Edward Snowden's Case Summary

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While Manning’s case is one highlighting lax security procedure, the case of Edward Snowden is one of stark contrast. Edward Snowden grew up near the National Security Agency headquarters in Maryland (Scherer & Shuster, 2013). He is a high school dropout who found an alternate identity on the Internet (Scherer & Shuster, 2013). His father was a US Coast Guard Officer and mother worked as a clerk in the federal court, they separated when Snowden was still a toddler (Scherer & Shuster, 2013). Snowden started his career as a CIA employee in Switzerland, where he annotated his displeasure with ongoing activities on anonymous chat boards (Scherer & Shuster, 2013). Edward Snowden worked as systems administrator for Booz Allen Hamilton on contract support to the National Security Agency in Hawaii (Scherer & Shuster, 2013). Snowden’s duties allowed him to have administrator privileges; which he used to by-pass authentication procedures to gain access above what he needed or received clearance. The National Security Agency is one of the most secure facilities within the Department of Defense, yet Snowden managed to acquire 1.7 million Top …show more content…

Snowden admittedly applied for and took a systems administrator job as a means to gain access to the information he wanted to release (Van Cleave, 2013). While in Switzerland working for the CIA, Snowden expressed his displeasure with the secrecy of the CIA on anonymous websites and chat rooms. Snowden also had minor security incidents during his tenure at CIA and his time with NSA in Hawaii (Scherer & Shuster, 2013).. Snowden’s social life or lack thereof also provided a potential indicator that something was not quite right. While no single indicator provides a definitive proof that Snowden would commit his acts, the combination of the factors should have raised the suspicions of security

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