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How Snowden did it — 13 Comments

  1. It just raises the point that the system is far from secure and so it should not exist as is.

  2. Oh you mean like any IT guy who has administrative rights to all the company computers. We’ll what do you know?
    That’s some high tech security system they have . Our personal email, bank credit card and bank transactions are all locked up tight as a ballerina’s butt.
    Like the man said, another phony scandal by white racist tea party republicans .

  3. In a lot of big enterprises, the shirts never did bother to “lower” themselves to find out what the geeks actually did. Dilbert got it right.

  4. While bureaucratic incompetence is certainly the Occam’s Razor explanation, I can’t shake the feeling that Snowden was somehow “allowed” to get loose with all his information, considering that the Obama administration has been doing everything conceivable to damage America and American interests.

  5. Help, System Administrator, for no one is faithful anymore; those who are loyal have vanished from the human race.

    Everyone lies to their neighbor; they flatter with their lips but harbor deception in their hearts.

    May the System Administrator silence all flattering lips and every boastful tongue,
    those who say, “By our tongues we will prevail; our own lips will defend us. Who is System Administrator over us?”

    “Because the poor are plundered and the needy groan, I will now arise,” says the System Administrator.“I will protect them from those who malign them.”

    And the words of the System Administrator are flawless, like silver purified in a crucible, like gold refined seven times.

    You, System Administrator, will keep the needy safe and will protect us forever from the wicked who freely strut about when what is vile is honored by the human race.

  6. obomba leaks his own war. I think the bullseye is on Israel. Obomba wants the muslim attacks to escalate on Israel. Also, it makes a nice distraction for obomba.

    Chaos is needed for fundamental transformation of American by phony King Thinskin obomba.

  7. I got the impression reading stories and memoirs of old CIA guys that they really were dedicated to their work. They believed in their hearts that they were doing important work protecting the USA (and they were in my opinion). I suspect that after 5 years of obama only the veterans of the intelligence outfits share the same feelings. The younger guys are poorly vetted, poorly led and poorly supervised.

    British intelligence in the 1950’s had the same problem, loyalty to class allowed the infiltration of Soviet moles. In our case it seems to be loyalty to the new leftist class.

  8. The NSA has NO security on their Network or their collective database. They disabled all logging for complete deniability.

    If you research traditional Unix “Group” accounts and how they work, you will see the mistakes / screw ups.

    Notice how China and Russia are not interested in Snowden’s file cache?
    — Why? —
    They already had a copy of everything the NSA had on its network.

    If Snowden wanted to destroy the NSA and its database, he could have done it very easily. — Look up the Unix / Linux command “rm -Rf /” and why you never run that as system admin.

  9. This should defray some beliefs that Snowden was faking things in his claim. Honesty, if not the best virtue, is at least a reliable one.

  10. Unlike Manning, who was just given access to “stuff” and he decided what to do about it based on his female hormonal surges, Snowden is a different kind of character, with access to much higher level of “analysis” on the intel datum.

  11. Ymarsakar:

    Actually, at least from what I can tell so far, it seems he WAS faking things in his claim.

    To the best of my recollection, his claim was that he was given the authority to do certain things and to know certain things that were extremely sensitive (such as, to listen in on the phone calls of the president). He had authority to do certain things, but a lot of the info he got was obtained because he dishonestly stole that authority through his computer skills. He had the ability, not the authority.

    And I haven’t heard that listening in on the president was among the things he did.

    There is no doubt, though, that what he was able to do is disturbing on very many levels.

  12. He had authority to do certain things, but a lot of the info he got was obtained because he dishonestly stole that authority through his computer skills.

    http://www.bing.com/videos/search?q=Edward+Snowden+Full+Interview&Form=VQFRVP#view=detail&mid=37637A7213178F4693B537637A7213178F4693B5

    I generally don’t pay attention to what other people say or claim about Snowden, I prefer to hear it from the horse’s mouth as data degradation exists even for a 2 person chain (telephone game).

    2-3 minutes

    He, paraphrasing, claimed that “any” analyst can begin to collect information on a target, whomever that target may be. How much of the data is collected or given, is limited by the authorities the person is given in the system and the reach of the sensor net. He thus split himself off from those other analysts when he said that they don’t always have the authority to grab the info, but he did. Which I infer to mean he has the system admin authority to do so.

    Unless his job description and resume for sys admin is in his eyes someone who the CIA/NSA wants to gather or analyze data, he wasn’t claiming that the CIA or NSA gave him authority to collect the data for some specific intel purpose.

    Given his sys admin status, on a purely technical level, he was given admin access. Anyone that says this means he was claiming a social or task based authority, that’s not based on original source but further interpretations down the chain.

    HIs description of his data reviewal also seems to imply he was seeing operations data, not just raw data but operations data with targeting, methods, and resources. That this was going on during the Bush admin and the Obama admin. Neither he nor anyone else has specified what exactly he was doing that he picked up information when he wasn’t looking specifically to dig up dirt on the US.

    In conclusion, Snowden didn’t claim his authority came from X. Thus the interpretation that he was dishonest is called an interpretation of the data, when the data itself is not that solid or completely verified. There are signs that system admin privileges were not the only methods he used to gather data.

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