Edward Snowden has popped up again, this time nuzzling an American flag on the cover of Wired. In the accompanying story by James Bamford, Snowden again shares the reasons he decided to steal and leak documents from the N.S.A., and reveals a few new tidbits.

The juiciest of those new revelations pertains to Syria, a country from which Snowden says the United States government was keen to gain more information—through expectedly nefarious means.

Here’s Bamford’s description of an N.S.A. mistake that allegedly cut an entire country off from the Internet:

One day an intelligence officer told him that TAO—a division of NSA hackers—had attempted in 2012 to remotely install an exploit in one of the core routers at a major Internet service provider in Syria, which was in the midst of a prolonged civil war. This would have given the NSA access to email and other Internet traffic from much of the country. But something went wrong, and the router was bricked instead—rendered totally inoperable. The failure of this router caused Syria to suddenly lose all connection to the Internet—although the public didn't know that the US government was responsible.

(It’s worth noting the obvious here, which is that if a foreign operation cut off the entire United States from the Internet, there would be hell to pay, and the effect on the economy would likely be massive.)

This type of ham-fisted attempt at conducting surveillance without regard for collateral civilian monitoring—or explicitly targeting civilians—has come to characterize the N.S.A. revealed in reporting resulting from the Snowden cache of documents.

Nor is it hard to believe that the N.S.A., after goofing its attempt at installing a back-end hack on all of Syria, was reportedly “powerless” to fix it. The N.S.A. has repeatedly admitted it doesn’t even know how many documents Snowden took, and Snowden vigorously has disputed other N.S.A. claims. Snowden told Wired that he left the agency hints that he hoped it would notice, so that officials could be sure to contain any collateral damage as a result of disclosures. According to one of Snowden’s lawyers, they did not spot the “bread crumbs.”

(Another humorous example: the government claims he cheated on a technical employment test. “Of course I didn’t cheat on the exam, although I’d argue being able to hack a hacking examination probably makes you more, not less, qualified for the job,” Snowden told Vanity Fair in an extended interview for the May issue. “This is just another artifact of a failed investigation, and I’m not sure why they trumpet it.”)