OK, now I’m back to being serious about Edward Snowden…
Way back last year when we first heard of him, there was a lot of frantic head-scratching in the intelligence community because espiocrats didn’t see how this low-level employee of a contractor had access to so many different subject areas. Given the way information is normally compartmentalized in intelligence organizations to prevent such broad leaks, he just shouldn’t have known most of that stuff.
The authors of an article in Vanity Fair tell NPR’s Terry Gross of “Fresh Air” how it happened:
The NSA now tells us they’re able to explain why Snowden was able to roam so free through the computers — including many niches he should not have otherwise been able to access. And it turns out, the NSA tells us, it was because they had given Snowden a different assignment, a unique assignment if you will, just because he was in Hawaii.
Hawaii is at the end of a long, long tagline with Washington and it’s not necessarily always up to date on the latest procedures and things that should be gotten from Washington. Further, if there’s ever any type of disconnect between Fort Meade and Hawaii — technically or communications-wise — Fort Meade, the headquarters of the NSA, was very concerned that somehow they would not be able to reach Hawaii: literally [would be unable to] communicate with them in the event of, I don’t know, a nuclear problem or an earthquake or something.
What Snowden was doing was downloading and copying and backing up hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of pages of documents to make sure Hawaii had it all in case something went wrong. … What no one realized at the time, of course, is that he was also making copies for his own reasons…
When I was a student at Memphis State and had a part-time job at the library, I was assigned at one point to haul older periodicals down to the basement and stack them on a vast number of metal shelves down there. The library subscribed to what must have been hundreds of fascinating, esoteric publications. I remember in particular a journal called Conradiana, devoted completely to the study of Joseph Conrad. It sticks out in my mind because I read in it an article from an English teacher I’d had during my one-semester sojourn at USC.
Not until the Worldwide Web came along would I have the opportunity to surf such a wealth of little worlds of arcane knowledge. I would head down with a load of old magazines, and not re-emerge for hours. I didn’t mean to slack off; I would give those publications a glance while filing them, and I would just get lost in them. For me, it was like being Scrooge McDuck, diving into his vault full of money.
Anyway… the moral of the story is, you need to keep an eye on the kid down in the basement with access to all the info…
Related Posts
The Snowden issue aside, I wonder how much money libraries have wasted subscribing to interesting and esoteric journals over the years? Not just the expense associated with purchasing them, but also the cataloging, physical storage space, etc.
When I was doing my academic research, I loathed actually going to the campus library. I would get everything possible digitally, and through interlibrary loan. If I found it digitally, I could download or save a copy of the article for free. If I found it via ILL I could request it and the library staff would copy it for free. If I found it physically in the library, I had to go and find it, drag it out of the stacks, and make and pay for my own copies. As a poor student, I preferred not to do it that way. Anyways, I wonder how much we wasted on journals and periodicals over the years?
Digital research is sooooo much easier! Copy and save quotes, no endless Xeroxing, or note card taking!
I heard that on Fresh Air too, and thought Aha, so that explains it. The other thing the guy said that was interesting was that the NSA does have security systems in most places that would have detected the copying of such data on the side like Snowden was doing, but Hawaii was last on the list to have the security procedures installed and they weren’t in place yet there.
So basically, he attacked our system through its soft underbelly. He was in exactly the wrong place for someone so untrustworthy.