Why Edward Snowden would fail today

Rep. Pete King (R-N.Y.) said on Sunday that leaker Edward Snowden would not be able to obtain the same top-level information today because of new protections put in place by the National Security Agency.

{mosads}In the past, King said on CBS’s “Face the Nation,” the agency was “so concerned about outside forces penetrating their system, that they just did not take the proper precautions internally.”

“A lot of that has been changed,” he told Bob Schieffer. “There is monitoring now of what goes on. Snowden would not be able to do it again in the future. … Of course, you know, it’s too late for that.”

Snowden, a former contractor for the NSA, was able to access databases and copy documents en masse with the use of a basic “web crawler” tool, according to a report by The New York Times on Saturday.

It could be automated to search for certain topics and copy whole documents at a time — something that would have likely set off alarm bells if it happened at NSA headquarters in Fort Meade, Md. However, the outpost in Hawaii where Snowden worked was reportedly not outfitted with the same internal protections.

“It can never be allowed to happen again,” King said. “I know already there’s been a number of reforms the NSA has instituted.”

King is a member of the House Homeland Security and Intelligence committees.