Wait? Isn’t NSA supposed to be the galactic champions when it comes to computers? Well, actually no, they aren’t. Neither are the Brits. Both are indeed quite skilled at coming on like B-movie heavies, making menacing noises, and being generally thuggish. But when it comes to having any discernable grasp about how the Intertubes and those computer thingees work, their top brass really are clueless.
The Guardian says their government demanded “we want our stuff back,” a curious and dimbulb comment indeed since the NSA documents Snowden walked off with never belonged to British Intelligence in the first place. They compounded their ignorance by insisting the data be destroyed. When The Guardian explained none of the data was on British servers and that Greenwald lives in Brazil, the government had a hissy fit and ordered a Guardian laptop be smashed to pieces. Apparently they really did think all the data was somewhere in the Guardian office in London.
Meanwhile back in the States, NSA has its panties in a twist about Snowden and in its wisdom has decided that since Snowden was a sysadmin, the best of all possible solutions is to fire 90% of their sysadmins and replace them with software. This of course insures that hackers only have to penetrate one piece of software to get all the keys to all the cookie jars rather than route around sysadmins who might actually know what they are doing.
This really is the Wizard of Oz. Behind the fearsome curtain are little men who really have no clue at all. It’s time to throw them all out into the streets.