Like millions of Americans, I watched Edward Snowden’s interview with Brian Williams on ABC last night. This was the first time the intelligence analyst cum whistleblower did a public interview on television, and one of the only handful of interviews that Snowden has done with the press in general.

As someone who also worked in cybersecurity with the US government (and even hired Snowden’s previous employer Booz Allen Hamilton a few times), I’m incredibly conflicted on how I feel about Snowden. This interview didn’t really change any of those complex feelings. In fact, it sort of made me feel even more conflicted.

On one hand I’m like most Americans in that I’m upset at the frighteningly broad and intrusive nature of NSA domestic spying. I agree with Snowden that most of this spying has probably been counter to security, and that effecitvely becoming a cyber police state is counter to the principles of democracy and the constitution.

But on the other hand, I’m not sure how altruistic Snowden’s intentions really were. Snowden played his interview extraordinarily well, but dodged critical questions such as whether or not he leaked classified military or national intelligence information to Russian intelligence agents. He came off with a suave and practiced demeanor which allowed him to field Brian Williams’ questions elegantly well, but his emphasis that he’s a selfless “patroit” felt haughty and almost arrogant.

If Snowden really felt leaking all of this information was his last recourse in order to render positive change in the US intelligence community, so be it. But if he did all of this for narcissistic glory (an image frequently attributed to Wikileaks’ Julian Assange), I’d find that incredibly dubious and unethical to say the least.

Regardless, there were some very interesting revelations that Edward Snowden unveiled regarding the NSA’s domestic spying capabilities. Here’s my reaction to some of the key points Snowden made in his hour long interview:

Edward Snowden was trained as a spy

TL;DR verdict: Total BS.

Snowden in his interview stated that he was trained as a spy during his time working on project with DISA and NSA, complete with cover identity.

“I was trained as a spy in sort of the traditional sense of the word — in that I lived and worked undercover, overseas, pretending to work in a job that I’m not — and even being assigned a name that was not mine,” Snowden said.

First of all, if Snowden was sticking to a cover identity while working as a Booz Allen Hamilton employee I’m sure the only training he’d get is the mandatory result of an HR referral regarding creepy behavior. While Snowden held an extremely high level clearence and was no doubt privy to extremely sensitive information, there’s literally no reason he would have had to maintain a cover identity.

Four years ago I hired a team from Booz Allen Hamilton to help my group at NetApp conduct our yearly Common Criteria certification (a necessity for most IT vendors selling into the US government). Many of those individuals were ex-military SIGINT (signals intelligence) or intelligence community, and all of them held Snowden’s level of clearence.

But rather than give me a cover identity, we spoke openly to each other and gave each other names. Hell, a few of them are even contacts of mine on LinkedIn. If one of them tried to give me a cover ID, I probably would have fired Booz on the spot for being disingenuous and untrustworthy, thereby denying them a lot of expensive afterwork.

Even within the military and national intelligence community, Snowden’s “cover story” training makes no sense. One of my best friends left Silicon Valley to be a PM in DARPA a few years ago, and despite holding a Top Secret+ level clearence our last dinner in New York together didn’t involve her telling me to call her something ridiculous like “Jane Doe.”

When I directly worked with members of the US military — including officers who worked inside Snowden’s prior consultant project DISA — there were no cover stories employed or even necessary.

The closest thing I could see Snowden’s story coming to is in the conduct of how some NSA cryptoanlaysts work. Like other members of the infosec community, I’ve had a chance to talk to members of the NSA in the course of my work. Some very high level, sensitive folks will occasionally decline to give you their name during sensitive meetings and instead go by “John Doe” or some other pseudonym. But other than the awkwardness of having to reference a group of “John Does” there’s nothing James Bond-y about any of this.

Being what we would consider a secret agent requires an extensive amount of training, none of which Snowden would have had while being outside of the Directorate of National Intelligence (or DNI — the group responsible for human intelligence and direct action work within the US intelligence organization) much less even the US government.

Plainly put, if Snowden’s a spy I’m a NAVY SEAL. And I’m no NAVY SEAL. My mile time alone will tell you that #fail.

The NSA can monitor all mobile data transferred through the US

TL;DR verdict: Probably true

During his interview, Snowden revealed that the NSA is easily able to granularly harvest information about US citizens through their smartphones. According to Snowden, “any country — the US, Russia, China — with sufficient means can use your [mobile traffic] to learn a lot about you.”

This is almost certainly true.

First, doing something like studying someone’s online traffic is a relatively trivial hack so long as you have access to an insecure network. I’m using an old loaner laptop from my work to write this blog post at a Starbucks in SoMA. But because of the Atheros chipset wifi card on my laptop, I could boot up linux and run Wireshark and watch all unencrypted traffic on the network.

Not only would this include the packets I’m sending to write this post (something Snowden referenced in his interview as “watching the stream of consciousness” of private citizens), it could also include sensitive content such as emails and instant messenger conversations. If you connect to a public wifi network and don’t use encryption like SSL, your internet traffic is fair game.

Things get slightly more complicated if you’re communicating over 3G or LTE instead of Wifi. But many cell phone networks are very vulnerable to cryptoanalytic attack.

GSM, for example, uses the very outdated A5/1 encryption algorithm to protect traffic. A5/1 is easily broken nowadays thanks to research that was released in the mid-2000s. To quote the abstract of Elad Barkan, Eli Biham, and Nathan Keller’s landmark paper on the topic:

Unlike previous attacks on GSM that require unrealistic information, like long known plaintext periods, our attacks are very practical and do not require any knowledge of the content of the conversation. Furthermore, we describe how to fortify the attacks to withstand reception errors. As a result, our attacks allow attackers to tap conversations and decrypt them either in real-time, or at any later time.

But the NSA doesn’t even need to decrypt GSM messages because, well, they have access to the pipe in the first place. Thanks to lawsuits filed by the EFF it’s now public knowledge that NSA is given access to telecom traffic by domestic telcos via splitters such as the now infamous Room 641. This allows them the same kind of unrestricted acccess to domestic cell networks like I have to the AT&T Wifi connection at the Starbucks I’m sitting at.

Edward Snowden watches old Netflix episodes of The Wire

TL;DR verdict: Nice job.

Seriously, great show. Best in TV history arguably.