Chris Strohm, Bloomberg: “Edward Snowden could have been thwarted from leaking classified U.S. documents if the National Security Agency encrypted the information to make it unreadable, two former senior cybersecurity officials said. Snowden would have needed a digital key to decipher the secrets after gaining access to them if the data was scrambled, Ira “Gus” Hunt, former chief technology officer for the Central Intelligence Agency, and Howard Schmidt, a former U.S. cybersecurity coordinator, said in interviews yesterday at a conference in San Francisco…Snowden, a systems administrator working for NSA contractor Booz Allen Hamilton Holding Corp. (BAH), probably would have been exposed if he’d tried to get decryption keys, they said. “We have to get to the point where the data itself, independent from the systems, is appropriately protected everywhere all the time,” said Hunt, who left the CIA in October and is on the advisory board at eSentire Inc., a Cambridge, Ontario-based security software company.”