NSA asleep at the switch, Snowden Used Low-Cost Tool

NSA, intelligence? Or just an oxymoron?

Officials say Mr. Snowden used “web crawler” software. Moreover, Mr. Snowden succeeded nearly three years after the WikiLeaks disclosures, in which military and State Department files, of far less sensitivity, were taken using similar techniques. (source infra)

Snowden Used Low-Cost Tool to Best N.S.A. - NYTimes.com: " . . . the N.S.A.’s mission includes protecting the nation’s most sensitive military and intelligence computer systems from cyberattacks, especially the sophisticated attacks that emanate from Russia and China. Mr. Snowden’s “insider attack,” by contrast, was hardly sophisticated and should have been easily detected, investigators found...."

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NSA delayed anti-leak software where Snowden worked

Greatest threats are always from the inside. NSA found out the hard way.

Exclusive: NSA delayed anti-leak software at base where Snowden worked -officials | Reuters: " . . . . Snowden was assigned by Booz Allen Hamilton to the Hawaii facility in late March or early April 2013, after first attending training sessions near NSA's Maryland headquarters. He was only there for a few weeks before he told his employers that he needed time off because of health problems. Snowden then disappeared and turned up several weeks later in Hong Kong. There, he gave a TV interview and a trove of secrets from the NSA and its British counterpart, Government Communications Headquarters, to writer Glenn Greenwald, filmmaker Laura Poitras, and journalists from Britain's Guardian newspaper. Reuters reported in August that Snowden began downloading documents describing the U.S. government's electronic spying on an earlier job working for Dell Inc in April 2012. One official said Congressional oversight committees had repeatedly expressed concerns to the administration that agencies across the government, including spy units, had moved too slowly to install updated security software. Another official said that U.S. agencies were still not positive they knew the details of all the material which Snowden had downloaded and turned over to journalists."

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