Snowden Used Software Scraper, Say NSA Officials 227
An anonymous reader writes with this excerpt from the New York Times: "Intelligence officials investigating how Edward J. Snowden gained access to a huge trove of the country's most highly classified documents say they have determined that he used inexpensive and widely available software to 'scrape' the National Security Agency's networks, and kept at it even after he was briefly challenged by agency officials. Using 'web crawler' software designed to search, index and back up a website, Mr. Snowden 'scraped data out of our systems' while he went about his day job, according to a senior intelligence official. 'We do not believe this was an individual sitting at a machine and downloading this much material in sequence,' the official said. The process, he added, was 'quite automated.'"
The trick (Score:4, Interesting)
"because he worked at an agency outpost that had not yet been upgraded with modern security measures."
"when he was questioned, Mr. Snowden provided what were later described to investigators as legitimate-sounding explanations for his activities"
Speechless.
Middle Initial (Score:2, Interesting)
Anyone else notice that Snowden is increasingly being referred to as "Edward J. Snowden" instead of just "Edward Snowden"?
How Many More NSA Employees? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Stunning. (Score:5, Interesting)
The very first program (after "Hello World") I wrote in Java was a website scraper. I used it to download all of Sun's API and tutorial pages for Java and rewrite links to be relative. Younger and dumber. This created two copies of each set of docs: The scraped version and the compressed version, which I only discovered existed after having scraped the downloadable offline version of said docs.
Point being: My scraper was written in a few hours and far less powerful than wget.
Re:Stunning. (Score:5, Interesting)
Now that we have documented proof of a rogue government agency that ignores the law and then lies about it, I'm waiting for some enterprising criminal defense attorney to realize they've got the perfect patsy. Regardless of what crime their client is alleged to commit, just deny involvement in the crime and claim that it was committed by the NSA.
I'm not a lawyer, I just play one on Slashdot. But it seems to me that should be sufficient to raise reasonable doubt.