14 DAY TRIAL // A few days ago it was revealed that NSA officials were baffled by Snowden’s actions and how he managed to take the files from the agency’s servers since there are no logs left behind.
A new report indicates, however, that Snowden didn’t just hide behind the logs, but he managed to borrow someone else’s user profile to access the documents.
According to an unnamed source of NBC News, Snowden impersonated NSA officials in his efforts to get his hands on the compromising files about the NSA mass surveillance programs.
Investigators have been trying to figure out for the past two and a half months how Snowden got the files he did and started looking for discrepancies between the real world actions of an NSA employee and online activities linked to that person’s computer user profile.
Snowden already had a “top secret” security clearance, which meant his own user profile gave him access to a bunch of classified documents, but higher level NSA officials have clearance levels that surpass his and thus, have access to even more sensitive documents.
His job as a system administrator gave Snowden the power to access the NSA servers with various user profiles, thus impersonating others when accessing files.
It seems that the NSA whistleblower also had the right to download files from his computer to an external storage device, which helped him take about 20,000 documents onto thumb drives.
“The damage, on a scale of 1 to 10, is a 12,” a former intelligence official told NBC.
This proves, once more, that Snowden is even smarter than US officials believed. As one US official told the aforementioned source, “this is why you don’t hire brilliant people for jobs like this. You hire smart people. Brilliant people get you in trouble.”
It is known that Snowden has shared thousands of documents with journalist Glenn Greenwald, while other files are still in his possession with no intention of release. The documents, which could damage the US more than any other files revealed so far, are only going to reach the media if anything happens to Snowden.