NSA Shouldn’t Hire Geniuses

Apparently, the National Security Agency has had to question hiring brilliant people ever again after the Snowden case. As you remember, whistleblower Edward Snowden managed to access some sensitive national security data by spoofing some of the outfit’s top spooks. According to NSA representatives, every day the agency is learning how brilliant Edward was and found more good reasons to only let dimmer people into its systems.

Apparently, brilliant people shouldn’t be hired for jobs like that, because they get the agency in trouble. Instead, smart people should be hired. When Edward Snowden was a Honolulu-based employee of Booz Allen Hamilton, he obtained system administrator privileges on the NSA’s intranet – NSAnet. It looks like the National Security Agency still has no idea exactly what Edward took, but it started a forensic investigation to demonstrate how deep he got into their networks.

Part of the problem is that the whistleblower impersonated high-level officials on the network so perfectly that it’s difficult to tell if it was them, or him who was reading the NSA’s most secret stuff. At the moment, they can do nothing but look for discrepancies between the real world actions of an NSA worker and the web activities linked to that person’s user profile.

The agency has already detected a few cases where Edward Snowden borrowed someone else’s user profile in order to access documents. Although Edward had “top secret” security clearance, he apparently needed higher levels of clearance. This was achieved by using his admin rights: he managed to create and modify user profiles for employees and contractors. In addition, he had access to NSAnet through those user profiles, which means that he was able to impersonate other users to obtain access to files. It is known that Snowden borrowed the identities of users with higher level security clearances in order to grab sensitive data.

Moreover, Snowden’s admin rights also allowed him download files from his PC to an external storage device. This is how he obtained 20,000 documents put onto thumb drives before leaving Hawaii for Hong Kong this past spring.