There have been hints throughout the media and various releases that a second Snowden may be lurking at the NSA. Whether he/she is still employed at the agency is the remaining question.

With the recent leak of NSA (TAO) Tailored Access Operations tools being auctioned on the internet by a group calling itself The Shadow Brokers and Snowden making a cryptic call to action
just mere weeks prior, are we witnessing the beginning of a major operation to expose secret hacking practices and cyber weapon tools used to do so? Is someone trying to highlight how vulnerable software and hardware is to the NSA?

The release of the cyber equivalent of the Kraken was accompanied by a message in broken English and an auction of the tools that the Shadow Brokers group calls "Cyber weapons."

The hack raises many questions but the obvious is – if it was state sponsored by Russia as the media has insisted, why auction the tools? Additionally if Wikileaks has the tools maybe the auction was a promotional thing and not legitimate.

The existence of a second Snowden-type leaker at the NSA has been hinted at before. Glenn Greenwald of The Intercept, the journalist and original reporter of Snowden's files, has even said that there is a second Edward Snowden to Snowden himself in the documentary Citizen Four.

In October 2014, the FBI raided the home of the suspected second Snowden, who is presumed to have leaked how the U.S. puts people on suspected terrorist watch-lists, a classified 166-page document that was given to the intercept August 2014.