[keithpeter]

If one of their many contractors can leak details to the press for idealogical ends it's pretty safe to assume that much worse secrets have already been leaked to other nation states (China, Russia etc....) for financial gain.

Especially as the agency in question appears to have no compartments or levels of access. I've been wondering how a comparatively junior contract worker could access so much information...

[mpyne]

They're very compartmented, as it turns out.

But Snowden was a sysadmin and successfully managed to digitally impersonate persons actually in the right compartments, among other things, in order to get access to the data he wanted.

I suppose it's better to say that NSA is too reliant on contracted systems administrators to handle what should be inherently governmental functions, and that they don't properly compartment sysadmin functions. But then again, is it even possible to completely protect a computer network against an insider sysadmin threat?