It's becoming apparent that describing Snowden's role at the NSA as a "regular/vanilla" analyst, or system administrator (media/government narrative) is an imprecise understatement.
There was a NYT story a couple of days ago which claimed that he was a NSA-trained 'hacker', he self-described as a 'infrastructure analyst', and a long time ago as a 'wizard.'
I know people who with just 'Analyst' as their titles have tech-PM'd MS Project implementations at large telco's, and others making stupid money in finance - it's also the title extraordinary spies are given in movies.
Much more plausible from a CI perspective is that he had fairly massive help on the inside, combined with known incompetence at designing and enforcing internal controls in Today's NSA (vs. the NSA of the 80s).
I imagine there were people with access and knowledge inside NSA who didn't want to risk becoming whistleblowers themselves, and pointed him in the right direction or outright gave him stuff.
Well to be honest, I don't think anyone needs an article to understand that an analyst/admin/whatever working at NSA, has knowledge of computer security. It's kinda mandatory for people in these positions, even if they work for a small company.
There was a NYT story a couple of days ago which claimed that he was a NSA-trained 'hacker', he self-described as a 'infrastructure analyst', and a long time ago as a 'wizard.'
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/05/us/resume-shows-snowden-ho...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Snowden#Career
I know people who with just 'Analyst' as their titles have tech-PM'd MS Project implementations at large telco's, and others making stupid money in finance - it's also the title extraordinary spies are given in movies.