NBC News: Snowden Masqueraded as NSA Exec to Gain Document Access

On Thursday, NBC News reported that NSA leaker Edward Snowden gained access to some national security documents by pretending to be an NSA official. “Every day, they are learning how brilliant [Snowden] was,” a former US official told NBC News. ‘This is why you don’t hire brilliant people for jobs like this. You hire smart people. Brilliant people get you in trouble.”

Snowden, who worked for NSA contractor Booz Allen Hamilton, was a system administrator with NSAnet. He downloaded 20,000 documents. NSA knows that Snowden borrowed others’ user profiles to grab the most highly classified material. Because of his already top secret clearance, he could download those documents to an external storage device.