The level of access Snowden accrued may be symptomatic of structural access failure. Chelsea Manning, too, got away with a considerable amount of material. Su

The level of access Snowden accrued may be symptomatic of structural access failure. Chelsea Manning, too, got away with a considerable amount of material. Surely other state actors would have moles at these levels - so they probably got all this stuff as well. Security by obscurity may be a bad rule to follow at the state level - in the future we may need to know we are safe and not trust spies or wonks with our safety. Cryptography needs to be provably secure. Perhaps safety should be? Which raises the question can National Security be performed transparently ? Was the hack of GMail by China attributed to a NSA backdoor ? The real problem may be general to any government department that lacks oversight - total and utter incompetence. No-one has publicly hacked Greenwald - the secret services have been caught with their pants down at least twice. The BBC reports Russia and China have cracked encryption implemented by Snowden. From what I read about Snowden it seems he would have used the best publicly available crypto and so that is quite a considerable claim. Conclusion : leaks are more likely to come from the leaky sieve. http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/adamcurtis/entries/3662a707-0af9-3149-963f-47bea720b460 http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/adamcurtis/entries/3662a707-0af9-... I cite Adam Curtis : "Maybe the real state secret is that spies aren't very good at their job and don't know very much about the world" These super secret departments get more funding and power when there is more terror not less. The career incentives of the intelligence classes may not align particularly well with actual national security.