NSA Whistleblower Ed Snowden: From My Desk I Could Wiretap Anyone: You, A Federal Judge Or The President Of The US | Techdirt

NSA Whistleblower Ed Snowden: From My Desk I Could Wiretap Anyone: You, A Federal Judge Or The President Of The US | Techdirt: "I, sitting at my desk, certainly had the authorities to wiretap anyone, from you, or your accountant, to a federal judge, to even the President if I had a personal email."

Booz Allen Hamilton, federal contractor - CSMonitor.com

Booz Allen Hamilton, federal contractor - CSMonitor.com: "How on earth can you keep secrets if just one American company has enough people with top secret access to fill a mid-sized American town?

On top of that has been the trend over the past dozen years or so to make intelligence information more shareable. The old days of heavy compartmentalization are long over, all in the hopes of identifying patterns in intelligence collected by disparate agencies. That's one reason that Bradley Manning, a young soldier in Iraq, had access to almost the entirety of the State Department's database of classified cables, and was able to pull off his massive data dump to WikiLeaks."

"The Guardian has a good piece out today explaining the very good reasons why US intelligence increasingly relies on contractors - mostly because they're better at creating, and adapting to, new technology.

But with more and more people - and young people at that - getting access to top secret data, the surprise isn't the recent NSA leaks. It's that they're not more common."