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Raider of the Inner Sanctum | 79

required a minimum of one month's notice for foreign travel. By making the request, he lessened the likelihood that it would arouse undue suspicion when he departed for Hong Kong with stolen documents on May 18. This brief window left him some four weeks to take the lists that he coveted.

Snowden carried out the heist with precision reminiscent of a Mission: Impossible movie caper. First, he needed to get passwords to up to twenty-four compartments at the National Threat Operations Center that he had not been read into. Even in the “open culture” of the NSA, this was not an easy challenge. He would be asking one or more intelligence professionals to break strict NSA rules that not only prohibited them from disclosing their passwords to an unauthorized party such as himself but required them to report any unauthorized person who asked to use their passwords. Remarkably, he accomplished this incredible feat. He gained access to twenty-four compartments containing the NSA’s most closely guarded secrets in a matter of a few weeks.

Next, he had to find the lists he was seeking in a vast ocean of data. For this task, he used software applications called spiders to crawl through the data and find the files he was after. He deployed these robotic spiders, which presumably had been programmed in advance, soon after he began working at the center. According to the subsequent NSA damage assessment, Snowden’s spiders indexed well over one million documents. Many of those that he copied and moved were from Level 3 sensitive compartmented information, according to the NSA analysis. The spiders also made his penetration relatively safe. As previously mentioned, the Hawaii base did not have a real-time auditing system. So alarm bells did not go off in the security office when he indexed documents.

Finally, Snowden had to find a way to transfer this data to a computer with an opened USB port. This task was complicated by a security precaution. Most of the computers at the center had had their ports sealed shut to prevent unauthorized downloads. Making the transfer even more difficult, he was working as an analyst in training in an open-plan office with closed-circuit security cameras. But it was not impossible. System administrators sometimes used service computers that had unsealed ports to back up data before they did

Epst_9780451494566_2p_all_r1.z.indd 79 9/29/16 5:51 PM
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