Snowden trained as hacker while with National Security Agency

More details about the mysterious past of

Edward Snowden, the former contractor for the

National Security Agency who leaked details

about the agency's surveillance program, are

starting to emerge. Snowden, who is reportedly currently holed up in

an airport in Moscow, was taught all he needed

to know about hacking while he was working for

the NSA, according to The New York Times. And those are the very

skills that he would have

needed in order to snoop into the records that he

accessed. His resume, which hasn't been made public but

was described to the Times by people who have

seen it, touted his training in a course for

"certified ethical hackers ." A certified ethical hacker is a

professional certification handed out

by the International Council of E-Commerce Consultants (EC-Council)

for those who are trained to detect vulnerabilities in organizations'

systems using the same knowledge and tools as

a hacker. These details reveal just the sort of skills that

the NSA is desperate for when it comes to new

recruits -- but they're also the very skills that put

it at risk. "If he's looking inside U.S. government networks

for foreign intrusions, he might have very broad

access," James A. Lewis, a computer security

expert at the Center for Strategic and

International Studies, told the Times. "The

hacker got into the storeroom." Snowden has said he took a job as an

infrastructure analyst with Booz Allen Hamilton in

order to gather evidence on the NSA's

surveillance program. He prepared his resume

touting his hacking skills shortly before applying

for that job, while he was working for the NSA with Dell, according to

the Times.