Reuters: NSA Delayed Anti-Leak Software at Base Where Snowden Worked
Reuters has some new information on the investigation into Edward Snowden’s theft of top secret NSA documents: Exclusive: NSA Delayed Anti-Leak Software at Base Where Snowden Worked -Officials.
(Reuters) - The U.S. National Security Agency failed to install the most up-to-date anti-leak software at a site in Hawaii before contractor Edward Snowden went to work there and downloaded tens of thousands of highly classified documents, current and former U.S. officials told Reuters.
Well before Snowden joined Booz Allen Hamilton last spring and was assigned to the NSA site as a systems administrator, other U.S. government facilities had begun to install software designed to spot attempts by unauthorized people to access or download data.
The purpose of the software, which in the NSA’s case is made by a division of Raytheon Co, is to block so-called “insider threats” - a response to an order by President Barack Obama to tighten up access controls for classified information in the wake of the leak of hundreds of thousands of Pentagon and State Department documents by an Army private to WikiLeaks website in 2010.
The main reason the software had not been installed at the NSA’s Hawaii facility by the time Snowden took up his assignment there was that it had insufficient bandwidth to comfortably install it and ensure its effective operation, according to one of the officials.
Due to the bandwidth issue, intelligence agencies in general moved more slowly than non-spy government units, including the Defense Department, to install anti-leak software, officials said.
So… Edward Snowden just happened to take a job at one of the few NSA facilities that hadn’t installed the latest anti-leak software that could have automatically detected what he was up to? That’s quite a coincidence.