14 DAY TRIAL // Edward Snowden wasn’t just a contractor that worked a low-level system administrator job, despite what the NSA and the media has written so far. Instead, Snowden claims he was a real spy, professionally trained, who worked undercover abroad.
In a preview for an interview he offered NBC News, Snowden says that he worked to develop NSA’s IT security architecture as he worked for the intelligence agency.
“I was trained as a spy in sort of the traditional sense of the word, in that I lived and worked undercover, overseas — pretending to work in a job that I’m not — and even being assigned a name that was not mine,” Snowden told NBC’s Brian William.
It’s been known before that Edward Snowden had gone abroad while working for the NSA, making many wonder about the reasons behind his travels. Now, Snowden is revealing his true job since the agency has tried to discredit him when talking about his place inside the NSA.
“So when they say I’m a low-level system administrator, that I don’t know what I’m talking about, I’d say it’s somewhat misleading,” Snowden says. This is actually backed by the fact that Snowden had access to all these files in the first place, since that shouldn’t have happened under normal circumstances.
The Obama administration has been trying for the past year to discredit Edward Snowden, making sure to point out that he never actually finished high school, that he wasn’t a real NSA agent since he worked as a contractor, or that his job wasn’t all that special.
“No, I’m not going to be scrambling jets to get a 29-year-old hacker,” Obama said last June, just before the United States demanded help from European nations to ground the presidential plane of the Ecuadorean state leader under suspicion that Snowden was on board.
“I am a technical specialist. I am a technical expert. I don’t work with people. I don’t recruit agents. What I do is I put systems to work for the United States. And I’ve done that at all levels, from the bottom on the ground all the way to the top,” Snowden told NBC.
The whistleblower also mentioned that the US has been trying to use his position to distract from the totality of his experience. “I’ve worked for the Central Intelligence Agency – undercover, overseas, I’ve worked for the National Security Agency – undercover, overseas, and I’ve worked for the Defense Intelligence Agency as a lecturer at the joint counter-intelligence training,” Snowden revealed, adding that he’d developed sources and methods for keeping US information and people secure in the most hostile and dangerous environments in the world.
Starting nearly a year ago, the leaked files from Edward Snowden have been used for reports around the world. It has so far been revealed that the NSA will stop at nothing to collect all the “hay” in the world in the hopes of finding a “needle” among all the straws.
The leaked information has revealed that the NSA spied on citizens all over the world, collecting phone metadata and complete conversations of billions of people, online conversations, email, and other data. It has also spied on foreign companies for economic purposes, state leaders and lawmakers around the world, international organizations, NGOs and even companies within the United States.
The NSA has also been working for years to build its own backdoors into encryption standards, to crack open most encryptions and to remotely spy on people by fiddling with computer components and networking gear.