“We both now typically and automatically encrypt all documents and work we carry – not just for the NSA stories,” says Greenwald via email. “So everything he had – for his personal use and everything else – was heavily encrypted, and I’m not worried at all that they can break that.”

Greenwald added that the people in possession of these files “cannot access them yet because they are highly encrypted and they do not have the passwords.” But, Greenwald said, “if anything happens at all to Edward Snowden, he told me he has arranged for them to get access to the full archives.”

CIA contractor Edward Snowden, who leaked some of America's most closely guarded secrets, had travelled to India before 2011 but did not report the trip during his background-check process.

"The background checkers failed to verify Snowden's account of a past security violation and his work for the CIA, they didn't thoroughly probe an apparent trip to India that he had failed to report," the Wall Street Journal reported, quoting a review after leaks of classified documents by him.

Snowden started out in the US army, leaving in 2004, to work as a security guard at one of NSA's facilities. He joined the CIA in 2007, working on IT security.

After leaving the CIA in 2009, Snowden worked for several of NSA's private contractors. His last stint was with Booz Allen, which, he has said he joined to access the programmes he leaked. It's not clear if he went to India while working for the CIA or one of the NSA's private contractors he worked with or as a tourist.

Snowden impersonated NSA officials, sources say

Edward Snowden accessed some secret national security documents by assuming the electronic identities of top NSA officials, said intelligence sources.
(snip)
The NSA has already identified several instances where Snowden borrowed someone else's user profile to access documents, said the official.

Each user profile on NSAnet includes a level of security clearance that determines what files the user can access. Like most NSA employees and contractors, Snowden had a "top secret" security clearance, meaning that under his own user profile he could access many classified documents. But some higher level NSA officials have higher levels of clearance that give them access to the most sensitive documents.

As a system administrator, according to intelligence officials, Snowden had the ability to create and modify user profiles for employees and contractors. He also had the ability to access NSAnet using those user profiles, meaning he could impersonate other users in order to access files. He borrowed the identities of users with higher level security clearances to grab sensitive documents.

Once Snowden had collected documents, his job description also gave him a right forbidden to other NSA employees the right to download files from his computer to an external storage device. Snowden downloaded a reported 20,000 documents onto thumb drives before leaving Hawaii for Hong Kong on May 20.

@ggreenwald 8m
Yes: "incredible details" as claimed by the UK government, as filtered by a virulent NSA defender/govt contractor

@ggreenwald 44m
UK Govt: their op-sec was sloppy, but we can't get access to their docs because they're all "heavy encrypted" #GlaringContradictions

SPIEGEL has decided not to publish details it has seen about secret operations that could endanger the lives of NSA workers. Nor is it publishing the related internal code words. However, this does not apply to information about the general surveillance of communications.