Crossing the Rubicon

CHAPTER 5 Crossing the Rubicon What I came to feel is that a regime that is described as a national security agency has stopped representing the public interest and has instead begun to protect and promote state security interests. —EDWARD SNOWDEN, Moscow, 2014 S OON AFTER Snowden failed to get an SES job at the NSA in Sep- tember 2012, he intensified his rogue activities. As we've seen, part of Snowden’s job as a system administrator under contract to Dell was transferring files held at Fort Meade to backup computers in Hawaii. He “was moving copies of that data there for them,” said Deputy Director Ledgett, “which was perfect cover for stealing the [NSA] data” through the fall and winter of 2012. The security mea- sures at the Hawaii base presented no obstacles to him because, as a system administrator, he had privileges that allowed him to copy documents that had not been encrypted. Indeed, it was part of the process of building the backup system. The flaw he had pointed to in Japan, in which system administrators working solo could safely steal files, also existed in Hawaii, as we know. This time, however, instead of bringing it to the attention of the NSA, he used it to steal files. Snowden could be confident that his thefts of documents would go undetected. Real-time auditing of the movement of documents, | | Epst_9780451494566_2p_all_r1.z.indd 44 ® 9/29/16 5:51 Pa | | HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_019532