I agree that most of the mockery is off-point, but there is a case to answer here.
By acknowledging that readers won’t understand the terminology, but never actually explaining any of it, they’ve robbed the piece of important context, and ultimately leave the reader with little understanding of what exactly took place. Without that, there’s no way for the reader to understand statements like the “hardly sophisticated” one you quoted.
The piece goes on at length about how "the process… was quite automated”. You and I say “duh, of course it was automated! He downloaded hundreds of thousands of documents!”. But you can’t argue that readers are unsophisticated enough to need scare quotes without simultaneously arguing that they’re unsophisticated enough to benefit from an explanation.
The article leaves the hypothetical layman reader out in the cold, and after reading the article they’ll be none the wiser about what Snowden actually did or how he pulled it off.
