Former NSA defense contractor Edward Snowden gained access to classified material by convincing some former colleagues to share their passwords with him, according to a Reuters exclusive report published Thursday.
Citing unnamed sources, the report states that Snowden informed NSA employees he needed their passwords in order to perform his computer systems administrator job.
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The subterfuge reportedly occurred when Snowden was working at an NSA base in Hawaii. The cited sources said Snowden may have persuaded 20 to 25 fellow employees to give up their passwords, and that those employees were later questioned and "removed from their assignments."
The U.S. government seemingly knew that Snowden used others' passwords, as the Senate Intelligence Committee recently approved a bill funding software updates to help prevent future leaks.
In May, Snowden fled to Hong Kong with a trove of classified materials that he eventually leaked to journalists, most notably The Guardian's Glenn Greenwald. Greenwald left the newspaper last month to head a journalistic venture funded by Pierre Omidyar, a philanthropic billionaire and founder of eBay.
The leaked documents fueled a series of groundbreaking reports revealing the vast scope of NSA surveillance and data mining, the first of which was published in early June. Snowden revealed himself as the leaker several days after the initial report.
After about a month in Hong Kong, Snowden spent more than a month holed up in Moscow's Sheremetyevo International Airport before the Russian government granted him asylum for one year.
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