Some of us may have already assumed this, but according to a report from NBC News, sources in the intelligence community have confirmed that Edward Snowden abused his privileges as an administrator and used the credentials of others with higher security clearance to access documents.
Edward Snowden accessed some secret national security documents by assuming the electronic identities of top NSA officials, said intelligence sources. [...]
The NSA has already identified several instances where Snowden borrowed someone else’s user profile to access documents, said the official.
Each user profile on NSAnet includes a level of security clearance that determines what files the user can access. Like most NSA employees and contractors, Snowden had a “top secret” security clearance, meaning that under his own user profile he could access many classified documents. But some higher level NSA officials have higher levels of clearance that give them access to the most sensitive documents.
For him to abuse his administrative privileges to impersonate others with higher clearance runs contradictory to his initial claims that anyone could do what he did and more.