This is rich. After spending billions of dollars and running to their secret Kangaroo Court to peek into your underwear, monitor your phone calls, break into your internet databases, and read (sorry--collect) your email, the National Security Agency is still in the dark about how much a middle-tier computer analyst was able to glean about its super-secret spying infrastructure:
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.
So let's be clear. They can foil the most sophisticated encryption capabilities. They can infiltrate foreign governments and transcribe conversations of foreign leaders. They can hack into Google's and Yahoo's servers and collect your personal search history. They keep track of everyone you've ever associated with online. But the fuckers can't figure out how much information fell through the cracks to this twenty-something kid working for Booz Allen Hamilton?
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.
The takeaway seems to be that the NSA does a good job of spying on everybody but itself. But maybe
Time's Runner-up Person Of The Year was just too devilishly clever for them?
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.”
Yeah, it's
crazy to know your government intended to keep you in the dark about the fact that it hacked into your email and internet activity, tracked your physical movements, collected your "metadata" and made itself privy to your most intimate communications over the last decade. Just
crazy, man.
Using someone else's password? Fiendishly brilliant! Who could ever have anticipated that tactic? Hacking firewalls? Clearly this was no ordinary adversary. In fact, he was so extraordinary now they're actually talking about offering him amnesty just to get a handle on everything he knows:
In recent days, a senior N.S.A. official has told reporters that he believed Mr. Snowden still had access to documents not yet disclosed. The official, Rick Ledgett, who is heading the security agency’s task force examining Mr. Snowden’s leak, said he would consider recommending amnesty for Mr. Snowden in exchange for those documents.
“So, my personal view is, yes, it’s worth having a conversation about,” Mr. Ledgett told CBS News. “I would need assurances that the remainder of the data could be secured, and my bar for those assurances would be very high. It would be more than just an assertion on his part.”
A word of advice, Mr Snowden:
Don't take the deal.