When speaking of Edward Snowden, the government can’t seem to make up its mind. Sometimes he’s a high school dropout and misfit who couldn’t pass elementary computer classes and cheated on his NSA entrance exam. Other times he’s an evil genius who used extraordinary hacking skills to defeat the super-secure protections that prevented unauthorized access to NSA secrets. The characterization changes to fit the narrative of whatever story the government is trying to float at the time.
Now, Forbes has an article that tells us what one of Snowden’s colleagues at the NSA has to say about him. This colleague paints Snowden as very smart and talented, a “genius among geniuses.” One indication of that is that Snowden was offered, but turned down, a position in the elite Tailored Access Operations that develops exploits to access computers surreptitiously.
As to how Snowden was able to access all that data, the answer is simple: he was given access because he was so valuable and could do things others could not. His colleague explains that he was given virtually unlimited access to all of NSA’s data. He had no need to forge credentials, as the NSA has sometimes claimed, because he already had access. Of course, that fact doesn’t fit any narrative that the NSA would care to make public so this is the first we’re hearing of it.
Meanwhile, John Gruber of Daring Fireball also has something to say about Snowden: that it’s getting harder and harder to see Snowden as anything but a hero. That’s something that many of us have believed all along.