My Theory About Edward Snowden

A Thought

It is clear that Edward Snowden has had to become an expert on cyber security. A breakdown of security is what has him living in Russia, after all. But when I start to think about how Snowden could have taken data from the NSA, the means with which that could have happened seem quite simple to me. Let me explain.

The Network

In a network, it is common for servers to need to exchange information. There are a number of ways to do this, but on Linux, there are dedicated command line tools that can copy data and search a file system (see scp and grep). If the right connections are made, scooping up a lot of data isn't too hard. With just a couple of commands, it would be east to search for certain file types and copy them to a remote location.

The Question and a Theory

Were the right connections made between servers (or left open between servers) that allowed Snowden to use simple tools to extract data? If so, getting the data would be easy and his expertise as a "hacker" would be jeopardized. Are we villainizing/romanticizing Snowden simply because he used a couple native Linux commands? Could it be that simple?

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