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.'"

Comments

Re:If the story is true

[GodfatherofSoul]

That point was about 6 months ago. On Slashdot, where there's a pretty vocal community who thinks Bluray ISOs of the latest Hollywood releases "want to be free," any secret data reveal is presumed to be some kind of a public service. Snowden long ago exposed himself as just a guy interested in finding as much as he could find about government secrets, then indiscriminately dumping that information on the press. He's not whistleblower, he's not an activist, he's not an ideologue. He's just some kid who found daddy's car keys and took the Corvette for a spin. If it wasn't obvious before, it should be now that he had absolutely no game plan besides "look at what I got my hands on, cool!' That doesn't absolve intelligence agencies of responsibility, especially since he was relieved of duties under the CIA before getting his contracting job under the NSA.

He'll continue to be cheered on by a certain demographic of IT guys who idolize hacker culture because of *scope* of his infiltration, and not the benefit he's provided the country.