Greenwald’s Outrage Sandwich: NSA Analysts Can Analyze NSA Intelligence

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112. By ALL accounts he is a darn good systems analyst.

It would probably be a good bet that he was deeply involved in setting up a lot of the PRISM software modules himself. Someone had to do it, and he seems to have the appropriate skill set. There would be many stages to the development, including a validation and verification processes. It probably would have involved a lot of people over several years. He did work for the NSA during the appropriate time period.

The PRISM software appears to be designed to meet all of the legal requirements that have been established in order to satisfy the FISA court. The NSA would have been the customer for this software design. This puts Snowden squarely on the customer's team during most of the development, and the customer's team would have been the ones who had to be satisfied with the performance of the system.

This would also explain why he later took the job as an analyst. This would be in order to validate for himself that all of the procedures, policies, and protocols, all of which were anticipated when the software was designed, had actually been implemented in its use.

Snowden could easily be one of the most knowledgeable people around when it comes to understanding how all of the legal and policy issues are intertwined inside the PRISM software and user protocols.