The employee has already been fired and his name remains undisclosed

Feb 13, 2014 14:00 GMT  ·  By

NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden reportedly stole one of his colleagues’ passwords in order to get higher clearance to gain access to files that he eventually took and leaked to the media, the NBC writes.

It feels like we’re back to square one. The idea that Snowden simply stole co-worker’s code has been going on for months and Snowden himself denied such allegations during an interview.

Earlier this week, a group put in charge of investigating the information leak came to the conclusion that Edward Snowden used a web crawler to collect some 1.7 million files.

Now it looks like we’re back to the drawing board, as NBC reports that Snowden stole a password from a co-worker which he later used to retrieve data. In the publication’s defense, the information comes from a memo sent to congressional intelligence and judiciary committees earlier this week.

The file reveals that the entire thing happened on June 18, 2013, when Snowden supposedly accessed classified information by using the Public Key Infrastructure given to him by an individual to access the NSANet. The name of this person is not revealed in the file (nor was it redacted), but it looks like he’s already been sacked.

This man, an NSA civilian employee, an active duty military member and a contractor, has apparently confessed the entire thing over to the FBI. He denied knowing Snowden’s intentions of disclosing classified information.

Snowden has already explained on several occasions that by the nature of his job, he had access to such files as he had to administer the network and make sure that files were placed in the right locations.

This particular memorandum sent over to the US Congress seems quite odd given all the previous reports regarding this topic. The file is signed by Ethan L. Bauman, director at the Legislative Affairs Office at the National Security Agency.