I was thinking about this the other day and besides that after 4 mos. they don't know what he got which seems unforgivable given the nature of their business (there should be records of every USB transfer which is easily implemented). My thought was that perhaps they don't encrypt their passwords or perhaps make it easy for an administrator to decrypt them and see them. I believe most systems encrypt a password and virtually no one can decrypt it and see it. Which is why your average website has a function to change or create a new password but none can actually retrieve and send you the old one. I wonder if in their quest for Total Information Awareness they set things up so that they could see current passwords just to have that insight into employee's minds. Such a list would be valuable because if someone uses their daughter's birthday as a password then when they change their password one can guess they will change it to some other significant date in their life or it will have some other family affiliation.
I don't know but they are sounding more desperate. But that could be psy-ops to make Snowden feel more in control. They seem to be getting to the Guardian with threats but British law is different and has less freedom of speech than we do so it may be the British government which is doing the dirty work.
I've said it before but I really wish Snowden had pulled a few specific records from some celebrities if he had access. Revealing a few days of Angelina Jolie's phone records or emails would break through to your average American about the intrusiveness and kept things like spying on Merkel's records secret. Jolie wouldn't sue the paper for publishing the information because she would probably understand the necessity of making the scope of the wiretapping understandable to your average Joe, and not revealing the spying on Merkel would be beneficial to America's diplomatic mission.
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