Snowden gained the vast majority of the electronic information from scraping web tools he had access to. Recall the "wget hacking tool" controversy, where he us

Snowden gained the vast majority of the electronic information from scraping web tools he had access to. Recall the "wget hacking tool" controversy, where he used the command line to retrieve internal websites. The removal of that information, and obviously the disclosure of it, was illegal. The government didn't present a release claiming a substantial portion of the information was retrieved with that password list.