This is actually the most accurate article I've read about the NSA over this last week -- this is as a former NSA programmer/linguist. The good majority of posts about the topic have been great for a few laughs between my former colleagues and I, but the assertions made in this article actually made me lift my eyebrow a little in that someone actually got it right.

-1. Snowden overstated his salary... by a lot

Well folks, it goes without saying that 200k is an obscene amount of money for anyone working as a government contractor. Booz Allen employees are ironically some of the least paid employees in intel, because they follow a tiered structure of "rank" similar to the military (they are probably one of the largest contractor employees of military veterans). In order to get into that 150k+ range, you'd have to be hustling about winning contract after contract, and if you started to slow down then you'd eventually be shown the door with their "up or out" policy. The average contractor (as stated in a previous comment of mine) makes somewhere between 60k-110k. The higher end of that would be for employees with special skill sets such as programming abilities, languages, etc.

-That claim is "absolutely outrageous," former NSA and CIA director Michael Hayden tells The Daily Beast. Snowden "was not a collector," and no low-ranking contractor like him would have the authority to access anyone's phone calls or read anybody's emails.

In the government world, contractors are second-class citizens with very little authority to do anything at all, let alone start collecting on the president. That aside, Snowden was a CIA contractor working at an NSA facility, not an NSA employee. That translates to Snowden having the equivalent of read-only access to things related to his duties, besides being able to browse random stuff on the NSA internal network.

-Robert Deitz, a former top lawyer at the NSA and CIA, agrees that Snowden's boast is a "complete and utter" falsehood. "First of all it's illegal," he tells the Los Angeles Times. "There is enormous oversight. They have keystroke auditing. There are, from time to time, cases in which some analyst is [angry] at his ex-wife and looks at the wrong thing and he is caught and fired."

Everything you do is logged and audited by third parties to ensure compliance with FISA. An NSA employee could probably sexually harass 10 people before getting fired from their job. Collect on 1 american without proper approval, and they're done. If you think I'm exaggerating, I've seen both cases.

-"I don't know if Snowden's claim is accurate," says Marc Ambinder at The Week. But "as a systems administrator, he certainly is entitled to the benefit of the doubt when it comes to an assessment of the NSA's internal information security."

Again, a CIA contractor at an NSA facility. That's like having a Microsoft employee go to an Apple Developer conference and be put in charge of organizing the guest speaker list. All agencies are very compartmentalized, and while most have implemented some anti-stovepiping policies, they still remain very "this is mine that is yours" as far as their own systems go. So tell me again, why would you need anyone from the CIA to administrate your systems, when you have thousands of your own employees, military personnel, and readily available applicants to do so?