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Snowden Used Social Engineering To Get Classified Documents
cold fjord sends this news from Reuters:
"Edward Snowden used login credentials and passwords provided unwittingly by colleagues ... to access some of the classified material he leaked. ... A handful of agency employees who gave their login details to Snowden were identified, questioned and removed from their assignments. ... Snowden may have persuaded between 20 and 25 fellow workers at the NSA regional operations center in Hawaii to give him their logins and passwords by telling them they were needed for him to do his job as a computer systems administrator. ... People familiar with efforts to assess the damage to U.S. intelligence caused by Snowden's leaks have said assessments are proceeding slowly because Snowden succeeded in obscuring some electronic traces of how he accessed NSA records. ... The revelation that Snowden got access to some of the material he leaked by using colleagues' passwords surfaced as the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee approved a bill intended in part to tighten security over U.S. intelligence data. One provision of the bill would earmark a classified sum of money ... to help fund efforts by intelligence agencies to install new software designed to spot and track attempts to access or download secret materials without proper authorization.'"
As someone who has been a sysadmin for years, I can say, unequivocally, I never ask people for their passwords. If I need access to your account, I can have it. If I really need to do an end to end test, I can probably do it by swapping out your password hash and then restoring it so I never need your password. If that can't be done, i will change it and then reset it so you have to change it again.
Yet... despite this... from time to time people just.... send me their passwords.
"Account X on machine Y with password Z can't login, can you check it?"
So no shock at all here.
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
Clearly, disliking an overreaching government that wants nothing but control over it's slaves makes you a socialist now. Because, you know, socialists are totally against those things. Either that or you've been listening to way too much US government propaganda lately and the irony is lost on you.