Re: Just how did Snowden get all this info?
Snowden was very forthcoming about how he acquired the files. He was a sys admin, who had, by dint of his job, access to the raw filesystems of many of the servers and storage networks. For the ones he did not, he managed to socially engineer the passwords of other sys admins.
He then deployed a filesystem crawler to basically just SUCK as many files as he could into portable storage devices that he placed on the network. One of the reasons for the drip feed is that not even Snowden knows what he got...it was just gigs and gigs of files, much of it containing only pieces of the puzzle that have to be crossed with other files to make sense of. He managed to get a handle on a small chunk of it, and that was in the first releases. But the rest is still being pieced together and correlated, which is time consuming and may render more surprises.
The man hit the motherlode...we still don't know all of what he has. Neither does he in many ways. And the government is TERRIFIED...because it DOES have an idea of what is in there....
Biting the hand that feeds IT
