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32 | HOW AMERICA LOST ITS SECRETS Stevens, the assistant registrar of UMUC, who I spoke to at the base in 2016, told me that the program in 2009 did not provide gradu- ate courses in computer sciences. According to the program’s record, while Snowden had enrolled as a student in the summer of 2009, he received neither any credits nor a certificate. In October 2009, Dell assigned Snowden a job in which he had direct access to the NSA’s computers. He was now a system adminis- trator, which is essentially a tech-savvy repairman. Dell was working on a backup system code-named EPICSHELTER. For this contract, Dell was transferring large chunks of data from the NSA’s main computers in Maryland to backup drives in Japan so that the system could be quickly restored if there was a communications interrup- tion, Because most of the classified data was in its encrypted form, it had little value to any outside party. Snowden’s job was to maintain the proper functioning of computers, but as a system administrator he also had privileges to call up unencrypted files. He sat in front of a computer screen all day looking for any problems in the transferring of files to backup servers. © The work was highly repetitive and exceedingly dull. Snowden © found time to search for anomalies in the system, and he claimed to have spotted a major flaw in the security system in late 2009. He discovered that a rogue system administrator in Japan could steal secret data without anyone else’s realizing that it had been stolen. Snowden brought that to the attention of his superiors, as he later said. The emergence of a rogue system administrator was not that far- fetched in 2009. Hacktivists such as Julian Assange had adopted the battle cry “Sysadmins of the world, unite.” Instead of asking them to “throw off their chains,” as Marx did, he asked them to send clas- sified documents about secret government activity to the WikiLeaks site. Snowden, as a “sys admin,” was aware he had the power to do so. He recalled in Moscow in 2014, “I actually recommended they [the NSA] move to two-man control for administrative access back in 2009.” To make his point even clearer, he added, “A whistleblower could use these things, but so could a spy.” Not without irony, Snowden became that rogue system administrator some three years | | Epst_9780451494566_2p_all_r1.z.indd 32 ® 9/30/16 11:09 AM | | HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_019520