NSA fires employee who allegedly shared password with Snowden
By Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai From Mashable
The NSA has fired an employee who stands accused of sharing his password to the agency’s network with Edward Snowden.
The employee is the first victim of the NSA’s internal probe to determine whether anyone inside the agency is responsible for the leaks of thousands (or millions) of top secret documents. The NSA revealed the firing in a letter to Congress dated February 10, which was obtained by NBC News on Thursday.
The unnamed civilian employee, reportedly Snowden’s supervisor, apparently gave Snowden his Public Key Infrastructure certificate to log onto the NSA network. That could have given Snowden access to documents he might not have otherwise had access to, wrote NSA director of legislative affairs Ethan Bauman in the letter.
Snowden then allegedly convinced his supervisor to enter his password into Snowden’s computer. The supervisor didn’t realize Snowden was able to record it and use it in the future, according to Bauman.
This allegation would seem to confirm what Reuters reported months ago: that Snowden tricked between 20 and 25 of his alleged coworkers into giving him their logins.
But it’s unclear if that was the case. An anonymous NSA source who worked with Snowden in Hawaii told Forbes that Snowden didn’t fool any of his colleagues to steal their passwords. Snowden himself denied stealing any passwords nor tricking his colleagues into giving them up in a live chat at the end of January.
According to the NSA letter, two other employees were disciplined by the agency: an active duty military member and a contractor, neither of whom the NSA named. They didn’t lose their jobs, but rather lost access to classified information in August 2013.
PHOTO: Former intelligence contractor Edward Snowden poses for a photo during an interview in an undisclosed location in Dec. 2013 in Moscow, Russia.IMAGE: BARTON GELLMAN
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