Edward Snowden, the resident bad boy of the US government has finally answered the question we’ve been harbouring ever since this whole NSA palaver began; what happens when the team come across people’s naked sexy time pictures?
Obviously, they’re totally professional and treat them exactly like any other piece of information right? Yeah, kind of, except for, according to Snowden, it's the exact opposite.
In an interview with The Guardian today, the whistleblower claims that;
‘Many of the people searching through the haystacks were young, enlisted guys and … 18 to 22 years old. They’ve suddenly been thrust into a position of extraordinary responsibility where they now have access to all your private records. In the course of their daily work they stumble across something that is completely unrelated to their work, for example an intimate nude photo of someone in a sexually compromising situation but they’re extremely attractive.’
Obviously this is where the whole professionalism thing comes in right? Wrong.
‘So what do they do? They turn around in their chair and they show a co-worker. And their co-worker says: “Oh, hey, that’s great. Send that to Bill down the way.” And then Bill sends it to George, George sends it to Tom and sooner or later this person’s whole life has been seen by all of these other people.’
Cooool. Good to know…
Don’t worry too much, we’re guessing the NSA probably don’t spend that much time looking through the email boxes of the likes of us unless they’re looking for unopened Groupon offers or an endless chain of emails with our ex-landlord over the fact that yes we’re very sorry we thought toothpaste was an acceptable alternative to polyfiller but we’ve leanred our lesson and please could we have our security deposit back please? Might just ease up on the old naked selfies anyways though, just in case.
Follow Jess on Twitter @jess_commons
This article originally appeared on The Debrief.