14 DAY TRIAL // It is now obvious that the NSA still has no idea of what Edward Snowden took and what he was able to take out of the agency on a standard flash memory stick.
This is why the US and UK governments are very interested in getting their hands on whatever Snowden files they can, encrypted or not, to figure out what got out and what they need to prepare, i.e. come up with plausible explanations, for.
The reason why the NSA is clueless is because Snowden covered his tracks and removed the logs of his activity form the system. This is how he was able to copy tens of thousands of sensitive documents, for months, without being caught.
The fact that he was able to get away with that is a good thing for us, none of the chilling reveals of the past few months would have gotten out otherwise.
But it does beg the question, if Snowden was able to abuse his position and copy tens of thousands of documents despite clearly not being allowed to, without getting noticed, how many other NSA officers are able to do the same?
It's hard to believe that Snowden was a unique case, that he was either incredibly skilled or had an incredibly privileged position. While Snowden is obviously skilled, he's no master hacker and he worked as a regular system administrator.
There are many others like him, though much fewer after the leaks since the NSA figured a surefire way to stop any future leaks isn't to make its systems more secure, but to fire three quarters of the system admins.
If he could access all these documents and these systems without being detected, what's to stop others from doing the same not in the public interest but to make money, to spy on loved ones or to sell secrets to foreign countries?
It was only recently revealed that the NSA sees thousands of abuses every year. But these are the abuses that its internal audit system catches, many of them are self reported, i.e. when an officer "accidentally" oversteps his authorization.
It's hard to believe that these are the only abuses happening in the system, it's quite likely that more are happening without the NSA knowing. And those who would take care to cover their tracks have much more dangerous things in mind than reading some US citizen's love mail.