No Encryption Said to Let Snowden Use Leaked NSA Secrets

Edward Snowden could have been thwarted from leaking classified U.S. documents if the National Security Agency encrypted the information to make it unreadable, two former senior cybersecurity officials said.

Snowden would have needed a digital key to decipher the secrets after gaining access to them if the data was scrambled, Ira “Gus” Hunt, former chief technology officer for the Central Intelligence Agency, and Howard Schmidt, a former U.S. cybersecurity coordinator, said in interviews yesterday at a conference in San Francisco.