Posted on 12/16/2013 5:11:38 AM PST by RoosterRedux
The head of the National Security Agency task force assessing the effect of leaks by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden said Sunday that Snowden took "the keys to the kingdom" when he left the U.S. earlier this year and was granted temporary asylum in Russia.
In an interview with CBS' "60 Minutes," Ledgett said that Snowden had taken "an exhaustive list of the requirements that have been levied against-- against the National Security Agency. And what that gives is, what topics we're interested in, where our gaps are. But additional information about U.S. capabilities and U.S. gaps is provided as part of that."
Ledgett told CBS correspondent John Miller, himself a former employee of the office of the Director of National Intelligence, that he would not dispute an estimation that Snowden had taken 1.7 million documents from the NSA's hard drives, using his security clearance to get around measures that blocked off access for typical employees.
"He did something that we call scraping," Ledgett said. "Where he went out and just went-- used tools to scrape information from websites, and put it into a place where he could download it."
(Excerpt) Read more at foxnews.com ...
If the contract employee “amateur” Snowden took them, then you must assume that the Russian and Chinese intelligence services already had them via other agents.
“NSA doesn’t store their data on websites in HTML.”
Actually, they do. SharePoint is used within the NSA extensively. They also use web sites to host various data systems. They rely primarily on closed networks for security. Long gone are the days of closed and proprietary systems within the NSA.
“If the contract employee “amateur” Snowden took them, then you must assume that the Russian and Chinese intelligence services already had them via other agents.”
Exactly. Our security procedures have been extremely lacking. If a junior network admin had access to that much information imagine what dedicated and professional spooks have had access to.
“but another way to protect sensitive data is that it be shared only on a need-to-know basis. “
That no longer applies and hasn’t for years; it is supposed to, but it hasn’t. Data distribution has gone wild over the past 15 years. Everyone with access gets all the data they want. The NSA retired their long standing data security protocol about 10 years ago. The new protocols allow for unlimited access once clearance is established.
The dog that didn’t bark.
That’s the one to ponder, not Snowden.
You may want to re-evaluate your basis for those conclusions.
They are both naive and ill informed.
I read that 60 minutes interview with General Alexander. I’m still not buying most of his explanation. Snowden did the people of the US a big favor as far as I’m concerned.
Actually, they do. SharePoint is used within the NSA extensively. They also use web sites to host various data systems. They rely primarily on closed networks for security. Long gone are the days of closed and proprietary systems within the NSA.
How do you properly spell YIKES!!!!!? To me this is stunning news. SharePoint? Double YIKES!!!!!.
Thanks for this clarification.
Yeah, anyone that knows SharePoint got a cold shiver reading that.
Most likely explanation, Microsoft. Snowden was a Windows AD administrator with Global rights, one of the things most people don’t understand when setting up security is that Domain Admins have full control of every file and computer in the domain. Pretty easy to script a program to grab documents, spreadsheets, PDF’s and powerpoint files off of a file server and copy them to somewhere else.
Yes, but the important thing to the NSA and the rest of the powers that be, is that not all the data has made it to the American people yet. That has to be prevented at all costs.
Sharepoint: where perfectly good information goes to die.
GravePoint, is what I call it. A write-once-never-read system.
HA! I may have to steal that. I can't believe how many folks use it. I can never find anything in sharepoint.
It is only as good as the people using it...kind of tells you how dumb so many people really are!
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