Snowden's escape from the NSA exposed two things: 1) illegal kleptocratic behaviour on part of the government 2) gross security incompetence on part of the government. The NSA has spent all its time on #1 up until now, so they're going to hype him up as much as possible so as to diminish the embarrassment from #2.
> He wasn't just a community college stooge, he was brilliant! The obscure flaw that he exploited has since been fixed, hooray too!
Meanwhile 'sudo su' has been criminalized as a precaution.
sudo vim means vim gets root privileges. Meaning vim can do anything it wants if it's bugged or somehow compromised. Not likely on an otherwie secure system but not impossible.
sudoedit (according to the manpage) makes a copy of the file first, lets your editor edit it, then copies back when you're done -- so even a compromised editor couldn't do much damage beyond corrupting the given file.
> He wasn't just a community college stooge, he was brilliant! The obscure flaw that he exploited has since been fixed, hooray too!
Meanwhile 'sudo su' has been criminalized as a precaution.