A report this afternoon has confirmed suspicions that NSA leaker Edward Snowden has taken steps to make his trove of NSA documents available to others in the event “anything happens” to him, in an effort to insure that any information he hopes to see disclosed will still be published.
From The Daily Beast:
Glenn Greenwald, the Guardian Newspaper journalist Snowden first contacted in February, told the Daily Beast Tuesday that Snowden “has taken extreme precautions to make sure many different people around the world have these archives to insure the stories will inevitably be published.” Greenwald added that the people in possession of these files “cannot access them yet because they are highly encrypted and they do not have the passwords.” But, Greenwald said, “if anything happens at all to Edward Snowden, he told me he has arranged for them to get access to the full archives.”
The fact that Snowden has made digital copies of the documents he accessed while working at the NSA poses a new challenge to the U.S. intelligence community that has scrambled in recent days to recover them and assess the full damage of the breach. Even if U.S. authorities catch up with Snowden and the four classified laptops the Guardian Newspaper reported he brought with him to Hong Kong the secrets Snowden hopes to expose will still likely be published.
A former U.S. counter-intelligence officer following the Snowden saga closely said his contacts inside the U.S. intelligence community “think Snowden has been planning this for years and has stashed files all over the internet.” This source added, “At this point there is very little anyone can do about this.”
On Monday, Hong Kong’s South China Morning Post revealed that Snowden sought his NSA contractor position with Booz Allen Hamilton specifically for the purpose of gathering evidence on the agency’s surveillance programs. The former NSA contractor told the paper that “his intention was to collect information about the NSA hacking into “the whole world” and “not specifically Hong Kong and China.” Snowden also hinted at possessing more documents that could be leaked at a later date.
If I have time to go through this information, I would like to make it available to journalists in each country to make their own assessment, independent of my bias, as to whether or not the knowledge of US network operations against their people should be published.
In a live Q&A session that Snowden did with The Guardian on June 17th, Greenwald asked Snowden, “How many sets of the documents you disclosed did you make, and how many different people have them? If anything happens to you, do they still exist?” Snowden responded:
All I can say right now is the US Government is not going to be able to cover this up by jailing or murdering me. Truth is coming, and it cannot be stopped.
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Comments
“I aim to misbehave.” – Mal Reynolds
Hell ya.
You can’t stop the signal
To all those who think that Snowden is a “hero,” you might start to think otherwise.
I’m with the Prof’s original impression that he is what he appears to be and that’s significantly less than any hero status..
Well if you want to make this about him, of course he’s not a “hero”. If you focus on what he reported about NSA data collection on American citizens, you tend not to get bogged down in the personalities involved.
He’s not a hero or a villain. He’s a naive young man who didn’t think this through very thoroughly and now is stuck between a rock and a hard place. Instead of debating the man, why in the hell aren’t conservatives focusing on the NSA?
^THIS>
I wonder when Mandy is going to post comprehensive material on the NSA, PRISM, Clapper, tech giants, and all around spying and lying by the US government.
But, keep plucking that chicken..
He’s a spy…
he’s a hero..
he’s a spy..
he’s a hero..
Someday you’ll get to that last feather.
THIS ^
I have a mental image of folks counting pinhead angels.
The Telegraph has a blog on the ramifications for US IT . No one will be trusting them for storage etc .
Why not just put all your data one a thumb & just send it to the NSA in a paper package with a greeting card ?
What was that “Too Many Secrets” movie? Oh yeah, Sneakers.
Most of us, chilled by the idea of the government reading emails and texts *as we type them*, wonder exactly what are NSA’s abilities. Being scientific minded, I decided to simply test it. So, I typed out an email:
“Dear Chinese embassy officials, My name is Henry Hawkins and I am a current CIA employee with inside information I’m certain you’d be interested in. Call me at 1-252-555-2935.”
I made sure I had the correct email address, hit ‘send’, and sat back waiting for the black helicopter to swoop in and kidna
Really, there’s a trustworthy trustee somewhere in possession of encryption passwords and how to access docs? I’d say they already are “released”.
This is starting to smell a bit like Wikileaks.
Add to that the fact that the NSA said he was some low level puke who broke into their systems to get the information and I’m pretty confident that just about everyone BUT the citizens of the USA had this information.
There are still conservatives who believe he’s a hero?
Well, there are still conservatives who think he’s the story.
Super Duper double secret secrets revealed!
The Chinese, Russians, Cubans…um…all of our (non)enemies had no idea the NSA was spying on them until Snowden told them!
al Qaida, islamic terror groups, the world over, had no idea we would actually intercept their electronic communications until Snowden told them!
Spying on the American people? All of them? All of the time?
Hell, everyone already knew that! What’s the big deal?
I imagine the Chinese and Russian wouldn’t dream of spying on us, right?
Plan A+: send in the navy seals and do an Osama on Snowden.
To Moscow.? How do you plan to get them there?
Obama might get a swap if he just hands over one of those helicopters – make it 3 . It would save having to get them outed & targeted 3 months later.
I previously opted that he is no lone wolf. It is a wider effort either –
A Fabianesque informal grouping of like minded travellers ( young IT geeks) or a full insurgency by one part of the Intelligence community against the new steroided security agencies or vice versa.
If We knew exactly what the CIA were doing in Benghazi then we might have an idea .
Something is rotten in The Secret Kingdom .
You mean the NSA missed Snowden’s emails to Assange?
Wow, people just want to accept the claims of Snowden and Greenwald at face value, don’t they? But what have they actually released so far?
There is a FISA Court warrant, a bunch of claims about other things which may or may not be true, and information about intercepts outside the USA, which no one serious should question the legality of – but the release of which has nothing to do with US citizens’ rights and everything to do with damaging US national security.
Greenwald, known liar and self-promoting leftist who hates anything which promotes America’s security, and an unknown agent whose first thoughts were to contact Greenwald and Wikileaks and flee to China, Russia, or Cuba. Really?
So you believe these guys, and Mike Rogers and the rest of the Republicans with top security clearance are in on the big conspiracy? Really?
Okay. Believe what you want. Maybe you will even find a Bilderberger in the woodpile somewhere.
I am waiting to see what else Snowden has. Obama hasn’t called either the Chinese or Putin about extradition. His administratio botched the extradition papers to Hong Kong. How seriouly does obama want Snowden brought back to the US? Hopefully, Snowden has something on obama. He did say all the way up to the president. As far as I am concerned Snowden is irrelevant. Neither a hero nor a villan. And those of you who say everyone knew about NSA spying and retaining those records are full of it. NSA said in the beginning that if any private citizen’s information was inadvertly accessed, it was deleted. Don’t kid yourselves. Obama is the one who ramped up the spying.