Imperial Valley Press

US experts fallout from Snowden leaks for years to come

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WASHINGTON (AP) — 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 to combat narcotics and money laundering.

The Intercept, an investigat­ive publicatio­n with access to Snowden documents, published stories on both subjects.

The top U.S. counterint­elligence official said journalist­s have 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, when Snowden left, there have been thousands of articles around the world with really sensitive stuff that’s been leaked.”

On June 5, 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, an Intercept co-founder and 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.” “It’s been almost five years since newspapers around the world began reporting on the Snowden archive and the NSA has offered all kinds of shrill and reckless rhetoric about the ‘damage’ it has caused, but never any evidence of a single case of a life being endangered let alone harmed,” Greenwald said.

 ??  ?? In this file image made from video released by WikiLeaks on 2013, former National Security Agency systems analyst Edward Snowden speaks in Moscow. AP PHOTO
In this file image made from video released by WikiLeaks on 2013, former National Security Agency systems analyst Edward Snowden speaks in Moscow. AP PHOTO

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