Edward Snowden Pardon and the SolarWinds Hack | City Journal
After the NSA, CIA, and the Cyber Command shut down the sources and methods Snowden had compromised, McConnell pointed out that entire generations of information had been lost. The resulting blind spots in our surveillance of Russia gave Moscow s intelligence services full latitude to carry out mischief. Russian intelligence services have no shortage of operatives and tools to carry out long-term operations in cyberspace and elsewhere.
In the 2020 SolarWinds penetration, which Secretary of State Mike Pompeo attributes to Russian intelligence, the gaps allowed Russian spies to masquerade as authorized system administrators and other IT workers. The spies could use their forged credentials to copy any material of interest, plant hidden programs to alter the future operations of thousands of workstations in networks inside and outside the government, cover their tracks, and plant hidden backdoors for future access. Though it may take years to find and unravel all the malicious code implanted in these systems, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency has already determined that this threat poses a grave risk to the Federal Government and state, local, tribal, and territorial governments as well as critical infrastructure entities and other private sector organizations.
This immense compromise of government networks is the inevitable price for allowing a large part of our counterintelligence capability to be compromised in 2013. The perverse irony here is that while Vladimir Putin rewarded Snowden for his contributions with permanent residency, Donald Trump says that he is looking into pardoning Snowden for his intrusion into NSA files and betrayal of American secrets.