14 DAY TRIAL // Ever since the recent string of NSA leaks started, the US government and its spy agencies have been trying to reassure people by saying that they don't actually spy on Americans and even if they did, there is great oversight from outside bodies, such as the FISA court, which has been proven time and time again to not be true, and proper mechanisms inside the company to prevent abuses.
But this, time and time again, is being proven to be a lie as well. It's been shown that agents used NSA tools to spy on their lovers. The fact that the NSA still has no idea of what Snowden took is telling of just how messed up its internal auditing system and its checks and failsafes are.
In fact, the New York Times is now revealing that the CIA had gotten suspicious about Snowden back in 2009 when he was still working in the Geneva office. Apparently, his supervisors noticed a distinct change in his behavior and even suspected that he tried to break into classified files to which he did not have access to.
The exact details of the report aren't known, but it was enough for him to lose his job and Snowden was sent home. He then started working as an NSA contractor and even received hacking training from the NSA, training which he then used to walk away with tens of thousands of documents on the NSA and its allies.
For what it's worth, the CIA has disputed that a negative report was filed on Snowden while he was working in Geneva and that he was sent home as a result.
But the New York Times claims the CIA never forwarded its report to the NSA or companies that work with it, so Snowden had no problem finding a job, thanks to his past work with the CIA. Only major rule-breaking infractions are reported to other agencies automatically, apparently, things like personal behavior reports need to be requested.
Obviously, this oversight proved a great thing, Snowden would not have been able to make all the revelations he made if he had been barred from working as a contractor.
But it does put into question the intelligence community's internal practices and casts even greater doubt over its capability of keeping all the private data on innocent individuals that is being amassed from landing in the wrong hands.
Likewise, a rogue agent wanting to get rich or hurt the US could walk away with very damaging information. In fact, considering how easy it seems to spy on the NSA, it would be incredibly surprising if Snowden was the only one to do it.