Some of the things he said at the time seemed far fetched

Sep 7, 2013 13:11 GMT  ·  By

When the video interview of whistleblower Edward Snowden surfaced several months ago, many in the mainstream press and beyond started focusing on what they do best, pick apart the human and ignore the complex issues he was bringing forward.

Still, even those inclined to believe that the NSA had powers beyond what was commonly expected, even the slightly more paranoid ones found some of the things Snowden was claiming to be true a bit hard to swallow.

For example, his claim that he, as a system administrator, had access to all but the most classified documents and that he also had the power to target and retrieve data from anyone on the planet seemed exaggerated at the time.

Since then, it became clear that system administrators really had unlimited power and that there were no checks in place to prevent them from grabbing anything they wanted and cleaning up their tracks after.

That's obviously true because the NSA still has no idea what Snowden took or even how he managed to grab everything he has. The agency obviously has poor internal security.

Snowden also explained that the type of power he had wasn't limited to him and that others were capable of doing the same which should be more than worrying to the US government.

Likewise, Snowden's claims that the NSA regularly works with technology companies to get access to vast amounts of data was vehemently denied by the likes of Google and the others involved in the PRISM program, but it is now clear that the agency does have access to most communications via ISPs, for example, and by building backdoors into commercial security software.

Whether the NSA actually has direct access to the private data of major web companies is still debatable, but isn't as far fetched as it might have seemed a few months ago.