NSA leaker Edward Snowden “has had, and continues to have, contact with Russian intelligence services” since his arrival in Moscow, a declassified report released on Thursday by the House Intelligence Committee alleges.
While some of the report, and much of its footnotes, remains heavily redacted, Thursday’s release highlights a number of claims about the former contractor’s actions in the run-up to the leak and the disclosure’s subsequent impact. The committee had previously issued a three-page executive summary of the classified report in September, following a two-year inquiry into Snowden’s actions.
Snowden, the highly critical report says, was not a whistleblower, but instead a disgruntled employee who is a serial exaggerator and fabricator. The committee also concluded that the “vast majority of documents” Snowden removed were “unrelated to electronic surveillance or any issues associated with privacy and civil liberties.”
Snowden, a contractor with Booz Allen Hamilton at the time he fled the United States, created a firestorm by the leak of information revealing NSA’s data mining program. He told The Guardian in 2013 that he “carefully evaluated every single document I disclosed to ensure that each was legitimately in the public interest.”
In addition to surveillance programs impacting American citizens’ privacy, the leaked documents also detailed information on U.S. monitoring of foreign heads of states’ phone calls, Chinese cyber espionage, and the existence of surveillance programs in other countries. The Intelligence Committee’s report states that most of what Snowden took relates to U.S. military, defense, and intelligence programs.
In the wake of Snowden’s disclosure in 2013, the committee also found that NSA and the intelligence community as a whole have not made enough changes to reduce the risk of another incident.
The report notes that a recent Pentagon review identified 13 “high-risk issues” related to Snowden’s leak. “If the Russian or Chinese governments have access to this information, American troops will be at greater risk in any future conflict,” the report said.
The section in the report alleging Snowden’s connection to Russian intelligence cites classified information to support its claim. In a recent interview with Yahoo’s Katie Couric, Snowden said that he gave Russian officials “the stiff-arm” in 2013, and since then “they have left me alone, for the most part.”
Snowden knocked the report’s findings on Thursday, writing in a series of tweets that it ignores his previous criticisms of Kremlin policies and claims “without evidence I'm in cahoots with Russian intel. Everyone knows this is false.”
The former contractor is currently living in Moscow under an asylum arrangement in the wake of his release to media of the trove of NSA documents. According to the report, “it is likely that even Snowden does not know the full contents of all 1.5 million documents he removed.”
“One thing that is clear is that the IC documents disclosed in public are merely the tip of the iceberg,” the declassified report stated. “As of August 19, 2016, press outlets had published or referenced [redacted] taken by Snowden. This represents less than one-tenth of one percent of the nearly 1.5 million documents the IC assesses Snowden removed.”
Intelligence Committee Chair Devin Nunes said in a statement that “it will take a long time to mitigate the damage he caused, and I look forward to the day when he returns to the United States to face justice.” And ranking member Adam Schiff noted that “Snowden and his defenders claim that he is a whistleblower, but he isn't, as the Committee's review shows.”
“Most of the material he stole had nothing to do with Americans’ privacy, and its compromise has been of great value to America's adversaries and those who mean to do America harm. Whistleblowers are important to proper oversight and we will protect them from retaliation, and those who engage in civil disobedience are willing to stay and face the consequences,” Schiff said.
Snowden’s lawyer Ben Wizner, who also directs the ACLU’s Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project, weighed in on Twitter, calling the report “petulant nonsense.”
According to the newly declassified report, the committee’s investigation “found no evidence that Snowden attempted to communicate concerns about the legality or morality of intelligence activities to any officials, senior or otherwise, during his time at either CIA or NSA.”
“As a legal matter, during his time with NSA, Edward Snowden did not use whistleblower procedures under either law or regulation to raise his objections to U.S. intelligence activities, and thus, is not considered a whistleblower under current law,” the report states.
Mackenzie Weinger is a national security reporter at The Cipher Brief. Follow her on Twitter @mweinger.
For more on The Cipher Brief’s reporting on Snowden, see the two-part series on the third anniversary of the leaks, Snowden’s Impact Fades After Three Years & The Snowden Fact-Check, and read the exclusive interview with the man who was Snowden’s boss when he fled the United States.
