Snowden backers say U.S. exaggerates actions’ effects
WASHINGTON — Whistleblower or traitor, leaker or public hero?
National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden blew the lid off U.S. government surveillance methods five years ago, but intelligence chiefs complain that revelations from the trove of classified documents he disclosed are still trickling out.
That includes recent reporting on a mass surveillance program run by close U.S. ally Japan and on how the NSA targeted bitcoin users to gather intelligence on counterterrorism, narcotics and money laundering — both stories published by The Intercept, an investigative publication with access to Snowden docu- ments.
The top U.S. counterintelligence official said journalists have publicly released only about 1 percent taken by the 34-year-old American, now living in exile in Russia, “so we don’t see this issue ending anytime soon.”
“This past year, we had more international, Snowden-related documents and breaches than ever,” Bill Evanina, who directs the National Counterintelligence and Security Center, said at a recent conference. “Since 2013, whenSnowden left, there have been thousands of articles around the world with really sensitive stuff that’s been leaked.”
In 2013, The Guardian in Britain published the first story based on Snowden’s disclosures. It revealed that a secret court order was allowing the U.S. government to get Verizon to share the phone records of millions of Americans. Later stories, including those in The Washington Post, disclosed other snooping and how U.S. and British spy agencies had accessed information from cables carrying the world’s telephone and internet traffic.
Snowden’s defenders maintain that the U.S. government has for years exaggerated the damage his disclosures caused. Glenn Greenwald, a former journalist at The Guardian, said there are “thousands upon thousands of documents” that journalists have chosen not to publish because they would harm peoples’ reputation or privacy rights or because it would expose “legitimate surveillance programs.”