Expertise

According to Snowden, he was able to take files because, although there was a log of every time someone would work with files, "Luckily, the strength of these systems was also their weakness: their complexity meant that not even the people running them necessarily knew how they worked. Nobody actually understood where they overlapped and where their gaps were. Nobody, that is, except the systems administrators. After all, those sophisticated monitoring systems you're imagining, the ones with scary names like MIDNIGHTRIDER-somebody's got to install them in the first place. The NSA may have paid for the network, but sysadmins like myself were the ones who really owned it" (p. 256).

Snowden, E. (2019). Permanent record. Macmillan.