Edward Snowden's bland job title hid his real power

Intelligence officials refer to Edward Snowden's job as a National Security Agency contractor as "systems administrator" - a bland name for the specialists who keep the computers humming. But his last job before leaking classified documents about NSA surveillance, he told The Guardian, was actually "infrastructure analyst".

It is a title officials have avoided mentioning, perhaps for fear of inviting questions about the agency's aggressive tactics: an infrastructure analyst at the NSA, like a burglar casing an apartment building, looks for new ways to break into internet and phone traffic around the world.

That assignment helps explain how Snowden got hold of documents laying bare the top-secret capabilities of the nation's largest intelligence agency, setting off a far-reaching political and diplomatic crisis for the Obama administration.

Some congressmen have challenged the NSA's collection of logs of nearly every phone call Americans make, and European officials have protested furiously after Snowden's disclosure that the NSA has bugged European Union offices in Washington and Brussels and, with its British counterpart, tapped the continent's major fibre-optic communications cables.

Snowden, who planned his leaks for at least a year, has said he took the infrastructure analyst position with Booz Allen Hamilton in Hawaii in March, evidently taking a pay cut, to gain access to a fresh supply of documents.

"My position with Booz Allen Hamilton granted me access to lists of machines all over the world the NSA hacked," he told the South China Morning Post before leaving Hong Kong for Moscow, where he has been in limbo in the transit area of Sheremetyevo Airport. "That is why I accepted that position about three months ago."