Send In The Clowns . . .

The Gadfly has to give Edward Snowden credit for one thing . . . not only has he exposed the fact that the U.S. government has been, and still is, spying on it's own citizenry en-masse, but he's also exposed our spook infrastructure as something akin to The Bourne Ultimatum combined with a Three Stooges episode.

Observe:

WASHINGTON — American intelligence and law enforcement investigators have concluded that they may never know the entirety of what the former National Security Agency contractor Edward J. Snowden extracted from classified government computers before leaving the United States, according to senior government officials.

Investigators remain in the dark about the extent of the data breach partly because the N.S.A. facility in Hawaii where Mr. Snowden worked — unlike other N.S.A. facilities — was not equipped with up-to-date software that allows the spy agency to monitor which corners of its vast computer landscape its employees are navigating at any given time.

Six months since the investigation began, officials said Mr. Snowden had further covered his tracks by logging into classified systems using the passwords of other security agency employees, as well as by hacking firewalls installed to limit access to certain parts of the system.

“They’ve spent hundreds and hundreds of man-hours trying to reconstruct everything he has gotten, and they still don’t know all of what he took,” a senior administration official said. “I know that seems crazy, but everything with this is crazy.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/15/us/officials-say-us-may-never-know-extent-of-snowdens-leaks.html?src=twr&_r=1&


You get that folks?  The most technologically advanced intelligence agency on the planet somehow forgot to install activity tracking software on it's own internal computer system, which the indubitable Mr. Snowden soon discovered and exploited, and subsequently made off with the mother lode of American intelligence treasures.

If you ask The Gadfly, it isn't much of a stretch to believe that maybe if these nosy bozos in the NSA weren't so enamored with snooping on the legal political activities of and the porn surfing habits of their own fellow Americans, perhaps they wouldn't find themselves in the troublesome, and arguably humorous, position that they currently find themselves in.



----TFG