Former CIA and NSA employee source of intelligence leaks

[merithyn]

Smart man to leave the US before outing himself, but I have a hard time believing that there is anywhere he can really go where he won't be extradited.

LINK

A 29-year-old former undercover CIA employee said Sunday that he was the principal source of recent disclosures about top-secret National Security Agency programs, exposing himself to possible prosecution in an acknowledgment that had little if any precedent in a long history of U.S. intelligence leaks.

Edward Snowden, a tech specialist who has also contracted for the NSA and works for the consulting firm Booz Allen Hamilton, unmasked himself as a source after a string of stories in The Washington Post and the Guardian that detailed previously unknown U.S. surveillance programs. He said he disclosed secret documents in response to what he described as the systematic surveillance of innocent citizens.

Graphic

NSA slides explain the PRISM data-collection program
Timeline of surveillance


A timeline of surveillance in the United States from 2001 to 2013: from the Patriot Act to the PRISM program.
Special Report
Ex-CIA worker says he's the source of the NSA leaks

Aaron Blake, Barton Gellman and Greg Miller 5:20 PM ET
Edward Snowden, a 29-year-old Booz Allen Hamilton employee, says he's "done nothing wrong" in leaks of the government's surveillance programs.
Government, companies argue that surveillance is lawful, limited

Robert O'Harrow Jr., Ellen Nakashima and Barton Gellman JUN 8
U.S. officials and Internet firms say there was no unlimited access or data mining of company servers.
Obama, welcome to Bush territory

Greg Miller JUN 8
Defending his counterterror tactics, the president finds himself in a situation similar to his predecessor's.
Surveillance programs renew debate about oversight

Robert Barnes, Timothy B. Lee and Ellen Nakashima JUN 8
Can the kind of transparent oversight Americans expect exist with efforts to keep them safe?
Feinstein: NSA programs thwarted plots in New York, Mumbai
Aaron Blake 9:43 AM ET
Senate Intelligence Committee Chairwoman Dianne Feisntein (D-Calif.) said Sunday that the Obama Administration's recently revealed surveillance programs have thwarted two major terrorist plots.

In an interview Sunday, Snowden said he was willing to face the consequences of exposure.

"I'm not going to hide," Snowden told The Post from Hong Kong, where he has been staying. "Allowing the U.S. government to intimidate its people with threats of retaliation for revealing wrongdoing is contrary to the public interest."

Asked whether he believed his disclosures would change anything, he said: "I think they already have. Everyone everywhere now understands how bad things have gotten — and they're talking about it. They have the power to decide for themselves whether they are willing to sacrifice their privacy to the surveillance state."

Snowden said nobody had been aware of his actions, including those closest to him. He said there wasn't a single event that spurred his decision to leak the information, but he said President Obama has failed to live up to his pledges of transparency.

"My sole motive is to inform the public as to that which is done in their name and that which is done against them," he said in a note that accompanied the first document he leaked to The Post.

The Guardian was the first to publicly identify Snowden, at his request.

The White House said late Sunday that it wouldn't have any comment on the matter.

In a brief statement, a spokesman for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence said the intelligence community is "reviewing the damage" that the leaks have done. "Any person who has a security clearance knows that he or she has an obligation to protect classified information and abide by the law," said the spokesman, Shawn Turner.

Snowden said he is seeking "asylum from any countries that believe in free speech and oppose the victimization of global privacy," but the law appears to provide for his extradition from Hong Kong, a semiautonomous territory of China, to the United States.

Although any extradition proceeding could take months or even years, experts said Snowden has not put himself in a favorable position.

"The fact that he outed himself and basically said, from what I understand he has said, 'I feel very comfortable with what I have done' . . . that's not going to help him in his extradition contest," said Douglas McNabb, an extradition expert.

The Justice Department said it was in the "initial stages of an investigation" into the unauthorized disclosure of classified information but declined to comment further.

[11B4V]

Maybe it needed to be leaked.

[Grey Fox]

China is a good place to start.

[Sheilbh]

I think he's pretty brave and it may be a justified leak, but from everything I've read I entirely support what the US government is doing. I assumed it's what they were doing anyway and I think it'd be a far greater scandal if they weren't.

Full interview here:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/09/edward-snowden-nsa-whistleblower-surveillance

[Neil]

He might be alright, so long as he doesn't go around raping everything in sight like Asange.

[Admiral Yi]

Anyone know anything about PRISM?

[Iormlund]

I think he's pretty brave and it may be a justified leak, but from everything I've read I entirely support what the US government is doing. I assumed it's what they were doing anyway and I think it'd be a far greater scandal if they weren't.

...

[merithyn]

Anyone know anything about PRISM?

Per the WSJ article here:

We've also learned through some very sketchy reporting about another NSA program code-named Prism. This appears to be an adaptation of the Bush-era program that intercepted foreign-to-foreign calls that happened to pass through U.S. switching networks. Mr. Obama says it is only aimed at foreigners. Prism appears to be designed to retrieve foreign communications like emails and digital files from major technology companies.

[Zanza]

I think he's pretty brave and it may be a justified leak, but from everything I've read I entirely support what the US government is doing. I assumed it's what they were doing anyway and I think it'd be a far greater scandal if they weren't.

No, it would not be a bigger scandal if the US government actually upheld its constitution.

[merithyn]

No, it would not be a bigger scandal if the US government actually upheld its constitution.

No fucking shit.

[Neil]

And that's the problem with written constitutions.  They're full of such ancient garbage that it becomes impossible to uphold them in a modern, civilized state.

[Warspite]

Doesn't Hong Kong have an extradition treaty with the US?

[Tamas]

I have only started browsing the articles at the Guardian, but FFS! All the paranoid shit people were accounting governments with in terms of surveillance (and I used to tell is BS), is not just actually possible, but also being done!

97 billion log entries on their computer surveillance thing from March of this year alone.


I know it was Bush's Patriot Act which let this happen, but either the current administration begins some cleansing and revoking these Patrio Actish privileges, or democracy indeed will be in serious danger.


I mean, by this, it doesn't seem far-fetched that for an average citizen who is not hiding behind anonym IP addresses and shit, their entire life can be mapped out by doing a search for their IP address in these massive logs these fuckers are keeping.

And the rest of it.

Shit.

[Tamas]

Also the dude who leaked it told the Guardian how he worries that he would become the face of the whole thing, stealing focus from actual content, and that is already happening.

I mean, look at the US edition of cnn. com (on the international one, it is just a sideissue). Huge fucking pic and letters: GUY WHO LEAKED NSA STUFF IS IN HONG KONG
Then, tincy-wincy links on the NSA sub-page points you to pages where it is explained why this whole surveilance thing is business and usual and no cause for worry.

What. The. Fuck.

[Monoriu]

Doesn't Hong Kong have an extradition treaty with the US?

Yes, we do.