It's kind of staggering that a contractor like Snowden had access to information like this. What possible reason could someone at his level have for looking this up?
And for Snowden he saw the black hole and everything they are planning he must have seen some very scary stuff, hopefully he wont be the guy in jail or death with a mark on his head "Told you so." and we did not act.
Take for example the fact that all weapons used in the military are designed and built by private contractors. Would you say it's a risk to allow contractors to have full access to weapons data when they are the ones that design and build it?
To speak to the Snowden leaks, in there entirety they now are clearly, far outside the scope of any single user, unless that user was a multi-department head or higher. It is more likely that the leaks are from multiple users now. The story posted yesterday about the access level of the information lends this theory some credibility, although none to the means of access.
http://investigations.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/08/29/20234171-...
Wait, I understand that he was a contractor. But wasn't he previously an NSA employee too. So he basically stayed in the same chair, but just got a bigger pay check. Revolving door and all that. I wouldn't go so far as to call it outsourced, his work was still 'in-house'.
Amazon will be developing it, and probably managing it, but it is not part of the primary Amazon infrastructure so outside of those contracted to work specifically on the CIA system, Amazon employees shouldn't have access.
It was a total failure of the 'compartmentalization' mode of thought, probably by Snowden's own design. He had the somewhat unique authorization to take files off-facility on a thumb drive, then used other clearance-level user information to pull 'juicy to leak' intel.
He was also a sysadmin, so... Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? if you're in charge of user authorities, you're probably in a pretty good position to get into stuff you shouldn't.
I like the quote NBC News [1] used from their 'former intelligence official' :
The damage, on a scale of 1 to 10, is a 12
lol, whoops.
[1] - http://investigations.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/08/29/20234171-...
EDIT - typo
And if they did not have L/P then the issue is far more concerning in that PKI was compromised.