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Three former NSA workers accused of aiding Snowden

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WASHINGTON Three people at the National Security Agency have been implicated in Edward Snowden's efforts to copy classified material, including a civilian employee who resigned last month after acknowledging he allowed Snowden to use his computer ID, according to an NSA memo sent to Congress.

The other two were an active-duty member of the military and a civilian contractor. The memo does not describe their conduct, but says they were barred from the NSA and its systems in August.

The memo from the director of the NSA's legislative affairs office, Ethan L. Bauman, to the House Judiciary Committee staff does not identify the three or say whether they all worked with Snowden at an NSA post in Hawaii last year. But it offers a glimpse into the internal investigation of what intelligence officials have called the largest theft of classified material in U.S. history.

The NSA employee who resigned did not know that Snowden, an agency contractor employed by the consulting firm Booz Allen Hamilton, planned to reveal classified NSA operations and systems to the media. But the employee admitted to the FBI in June that he had used his Public Key Infrastructure certificate, a special digital ID, to give Snowden access to material he was not authorized to see on an internal network called NSA Net.

The employee used his password to sign onto the network and Snowden secretly captured the password without the employee's knowledge, Bauman wrote, and later used it to download additional material.

The employee had his security clearance revoked in November and resigned on Jan. 10, according to the memo. Bauman's memo was first reported Thursday by NBC News.

An NSA spokeswoman declined to comment Friday.

Snowden, who is living in Moscow, has denied that he stole colleagues' passwords to gain access to classified documents. U.S. officials have confirmed reports that he used so-called Web crawler software to automatically troll the spy agency's networks and secretly access up to 1.7 million documents without being detected. It's still unclear how many he copied. News organizations have published a few dozen at most so far.

U.S. officials say Snowden mostly took documents that explained how NSA surveillance programs work, rather than fruits of eavesdropping and code-breaking operations. The officials say he was walled off from many NSA secrets, including recordings of private calls or conversations by world leaders.

But he appears to have accessed documents that could compromise military communications systems, satellite orbits and even the names of clandestine agents, officials say. Mitigating the damage, they say, will take years and cost billions of dollars.

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Three former NSA workers accused of aiding Snowden

Judge Jeanine Pirro – WH Under Fire For NSA Spying – Class Action Lawsuit Filed This Week – Video

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How NSA spying disclosures influence security strategies

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How has whistleblower Edward Snowdens exposs affected the ways organisations deal with internal and external security threats?

Edward Snowdens revelations about mass internet surveillance conducted by the US National Security Agency (NSA) and the UKs GCHQ has caused consternation around the world, particularly in Europe.

While the revelations have generated much debate and given security suppliers a golden opportunity to say how they could have stopped the CIA contractor in his tracks, one question remains for security professionals.

Regardless of motives and objectives, how should Snowdens revelations influence businesses information security strategies?

While it is difficult to get a clear-cut, unqualified answer to this, most information security professionals feel Snowden did not really uncover anything new, and some are unequivocal in their response. "Organisations should not build their strategy around stopping the NSA or GCHQ monitoring: this is a very negative, reactive and ultimately pointless exercise," says Adrian Davis, principal research analyst at the Information Security Forum (ISF).

"At the ISF, we state that an organisations information security strategy should support the business strategy and allow the organisation to conduct and grow its business in a secure and robust manner, by protecting the organisations assets including information against a range of threats."

An important part of the strategy, he says, should be to create and implement processes to manage contractors; control access rights and stop accrual of such rights by employees and contractors; and to monitor and review critical system activity on a regular basis.

These were some of the flaws that allowed the leaks to occur, says Davis.

But, like many others in the security industry, he feels the revelations that certain technologies, especially encryption, have back doors should come as no surprise. "The key here is to determine whether the back doors pose an exploitable vulnerability and if the organisation has deployed or can deploy measures to mitigate the vulnerability," says Davis."This brings us to risk assessment, which should inform the choice about what software to use, decide whether to use open source software, or choose another control to apply."

In the wake of the Snowden revelations, the open source community has suggested that having software open to the scrutiny of all will eliminate back doors for spy agencies. "This seems counterintuitive," says Robert Newby, analyst and managing partner at KuppingerCole UK. "But, simply put, if everyone can see it, it tends to keep people honest and is that not what Snowden was trying to do in the first place?"

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How NSA spying disclosures influence security strategies


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