Our government’s surveillance includes targeting innocent sysadmins as a means to an end, it seems. Ryan Gallagher and Peter Maass report on another file leaked by Edward Snowden:
Across the world, people who work as system administrators keep computer networks in order – and this has turned them into unwitting targets of the National Security Agency for simply doing their jobs. According to a secret document provided by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, the agency tracks down the private email and Facebook accounts of system administrators (or sys admins, as they are often called), before hacking their computers to gain access to the networks they control.
Read their report and view the files on First Look: The Intercept.
So… how is this lawful if the sys admin is a USper, you wonder? Well, remember that our government and courts have already determined that some of our privacy can reasonably be sacrificed in service of these all-important foreign intelligence goals.
On the one hand, you have to admire the unnamed NSA employee’s creativity and problem-solving skills. On the other hand, it should make us wonder what else we still don’t know about….