"Snowden used inexpensive software to access secret files" ?

[Martin]

http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20140208/23402526145/new-york-times-uses-scare-quotes-to-highlight-how-they-dont-understand-how-snowden-copied-documents.shtml


On Mon, Feb 10, 2014 at 12:26 AM, Alex Fraser <beatnic at comcast.net> wrote:

>  That same article was also in the NYT.
>
> On 2/9/2014 2:24 PM, Andre Kesteloot wrote:
>
>
>   *Press Trust of India | Washington - Feb 09 , 2014*
>   Last Update at 19:45 IST
>   'Snowden used inexpensive software to access secret files'
>
>     US whistleblower Edward Snoweden, who honed his hacking skills in
> India <http://search?type=news&q=India>, used inexpensive and widely
> available software to "scrape" the National Security Agency's networks,
> according to American intelligence officials probing his high-profile case.
>
> Using "web crawler" software designed to search, index and back up a
> website, 30-year-old Snowden "scraped data out of our systems" while he
> went about his day job, The New York Times quoted a senior intelligence
> official as saying.
>
> "We do not believe this was an individual sitting at a machine and
> downloading this much material in sequence," the official said.
>
> The process by which Snowden gained access to a huge trove of the
> country's most highly classified documents, he said, was "quite automated"
> and the former CIA contractor kept at it even after he was briefly
> challenged by agency officials.
>
> The findings are striking because the NSA's mission includes protecting
> America's most sensitive military and intelligence computer systems from
> cyber attacks, especially the sophisticated attacks that emanate from
> Russia and China, the report said.
>
> Snowden's "insider attack," by contrast, was hardly sophisticated and
> should have been easily detected, investigators found.
>
> Snowden had broad access to the NSA's complete files because he was
> working as a technology contractor for the agency in Hawaii, helping to
> manage the agency's computer systems in an outpost that focuses on China
> and North Korea.
>
> A web crawler, also called a spider, automatically moves from website to
> website, following links embedded in each document, and can be programmed
> to copy everything in its path.
>
> Snowden appears to have set the parameters for the searches, including
> which subjects to look for and how deeply to follow links to documents and
> other data on the NSA's internal networks. US intelligence officials told a
> House hearing last week that he accessed roughly 1.7 million files.
>
> According to media reports, Snowden had traveled to India in 2010. He
> spent six days in New Delhi <http://search?type=news&q=New+Delhi>, taking
> courses in "ethical hacking," where he learned advanced techniques for
> breaking into computer systems and exploiting flaws in software, the
> reports said.
>
> Among the materials prominent in the Snowden files are the agency's shared
> "wikis," databases to which intelligence analysts, operatives and others
> contributed their knowledge. Some of that material indicates that Snowden
> "accessed" the documents. But experts say they may well have been
> downloaded not by him but by the programme acting on his behalf.
>
> +++++++++++++++++++++++
>
>
> 73
> André N4ICK
>
>
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