[languagewars]

While I agree with your overall summary, I find it odd that you skip the issue of whether he had special access/ability or is just just one contractor among a group of essentially all NSA employees and contractors given access to a library of all of this information (as stated in a previous article.)

Given the NSAs general behavior and the nature of the Snowden leak in comparison to Manning's, I believe it is more credible that they have virtually everything at a single (and lowest) clearance and compartment, so this:

> If I had to guess, the most likely outcome here is going to be that we are talking about someone with very serious mental health issues who NSA had no business putting within 1000 miles of the information he managed to hoard in his house.

Is simultaneously true and a deflection from how incredibly inevitable this was and how incredibly incompetent they are as an institution. I am all for splitting their capabilities across existing agencies where it makes sense and cancelling programs all together where it doesn't.

[tptacek]

I simultaneously agree with the premise that NSA is secured incompetently and also disagree with the idea that everything is at a singe lowest clearance level, which is the opposite of how things have been described to me by people who worked there.

[languagewars]

My impression is that they have the NIH and refuse to use standard LSPP in favor of FLASK. They take this so far that they accept no feedback from the SELinux community. While they may have analyzed all the great reasons not to use every competitor, they probably lack oversight and critical evaluation of the EOU problems that causes, leading to less practical security than those using off the shelf software with proper oversight.