Snowdens Real Job: Government Hacker

NSA whistleblowers bland job title -- infrastructure analyst -- disguised actual responsibilities: Finding new ways to hack into foreign networks and telecommunications systems.

How did the apparently low-level IT-administrator-turned-whistleblower Edward Snowden, 30, manage to gain access to details of numerous top secret National Security Agency (NSA) surveillance programs?
Simple: He wasnt actually an IT or system administrator. Intelligence officials had repeatedly suggested this while also noting that the agency
employs numerous contractors to help maintain its systems
. Or as Gen. Keith Alexander, the director of the NSA,
told
ABC News
last month about post-Snowden changes at the agency: Were now putting in place actions that would give us the ability to track our system administrators, what theyre doing and what theyre taking, a two-man rule, weve changed the passwords.
In fact, Snowden himself stated in a video that his most recent job title wasnt that of system administrator. My name is Ed Snowden, Im 29 years old. I worked for Booz Allen Hamilton as an infrastructure analyst for NSA in Hawaii,
he told
Guardian
journalist Glenn Greenwald
in a video recorded in Hong Kong and broadcast after hed asked to be identified as the
source of the leaks
involving Prism and other surveillance programs. Prior to that job, Snowden said, Ive been a systems engineer, systems administrator, senior adviser for the Central Intelligence Agency, solutions consultant, and a telecommunications information system officer.
[ Proposed legislation would curb NSA surveillance powers. Read
Senate Bill Seeks Greater NSA Surveillance Oversight
. ]
Many commentators read infrastructure analyst as NSA-speak for a system administrator role, and many news reports of Snowdens leaks actually
labeled him as being a sysadmin
. But according to intelligence officials, the infrastructure analyst role refers to a position tasked with finding new ways to hack into foreign networks, to keep the NSA abreast of the signals intelligence its charged with gathering.
Why hasnt Snowdens real role been highlighted to date? Principally because government officials havent wanted to highlight the online espionage equivalent of breaking and entering into other countries networks and telecommunications equipment, according to a Sunday
report
in
The New York Times
that cited no sources.
That revelation finally explains how 30-year-old Snowden came to
possess official documents
relating to some of the countrys most sensitive surveillance programs, including intercepts of online audio, emails and video (Prism), traffic analysis of cell phone calls (Mainway), Internet metadata collection (Marina), and telephone content interception (Nucleon), not to mention
secret court orders
authorizing the surveillance programs.
Snowden said he took a job in March as a contractor at Booz Allen Hamilton -- reportedly taking a pay cut -- to gain access to the documents that hes since leaked.
My position with Booz Allen Hamilton granted me access to lists of machines all over the world the NSA hacked,
Snowden told
The South China Morning Post
prior to
leaving Hong Kong for Moscow
last week. That is why I accepted that position about three months ago.
Snowden now remains in limbo -- his U.S. passport has been revoked -- in the transit area of Moscows Sheremetyevo airport.
Regardless, expect the leaks to keep on coming. Greenwald has said that
Snowden leaked thousands of documents
, of which at least dozens are newsworthy.
Most recently, the
Guardian
Sunday released documents that it said detailed NSA operations against 38 embassies and missions, which were labeled as targets. That target list included not just Middle Eastern countries, but also U.S. allies such as France, Greece, Italy, Mexico, Japan and South Korea. Detailed interception methods included bugs planted in fax machines used to transmit official cables between the European Union embassy in Washington and EU headquarters in Brussels, as well as antenna intercepts and taps in networking cables.

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Snowdens Real Job: Government Hacker