Snowden leak ‘like giving Enigma secrets to Nazis’
EDWARD Snowden’s leak of top secret material was like telling the Nazis about the Enigma codebreaking project during the Second World War, a senior intelligence figure claims.
Chris Inglis, ex-deputy director of the US National Security Agency, said it was rebuilding its ability to track spies on the internet after Snowden ‘burnt the house down’ by leaking tens of thousands of classified files.
Snowden was a computer specialist at a US intelligence centre who tricked colleagues into revealing passwords so he could copy up to 1.7million files in one of the biggest leaks in US history.
He helped terrorists escape capture and assisted ‘rogue nations’ by revealing details of US and UK surveillance.
Mr Inglis compared the theft and leak of the documents to the impact on the war effort if the Nazis had been tipped off about the Allies’ knowledge of their Enigma machine, adding: ‘If we had made that plain and clear, we might have lost the battle of the North Atlantic. The effect is similar in this case.’
He said the Snowden leaks in 2013 ‘had a real and material’ impact on the fight against terrorism and the ability to spy on foreign countries, such as those involved in the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, and international criminal gangs.
Mr Inglis told The Times: ‘We did lose some of our terrorist targets and see much better tradecraft on the part of various rogue nations and other actors.
‘Snowden may have burnt the house down but we’ll get a better house. I don’t give any credit to the arson,’ he said.
NSA deputy director Richard Ledgett has said the number of targets who disappeared off the radar following Snowden’s leaks was in the ‘high hundreds’.
Following his betrayal, Snowden fled the US to live in Moscow.