Saturday, December 14, 2013
If they don't know what their own people are doing
How can we have any confidence in what they know about the people they are supposed to be spying on? The NSA, the people with their ear upon the world's communications, still don't know what Edward Snowden took because the contractor he worked for failed miserably to have the proper security precautions in place.
American intelligence and law enforcement investigators have concluded that they may never know the entirety of what the former National Security Agency contractor Edward J. Snowden extracted from classified government computers before leaving the United States, according to senior government officials.It has reached the point where the NSA is considering extending amnesty to Snowden just to stop any further leaks. One lesson we can draw from this is the failure of government reliance on private enterprise to perform its functions. A profit driven entity does not have the necessary priorities.
Investigators remain in the dark about the extent of the data breach partly because the N.S.A. facility in Hawaii where Mr. Snowden worked — unlike other N.S.A. facilities — was not equipped with up-to-date software that allows the spy agency to monitor which corners of its vast computer landscape its employees are navigating at any given time.
Six months since the investigation began, officials said Mr. Snowden had further covered his tracks by logging into classified systems using the passwords of other security agency employees, as well as by hacking firewalls installed to limit access to certain parts of the system.
“They’ve spent hundreds and hundreds of man-hours trying to reconstruct everything he has gotten, and they still don’t know all of what he took,” a senior administration official said. “I know that seems crazy, but everything with this is crazy.”
Subscribe to Posts [Atom]
Post a Comment