Officials: NSA delayed anti-leak tools at Snowden site

WASHINGTON — The National Security Agency failed to install the most up-to-date anti-leak software at a site in Hawaii before contractor Edward Snowden went to work there and downloaded tens of thousands of highly classified documents, current and former U.S. officials say.

Well before Snowden joined Booz Allen Hamilton last spring and was assigned to the NSA site as a systems administrator, other U.S. government facilities had begun to install software designed to spot attempts by unauthorized people to access or download data.

The software aims to block so- called insider threats — a response to an order by President Barack Obama to tighten access controls for classified information after the leak of Pentagon and State Department documents by an Army private to the WikiLeaks website in 2010.

Themain reason the software had not been installed at the NSA’s Hawaii facility by the time Snowden started there was that it had insufficient bandwidth to comfortably install it and ensure its effective operation, according to one of the officials.

Due to the bandwidth issue, intelligence agencies in general moved more slowly than non-spy government units, including the Defense Department, to install anti-leak software, officials said.

Another official said congressional oversight committees had repeatedly expressed concerns to the administration that federal agencies, including spy units, had moved too slowly to install updated security software.

A spokeswoman for the NSA declined to discuss details of the agency’s schedule for installing antileak software in Hawaii. She said the agency has had to speed up its efforts to tighten security in the wake of Snowden’s disclosures.

“NSA and the intelligence community at large have been moving forward with IT efficiency initiatives for several years. … The unauthorized disclosures have naturally compelled NSA and the rest of the IC to accelerate the timeline,” she said.

Snowden was assigned by Booz Allen Hamilton to the Hawaii facility in late March or early April 2013.

He was there for a few weeks before he told his employers he needed time off because of health problems.

Snowden then disappeared and turned up several weeks later in Hong Kong. There, he gave a TV interview and a trove of secrets fromthe NSAandits British counterpart to writer Glenn Greenwald, filmmaker Laura Poitras and journalists from Britain’s Guardian newspaper.