I am a real spy, not low-level system administrator - Snowden
Edward Snowden was trained as a professional spy and actually worked undercover abroad for America’s biggest intelligence agencies, developing their IT security architecture, the whistleblower revealed in an exclusive interview to NBC News. ● "I was trained as a spy in sort of the traditional sense of the word, in that I lived and worked undercover, overseas — pretending to work in a job that I’m not — and even being assigned a name that was not mine,” Snowden told Brian Williams, anchor on NBC’s on Nightly News. “So when they say I’m a low-level systems administrator, that I don’t know what I’m talking about, I’d say it’s somewhat misleading,” he said. The NBC News pointed out that once Edward Snowden started to leak sensitive information about the methods and scale of NSA global surveillance, the Obama administration tended to speak about him as small fry, a thievish hacker that happened to be a system administrator at the NSA quite by chance.
BBC: Edward Snowden: I was a high-tech spy for the CIA and NSA