I mean, it could be a smear from an agency who are hostile to the NSA for some reason (that stuff happens; like Valerie Plame, or the notion that Watergate was the result of the FBI leaking against the CIA and the White House). It's hardly likely to be from the NSA or the Whitehouse, who are currently in damage limitation mode; contrasting their own incompetence with that of the guy they're up against doesn't seem like a smart move...
This is the take-home message.
The steady stream of security breaches and information leaks in recent years has taught us that the only way to guarantee information does not fall into the wrong hands is not to record the information in the first instance.
So we're back to this. First the "Snowden had a Hacker Certification" nonsense (ignoring that CEHs are required by DoD for OPS jobs and aren't exactly high-quality to begin with) and now deleting log files equaling "hacking". I guess it is easier to make him seem like some super skilled hacker than admit that oversight and access controls were probably non existent.
Selfishly, I really don't even care about Snowden at this point but I do fear that the trend developing is to paint him as a "Hacker" putting security researchers as the next major "threat".
You'd think politicians would realize this the most. In 20 years time when the people running the NSA have changed and a different party or group is at the top of the pyramid, are they not going to use communications you used 10 years ago for their own ends? I'm hoping pure survivalist instinct will win out eventually and some politicians will vote the right way.
