14 DAY TRIAL // One of the reasons why former NSA contractor Edward Snowden was able to get away with tens of thousands of classified files, it turns out, was that the Hawaii outpost where he was working had been late in deploying the US' latest anti-leak software.
Reuters reports that the Booz Allen Hamilton outfit in Hawaii was suffering from bandwidth problems that prevented it from installing new anti-leak software that was being introduced in the wake of the previous big leaks from Chelsea Manning, formerly Bradley Manning.
After the diplomatic cables were leaked to WikiLeaks, the Obama administration ordered new protection software that was to be installed on all sensitive government computers. However, intelligence agencies were slower to adopt this new software, partly because it used up quite a bit of resources.
While it's funny to think that NSA contractors couldn't afford better internet connections, what probably happened was that, like all government software, the anti-leak tools were poorly thought out and poorly written and likely had unreasonable system requirements.
"We open our facilities only after we have met all of the necessary regulatory, statutory, and infrastructure requirements," a spokeswoman for the NSA told Reuters.
"NSA has a very large, diverse and complex IT infrastructure across our global enterprise, and many features of that infrastructure evolve over time as new capabilities are developed, refined, and deployed," she added.
The US government has been trying to act calm and composed in the face of increasingly damaging reveals about its massive surveillance effort. But, behind the curtains, it's scrambling to pick up the pieces.
The fact that it's still unsure what Snowden took or even how he took it is telling of the NSA's technical prowess and internal auditing process. The agency has been arguing that all it's doing is for the best interest of Americans, but it's hard to trust an agency that takes so little care in protecting its data.