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OREM — It's not often you get a story like that of Edward Snowden: a man coming forward out of obscurity to rat on the National Security Agency and its once super-secret surveillance programs.
In fact, it's extremely rare considering there are reportedly more than 850,000 contract workers operating with top-secret clearance in the United States.
Beyond the raw numbers and probabilities, Trent Leavitt, a computer forensics technologist who was a contract worker with the FBI for two years, said the system is geared against whistle-blowers.
Related:
US spy programs raise ire both home and abroad
The Obama administration faced fresh anger Monday at home and abroad over U.S. spy programs that track phone and Internet messages. The programs causing the uproar were revealed by Edward Snowden, an employee of a government contractor, who requested his identity be revealed and then fled to Hong Kong in hopes of escaping criminal charges."Once someone obtains that top-secret clearance, it's not something you want to let lapse or have taken away from you," said Leavitt, co-founder of Decipher Forensics in Orem.
Leavitt himself never had top-secret clearance, though he became familiar with the process through his dealings for with the federal government. He described a grueling background check where one to two FBI agents would drill into workers' histories.
"Typically, [it takes] 40 to 60 hours worth of work for one or two FBI agents," Leavitt said. "They're actually physically sending out people to your former high school, to your college, to your former employers to talk to people that you've worked with, find out your personality, find out what you're like."
Leavitt said contract workers who work on top-secret projects also must undergo a psychiatric evaluation.
In the end, if federal agents discover something they don't like, Leavitt said agencies will respond back to the contract companies that they don't want those individuals involved in the top-secret work.
Government contractor Trent Leavitt, of Utah County, said he doesn't believe the government was being misleading in simply stating it was after "metadata" from people's calls and electronic transactions.
"They're trying to downplay it and it shouldn't be downplayed at all," he said.
By definition, metadata is "data about data." Leavitt said it includes not only call durations and who was called, but GPS coordinates from where those calls were placed and received.
"You're text messages have metadata to them. Pretty much anything on your phone has back-end information. That back-end information is the metadata," Leavitt said. "There's a lot of information there they can gather about a person or an organization."
"You want people that would consider themselves ‘patriots,' I guess you could say, that are there to work for the better cause," Leavitt said.
Snowden fled to Hong Kong after divulging details of the secretive PRISM program. If ever caught and extradited, it's believed he could face numerous charges. Opinions varied across different websites and reports Monday as to whether Snowden had effectively escaped the grasp of U.S. authorities.
Additionally, beyond the possible criminal penalties for divulging classified information, Leavitt said contract workers are required to sign confidentiality agreements. Leavitt said he had to with the FBI, despite not having as high of clearance as other workers.
"It's a … ‘If you talk about what we're doing here, talk about the cases you're working on, then you're going to be stuck with a lawsuit that'll probably take the rest of your life to settle,' " he said.
