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posted by janrinok on Thursday June 04 2015, @11:53PM   Printer-friendly

THE NATIONAL SECURITY Agency knows Edward Snowden disclosed many of its innermost secrets when he revealed how aggressive its surveillance tactics are. What it doesn't know is just how much information the whistle-blower took with him when he left.

For all of its ability to track our telecommunications, the NSA seemingly has little clue exactly what documents, or even how many documents, Snowden gave to the media. Like most large organizations, the NSA had tools in place to track who accessed what data and when. But Snowden, a system administrator, apparently was able to cover his tracks by deleting or modifying the log files that tracked that access.

An Estonian company called Guardtime says it has a solution to that: using the same ideas that underpin the digital currency Bitcoin, the company says it can ensure no one can alter digital files, not even an organization's most senior executives or IT managers. The idea is to stop the next Snowden in his tracks by making it impossible to tamper with data, such as the NSA log files, in secret.


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  • (Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Friday June 05 2015, @02:19AM

    by Runaway1956 (2926) Subscriber Badge on Friday June 05 2015, @02:19AM (#192343) Journal

    TFS describes how Snowden would have been identified AFTER THE FACT, and proceeds to suggest that all of the data that Snowden accessed would then be identified. But, it wouldn't have stopped him from accessing and copying data in the first place. And, I'm less sure than the authors that they would have identified all the data that he downloaded. Did Snowden not suggest that he used login credentials that were not his own? I would have to go search for that bit of information, but it seems like Snowden mostly used his own login credentials, but at other times used office identifying credentials, or shared credentials. If that is the case, the NSA still couldn't be certain which data he took.

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  • (Score: 2) by FatPhil on Friday June 05 2015, @03:41PM

    by FatPhil (863) <pc-soylentNO@SPAMasdf.fi> on Friday June 05 2015, @03:41PM (#192569) Homepage
    Agree. You seem to be the only one reading it the same way as I do. If this technology were in place, and a whole bunch of other conditions, then Snowden wouldn't have been able to get away with it. Hmmm, but he didn't get away with it. So this technology made no difference.
    --
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