Speculative insider‑accomplice theory for Snowden’s NSA breach

[22 The witting-accomplice scenario better fits with the principle in logic called Occam’s razor that suggests that in choosing between alternative explanations, the one that requires the fewest assumptions should be given priority. It would be a relatively easy to gain access to passwords if Snowden had the cooperation of an insider at the center that had been read into the compartments or, even better, if he had the cooperation with a system administrator with the necessary PKI cards and shell keys to bypass the password protection. Such an accomplice could also help explain how Snowden was able to get the job at the Center in the first place; how he knew in advance that he could find there the “lists” of the NSA sources in foreign countries, and how he knew that there were no security traps at the center. Such a witting accomplice might even have prepared in advance the “spiders” that Snowden used to index the files. The witting-accomplice scenario of course requires a somewhat unsettling expansion of the plot. It means Snowden collaborated with one or more insiders at the Center to steal secret documents. It is not difficult to imagine, in light of the lax background checks at outside contractors servicing the NSA, that there were others in the “geek squad” that shared Snowden’s antipathy to NSA surveillance. Certainly, we know that Snowden found other NSA workers who were willing to attend his anti-surveillance Crypto party in December 2012. Anyone of these other potential dissidents could have shared Snowden’s objective of exposing NSA abuses. It would only be a small next step to offer Snowden help if he was willing to go public. Indeed, if the geek culture produced one Snowden, why wouldn’t it produce others? If such an accomplice lacked Snowden’s willingness to flee to another country, he may have limited his participation to supplying technical assistance. For his part, Snowden may have agreed to divert suspicion from his accomplice by taking sole responsibility for the crime when he went public. The problem with this scenario, however, is that no witting accomplices were ever found. The FBI, which was in charge of the domestic part of investigation of the Snowden case, questioned all of Snowden’s co-workers at the Center over the course of six months but it failed to find anyone who knowingly helped Snowden. If the accomplice was an idealistic amateur, it is likely the FBI would have found him. Three co-workers did admit to the FBI that they might have inadvertently given Snowden their passwords but these three slips would not account for Snowden’s breach of all the other compartments. Of course, there may have also been less forthcoming co-workers hid their slips in divulging their passwords to Snowden. This raises the more sinister possibility that the accomplice was not an amateur co-worker but a deep-cover spy who was already in place when Snowden arrived on the scene. Such a penetration agent could have been recruited by an adversary intelligence service before Snowden came on the scene. After Snowden expressed a desire to expose the NSA’s domestic surveillance, it could then have used Snowden as an “umbrella” to hide its own activities. Finding such a means to protect a source while exploiting his or her information is not uncommon in espionage operations, and since Snowden was willing to flee America and go public, he could serve as a near perfect umbrella. “Snowden may have carried out of the NSA many more HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_020274