By Fred Fleitz
Friday, September 16, 2016
At a time of extreme partisanship in our country and in
the midst of what may be the most contentious presidential election in U.S.
history, a congressional committee did something extraordinary: It issued a
bipartisan and unanimous report on an extremely divisive issue. This issue is
whether former National Security Agency technician Edward Snowden, who stole
1.5 million classified documents and leaked thousands to the news media, is a
true whistleblower or a traitor.
The report by the House Permanent Select Committee on
Intelligence (where I worked for five years) found what many of us have long
argued: Snowden is not a whistleblower; he is a disgruntled former intelligence
employee who did enormous damage to U.S. national security. Click here to read
the unclassified
summary of this report.
The House Intelligence Committee report could not be
better timed, having come out the day before the opening of Oliver Stone’s
hagiographic film Snowden and a new
campaign by liberal groups and the news media to persuade President Obama to
pardon Snowden for the contribution he supposedly made to the cause of
protecting civil liberties.
The five findings in the committee report’s unclassified
summary are stunning.
Snowden Caused
Tremendous Damage to National Security.
The vast majority of the documents he stole have nothing
to do with programs impacting individual privacy interests — they instead
pertain to military, defense, and intelligence programs of great interest to
America’s adversaries. Although many experts had already concluded this, the
report added that the U.S. government has spent at least hundreds of millions
of dollars and will eventually spend billions to counter the damage done by the
Snowden leaks.
The most well-known Snowden disclosure concerned the NSA
metadata program, which collects phone records but not the contents of phone calls.
Although this program has long been overseen by the congressional intelligence
committees and helped halt several terrorist attacks against the United States,
Snowden’s leaks about it led to a hysterical and uninformed reaction by the
press and some members of Congress that led Congress and President Obama to
implement major restrictions, which have made this program much more difficult
for intelligence officers to use to identify and track terrorist suspects.
Snowden’s defenders claim that since the metadata program
violated the Constitution and the privacy rights of Americans, Snowden was
justified in leaking information to the press about it and therefore should
receive a presidential pardon. Putting aside that Snowden didn’t bother trying
to raise his supposed concern about this program through legal channels, the
facts are that the vast majority of court decisions on this program upheld it
as legal, Congress and the Justice Department have monitored it, and only very
minor abuses were discovered. To read more on this issue, see my May 2015 NRO
article “NSA Data Collection: Necessary or Unconstitutional.”
While the unclassified report summary does not give
specifics of how Snowden’s leaks benefited U.S. enemies and terrorists (that is
probably detailed in the classified version available to all House members),
U.S. intelligence officials have publicly stated that Snowden’s leaks have
allowed ISIS and al-Qaeda to evade detection by Western intelligence services.
Former CIA director James Woolsey has called for Snowden to receive the death
penalty because his leaks of NSA monitoring techniques helped the ISIS-inspired
terrorists who committed the November 2015 Paris terrorist attacks conceal
their electronic communications.
The unclassified report also does not mention concerns
that Snowden’s leaks have made it more difficult to stop terrorist attacks in
the United States. A Chicago
Tribune editorial and a Wall
Street Journal op-ed by L. Gordon Cravitz, both published in December
2015, noted how limits on the use of the NSA metadata program — especially how
long the government can retain phone records — kept intelligence agencies and
law enforcement from acquiring intelligence that may have prevented the
December 2, 2015 San Bernardino terrorist attack in which two ISIS-inspired
terrorists murdered 14.
Snowden Was Not a
Whistleblower.
The committee found that Snowden does not qualify as a
whistleblower just because he disclosed classified information. It explains
that Snowden made no effort to pursue numerous legal avenues available to him
to raise any concerns he had about U.S. intelligence activities. The report
says that if Snowden feared retaliation for voicing concerns about NSA
activities, he could have brought them to the House Intelligence Committee,
which routinely receives disclosures from intelligence contractors like Snowden.
While I agree with this finding, I discussed in a 2013 NRO article “Preventing
Future Snowdens” that the intelligence oversight committees should be
officially designated as “safe harbors” to encourage would-be intelligence
whistleblowers to legally bring their concerns to Congress instead of making
illegal and damaging disclosures to the news media.
The committee also noted that Snowden used the security
credentials of co-workers to steal information from their computers and remove
personal information of thousands of intelligence employees and contractors. I
have yet to hear from Snowden and his defenders how a legitimate whistleblower
could engage in such behavior.
Snowden has never given a good answer for why he revealed
such an enormous number of U.S. classified documents rather than just
disclosing a handful to make his point about supposedly runaway government
domestic-surveillance programs. I believe this indicates that Snowden’s
disclosures were all about damaging U.S. national security and his self-promotion
and had nothing to do with whistleblowing. The Washington Post’s Walter Pincus had a similar take when he wrote
that “a real whistleblower would have selected the documents to be published,
made certain that they didn’t harm national security, and remained in the
country to face the consequences of his actions.”
The unclassified report summary notes that instead of
remaining in the country to face the legal consequences of his actions in the
tradition of the civil disobedience he professes to embrace, Snowden fled to
Hong Kong, then Russia. The committee report also points out that despite
Snowden’s insistence that he did not share U.S. secrets with the Russian
government, a top Russian official said otherwise in June 2016.
The unclassified summary is silent on whether Snowden had
been recruited by a foreign intelligence service. I believe he was. This also
is the view of former CIA operations officer Robert Baer, who told the London Daily Mail that the CIA believes Snowden
was recruited by Russian intelligence when he served in Geneva in 2007. Baer
believes Snowden first fled to Hong Kong to “muddy the waters” on the
involvement of Russian intelligence in his actions.
Snowden Was a Poor
Performer and Disgruntled Employee.
The report says Snowden was repeatedly counseled by
managers regarding his behavior at work and had been reprimanded for failing to
follow the proper protocol for raising grievances through the chain of command.
There was a similar report in a October 10, 2013, New York Times article
by Eric Schmitt that said Snowden was sent home from a CIA assignment in Geneva
after he was caught trying to break into classified computer files to which he
was not authorized to have access. Snowden’s CIA supervisor in Geneva
reportedly wrote a derogatory report in his personnel file that noted a
distinct change in Snowden’s behavior and work habits. According to the Times
article, this derogatory report slipped through the cracks and was not reported
to the NSA when it hired him as a contractor.
Snowden Was and
Remains a Serial Exaggerator and Fabricator.
The report summary discusses “a pattern of intentional
lying” by Snowden on how he washed out of the Army, his false claim about
obtaining a high-school degree, claiming he was a CIA senior advisor when he
was only an entry-level computer technician, and lying about health problems to
his supervisors. The report summary also notes that while Snowden claims
congressional testimony by Director of National Intelligence James Clapper in
March 2013 was the reason he began massive disclosures of U.S. secrets to the
press, Snowden began stealing this information eight months earlier. The
unclassified report does not mention a related fact: that Glenn Greenwald, a
journalist who facilitated Snowden’s leaks, says in his 2014 book No Place to Hide that Snowden first
tried to contact him on December 1, 2012.
The NSA and Other
U.S. Intelligence Agencies Have Not Done Enough to Prevent Another Massive
Unauthorized Disclosure.
The unclassified summary also says that a recent DOD
inspector general report directed by the committee found that the NSA has yet
to effectively implement post-Snowden security improvements. This is the most
disturbing finding of the report. Heads should roll over this and it should drive
whoever wins the 2016 presidential election to implement massive intelligence
reforms and a housecleaning of intelligence agencies. These efforts must
include an overhaul of how the government grants and manages security
clearances, tougher security rules for information-technology staffs, and
strict protocols to ensure that when intelligence-agency employees apply for
jobs at other intelligence agencies or contractors, full employment files must
be sent as part of the application process.
Congressman Adam Schiff (Calif.), the top Democrat on the
House Intelligence Committee, said this about the enormous damage to U.S.
national security caused by Snowden and the work that still needs to be done to
recover from this damage:
Snowden has long portrayed himself
as a truth-seeking whistleblower whose actions were designed solely to defend
privacy, and whose disclosures did no harm to the country’s security. The
Committee’s Review — a product of two years of extensive research — shows his
claims to be self-serving and false, and the damage done to our national
security to be profound. The review also shows that the Intelligence Community
still has much to do to institutionalize post-Snowden reforms to protect the
nation’s sources and methods.
Although I have strong differences with President Obama,
it is to his credit that he continues to refuse to refer to Snowden as a
whistleblower and has called on Snowden to return to the United States for
trial. I believe the House Intelligence Committee’s report vindicates the
president’s position and deals a death blow to any chance of a presidential
pardon for Snowden. (The committee also sent this unanimous,
bipartisan letter to the president urging him not to pardon Snowden.) The
House Intelligence Committee has done our country a great service by producing
this bipartisan and unanimous report that will help Americans learn the truth
about the enormous and costly damage done to our national security by Edward
Snowden and counter determined efforts by the Left — including by Oliver Stone
— to falsely portray him as a hero and patriot.
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