"These people seemed to be more like company worker bees rather than free-spirited computer hackers," he said.
In an age when terabytes of data can be stashed inside palm-size devices, the new details about Mr. Snowden's training and assignments underscore the challenges that the N.S.A. faces in recruiting a new generation of free-spirited computer experts with diverse political views.
The thieves then spirited that information away to computers in the United States, Latvia and Ukraine.
Buying a computer that can be spirited away in a briefcase or backpack no longer requires a big sacrifice in performance, storage or money.
When Martin Campbell, the director of "Casino Royale," made "GoldenEye," in 1995, the outcome was spirited enough, but it also felt stupidly grand, all wall-size computer screens and electromagnetic pulses fired from space.
Arar, 34, a computer engineer who was born in Lebanon, says he was spirited by U.S. authorities to Syria in 2002 and underwent repeated torture while held there for nearly a year.
Police handcuffed employees and confiscated computers, but they never found Kent's head Alcor had spirited it off to an "undisclosed location," as the Los Angeles Times put it.
Should the computer crash or be turned off by the energy-wise user or be spirited off to the office or the beach, no one would have access to the data.
Details of the HSBC Switzerland accounts were spirited into France by a whistleblower, Hervé Falciani, who had worked on upgrading the bank's computer systems.
The Scouts' spirited founder.
