According to Snowden’s latest interview (which lasted 7 hours, but was edited down for the Web — see [1] for the transcript, [2] for more brief summaries) the lax auditing on NSA systems is the source of many “fringe benefits” for working at the NSA.
For example, about every two months you see something like this… a sort of re-manifestation of the “mixing cocktails using the shredder” attitude made famous by “Falcon and the Snowman” —
“Many of the people searching through the haystacks were young, enlisted guys and … 18 to 22 years old. They’ve suddenly been thrust into a position of extraordinary responsibility where they now have access to all your private records. In the course of their daily work they stumble across something that is completely unrelated to their work, for example an intimate nude photo of someone in a sexually compromising situation but they’re extremely attractive. So what do they do? They turn around in their chair and they show a co-worker. And their co-worker says: “Oh, hey, that’s great. Send that to Bill down the way.” And then Bill sends it to George, George sends it to Tom and sooner or later this person’s whole life has been seen by all of these other people. Anything goes, more or less. You’re in a vaulted space. Everybody has sort of similar clearances, everybody knows everybody. It’s a small world.”
kabelmast 