Edward Snowden, the NSA source, is in Hong Kong!

[FarCenter]

35. From the Guardian article, it looks like he was probably a system adminstrator

He did not have a high school diploma. After the Army, he got a job in physical security with the CIA. Then got into IT system security.

He probably has a combination of on-the-job training and self taught skills around how to adminster security and maintain the operating sytem and LAN operations of Windows and/or Unix servers and workstations. He could have become extremely skilled, and therefore well paid, especially with his clearances, but I'd bet that his expertise is highly practical and narrow.

The documents were probably stored on the file servers he had access to. A flaw in many operating systems is that once you have administrator or root privileges, you also have the privileges of other users. An administrator should have access only to the commands, programs, and data needed to carry out the adminstration tasks.

Its almost parallel to script kiddie hackers who are self-taught about programming, operating systems, security, etc.