Edward Snowden sits on his hotel-room bed, about to keystroke a password into his laptop. Without looking particularly sheepish about it, he drapes a blanket over his head and upper body, so he ...

Most of the focus surrounding former NSA analyst Edward Snowden has been regarding the actual information he leaked to the media, not on how these folks are actually doing that.

According to a senior intelligence official, Snowden used ordinary "web crawler" software typically used to search, index and back up a website.