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Comment by rantanplan | Hacker News Reader

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?

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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 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...

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.

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).

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