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other analysts there. “It is inconceivable to me that his co-workers would divulge their passwords to him,” a former Booz Allen execu- tive, who had also worked at the Defense Intelligence Agency, told me. “If he was a system administrator, he might trick a threat ana- lyst into entering his password into his computer under the pre- text that he needed it to deal with an urgent hardware issue.” But, it will be recalled, Snowden was not a system administrator at the center. Snowden therefore “had no plausible reason for requesting passwords to compartments he had not been read into,” the former executive said. He said that NSA executives might have been read into all twenty-four of the compartments, but he deemed it incon- ceivable they would illicitly share their passwords with Snowden. I asked him what the chance was of his voluntarily obtaining some twenty-four passwords from co-workers in five weeks. “In my opin- ion, near zero,” he said.
It is possible of course that Snowden could have simply observed others typing in their passwords, one by one, but that would take time and possibly attract attention. I asked the former Booz Allen
© contractor whether it was possible that Snowden could have used a ® device for intercepting another computer’s electronic signals, called by hackers a “key logger.” Such a device, which is obtainable over the Internet, could be used to steal the passwords of the analysts who had been read into the compartments. My source said that while it was possible that Snowden smuggled in a key logger in his backpack, it could not be operated unless it was hardwired to a com- puter inside the center, because, like those at all other NSA facili- ties, the computers had been insulated to block any form of wireless transmission. This precaution was taken to guard against an EMP, or electromagnetic pulse, attack by an enemy. The only way Snowden could intercept keystrokes was to attach a cable from his key logger to each of his fellow workers’ computers. In this scenario, he would have had to surreptitiously build his own wired network connect- ing his hidden key logger to twenty-four separate computers. More- over, he would have to do this wiring in an open-plan office where he could not count on these additional wires, even if rigged one by one, not being noticed by either other analysts in the room or the “geek squad” of system administrators who regularly checked con-
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