It doesn't mention anything about security. There's a backup system, and a web front-end. Whatever his work was, it was impressive enough to get him an invite to the Tailored Access Operations. Not all work at the NSA was cutting-edge encryption.
How did you miss that? the whole article speaks to his supposed security prowess:
* Snowden had been brought to Hawaii as a cybersecurity expert working for Dell’s services division but due to a problem with the contract was reassigned to become an administrator for the Microsoft intranet management system known as Sharepoint.
And the next sentence starts Impressed with his technical abilities, Snowden’s managers decided that he was the most qualified candidate to build a new web front-end So whatever he did that was impressive, it wasn't security-related.
How can you tell from that statement that his impressive act was 100% not security related.... All you can really say is that it wasn't necessarily security related.
Anyone building a web front-end needs to have a lot of security-related knowledge (implement https correctly, cross site scripting and other js vulnerabilities, sql injection, buffer overflows in your apps, etc.)
