NSA Official Warned About Threat 17 Years Before Snowden
By John Walcott 2014-02-21T05:00:02Z
Seventeen years before Edward Snowden began releasing secret documents on U.S. electronic spying, an analyst with the National Security Agency foresaw just such a threat.
“In their quest to benefit from the great advantages of networked computer systems, the U.S. military and intelligence communities have put almost all of their classified information ‘eggs’ into one very precarious basket: computer system administrators,” the unidentified analyst wrote in a 1996 special edition of Cryptologic Quarterly, an NSA magazine ...
“A relatively small number of system administrators are able to read, copy, move, alter, and destroy almost every piece of classified information handled by a given agency or organization,” the analyst wrote in the 1996 article. “An insider-gone-bad with enough hacking skills to gain root privileges might acquire similar capabilities. It seems amazing that so few are allowed to control so much -- apparently with little or no supervision or security audits” ...
“In one incident at NSA, highly classified material printed out after hours on the wrong printer in the wrong room and was turned in by the cleaning crew!” the writer said. “In another incident at NSA, a large number of files sent to a printer at different times by different personnel in one office mysteriously ended up in the queue of another office’s printer” ...
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-02-21/nsa-official-warned-about-threat-17-years-before-snowden.html
= new reply since forum marked as read
We're not much better than the old KGB was in that regard, either, huh? 