In line with all the security issues involved in NSAgate and whistleblower Edward Snowden, whether you’re in favor of the government spying on people or not, one overlooked topic is how Snowden was able to get the data he leaked from a government agency that’s supposed to be secured.

According to Snowden’s interview, he used a flash drive or a portable storage device to get the data he needed to expose the government’s dastardly deeds.

The question now is, how secured are government files from prying eyes if one person can easily acquire data using a portable storage device?

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According to the Pentagon, government agencies, such as they are, have pretty tight data security.  There’s a ban on portable storage devices since the 2008 Buckshot Yankee incident wherein agent.btz, a malicious software, was uploaded to military networks using a  thumb drive.  The ban was implemented to prevent such incident from happening again as well as other security measures such as limiting access to sensitive files, control administration access, real-time monitoring of files so copying anything is immediately reported, preventing computers from accepting or recognizing unauthorized devices and other security measure.  So how did Snowden pull this off?  There’s always an exemption.

For the Pentagon, exceptions were awarded to systems administrators who install software and manage helpdesk services for the department’s millions of computers and nearly 600,000 mobile devices in some 15,000 networked groups.  And this is exactly the case for the NSA, Snowden was part of the exempted population that had access to sensitive data.

“There is a certain point where you have to start trusting people and that becomes a very imperfect system,” Steven Bucci, a former Pentagon official and now a cyber security expert for the conservative Heritage Foundation think-tank, said. “If you have a malicious insider – someone who has the authority to do stuff but then decides to violate the rules – you’ve got a problem, and there’s … very little you can do to stop that.”

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If portable storage devices are a huge security risk, why are there exemptions to the ban?

“[I]t’s a necessity.  Somebody has to update these systems – the endpoints, administering tools, updating software, updating operating system – they need to troubleshoot these systems and sometimes you just can’t get around the fact that a portable access to files is going to be required, especially in cases where there’s some type of network limitation of some kind,” John Casaretto, SiliconANGLE Contributing Editor, explained during his interview with Kristin Feledy on NewsDesk.

“It might be a location that is far away from a great connection, it just may be large files.  It’s just a basic reality that sometimes, somebody has to go work on these end systems, it may be endpoint systems or servers themselves, where they need access to tools,” he goes on.

Casaretto noted that that though these exemptions prove to be a risk, it’s not entirely ineffective.  The exceptions are given to those who need access to the data legitimately, it’s just that the people abuse the power given to them.

For more of Casaretto’s Breaking Analysis, check out the NewsDesk video below, and for tips on what services you can use or things you can do doege the government’s spying eyes, check out How To Get Out Of PRISM and Avoid NSA Spying and NSAgate: 3 Spy-Free Alternatives for Email, Browsing + Social Media.

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