Is it possible the NSA did not know what files Snowden had access to?

[kentuck]

http://investigations.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/08/20/20108770-us-doesnt-know-what-snowden-took-sources-say?lite

<snip>
More than two months after documents leaked by former contractor Edward Snowden first began appearing in the news media, the National Security Agency still doesn’t know the full extent of what he took, according to intelligence community sources, and is “overwhelmed” trying to assess the damage.

Officials, including NSA director Keith Alexander, have assured the public that the government knows the scope of the damage, but two separate sources briefed on the matter told NBC News that the NSA has been unable to determine the full extent of the data he removed.

Sources said authorities believe the trove of unreleased materials includes details of data collection by U.S. allies, including the U.K., Canada, Australia and New Zealand. These English-speaking allies, known along with the U.S. as the "Five Eyes," are critical to U.S. intelligence efforts.

Snowden was working for Booz Allen Hamilton in Hawaii as a contractor for the NSA before he flew to Hong Kong in May 2013. Documents that he had leaked then became the basis of a series of articles by Guardian journalist Glenn Greenwald and Barton Gellman of the Washington Post about the extent of the NSA’s monitoring of electronic communications. Greenwald has told reporters that Snowden has leaked him and Laura Poitras, a documentary filmmaker, thousands of documents -- all of which have since been encrypted -- and that the encoded files have been shared with others

[Warren Stupidity]

1. They might know what he had access to

but they probably don't know how much he took. So they know what the worst case scenario is, and it seems it is bad enough to provoke the clumsy heavy handed reaction from the national security state.

[LearningCurve]

9. I'll go with this

My current operating theory as well.

[pscot]

2. Probably depends on how good a hacker Snowden is

and how thorough NSA's internal security is.

[riqster]

3. Given his position and the NSA's totally inept controls, sure

But it's hard to know what to believe from those asshats.

[jmowreader]

4. It appears Snowden had access only to non-codeword material

"Codeword" material is things like raw traffic (the most closely guarded material), working papers, technical extracts, and product reports. Codeword material is protected by strong access control - down to the point where they will set a length of time your password is good for; a few days before it expires you will be directed by the system to change it. They have all the passwords you used on file, so you can't pick two or three and use them alternately. If you do not need access to codeword material for your job (the MI term is "the need to know&quot you won't ever get a password for it. And if Snowden decided to buddy-up to an operator to try to get a password, the operator would be on the phone to the special security officer with the greatest of haste.

The infamous PRISM slides are an example of non-codeword material; lots of admin crap, training aids, PowerPoint presentations like the Prism slide deck was...

We know Snowden was spying on the NSA while working at Dell. Then he moved to Booz Allen, probably because Booz Allen has access to higher-classification material. The safe assumption is that Edward Snowden has a copy of every single document he could get his thieving little mitts on.

[pnwmom]

5. But Snowden said that he had had access to all the names

of U.S. "assets" around the world. Wouldn't that have been codeword material?

[jmowreader]

6. Snowden also said he was able to read the president's email

The only list of "US Assets" around the world that I'm aware of is a Signals Intelligence Directive that lists every US SIGINT System site. (I used to call it the "NSA Travel Guide.&quot It's SECRET Handle via COMINT Channels Only, but it's not codeword material.

A list of "US Assets" that's got names of people in it would be something CIA would have. It WOULD be codeword material, and it wouldn't be something Snowden would have had access to even if he was an intelligence officer, seeing as how CIA and NSA don't work and play well together.

[DirkGently]

7. Something's certainly panicking them beyond all reason.

[Recursion]

8. It's irksome. They *invented* the computer software that makes this kind of auditing possible

It's open source. It's very secure. It's used all over in businesses. It's a way to keep there from being one superuser who has control over everything with no accountability. But it's sounding like they didn't bother to install it themselves.

[DevonRex]

10. No. But as sysadmin there's no way to tell what he took. Not really.

Too many ways to log in.

[joshcryer]

11. When you outsource 75% of the load to civilians, yep.

That wouldn't surprise me at all.

[kenny blankenship]

12. Unlikely they *really* don't have file access auditing on their systems.

But maybe they really are that incompetent.

Can't say which scenario would be more worrisome.