The NSA is now admitting that Snowden impersonated NSA officials to get his documents.

I think that this quote is particularly telling:

“Every day, they are learning how brilliant [Snowden] was,” said a former U.S. official with knowledge of the case. “This is why you don’t hire brilliant people for jobs like this. You hire smart people. Brilliant people get you in trouble.”

That comment won the Internet. 

More significantly, they still don’t know what Snowden got his hands on:

The NSA still doesn’t know exactly what Snowden took. But its forensic investigation has included trying to figure out which higher level officials Snowden impersonated online to access the most sensitive documents.

The NSA has as many as 40,000 employees. According to one intelligence official, the NSA is restricting its research to a much smaller group of individuals with access to sensitive documents. Investigators are looking for discrepancies between the real world actions of an NSA employee and the online activities linked to that person’s computer user profile. For example, if an employee was on vacation while the on-line version of the employee was downloading a classified document, it might indicate that someone assumed the employee’s identity.

The NSA has already identified several instances where Snowden borrowed someone else’s user profile to access documents, said the official.

This official called the damage a 12 on a scale of 10 to 12.

If you believe, as I do, that our society and our security have been harmed by the secrecy fetish of our state security apparatus, then this is an unalloyed good.