Edward Snowden is no whistleblower, according to a new report from a United States House Subcommittee which accused the former contractor of doing “tremendous damage” to USA national security.
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According to the Committee, most of the documents Snowden took did not have anything to do with the NSA’s surveillance programmes but instead dealt with “military, defence, and intelligence programmes of great interest to America’s adversaries”.
A United States congressional committee on intelligence Thursday ruled that former National Security Agency (NSA) official Edward Snowden was not a whistleblower as he claims, but he “was and remains a serial exaggerator and fabricator”.
“You don’t have to be someone special to change things”, Snowden said. “Not sure they understand how this hurts their case”.
“Despite Snowden’s later claim that the March 2013 congressional testimony of Director of National Intelligence James Clapper was a “breaking point” for him, these mass downloads predated Director Clapper’s testimony by eight months”, the report adds, calling the contractor “a serial exaggerator and fabricator”.
And a largely favorable movie about Snowden, directed by Oliver Stone, is now in theaters.
Speaking by video link from Moscow, Mr Snowden said on Wednesday that whistleblowing “is democracy’s safeguard of last resort, the one on which we rely when all other checks and balances have failed and the public has no idea what’s going on behind closed doors”.
White House press secretary Josh Earnest disputed that Snowden was a whistleblower and said he would enjoy legal due process at a trial in the United States, where he faces up to 30 years in prison for espionage and theft of state secrets. The committee determined that his disclosures led to the loss of intelligence “that had saved American lives” and cost the country billions of dollars, but it doesn’t cite evidence of specific damages in the unclassified summary.
That point is downright freaky, since Snowden is not only the prototypical whistleblower, but likely the most significant one in a generation.
Earnest also responded to a question on whether the US President has had any communication with Snowden.
Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Burbank), ranking member of the committee, said the investigation found that Snowden’s claims that he acted to defend Americans’ privacy were “self serving and false” and that he did “profound” damage to national security.
“The story of 2013 I think quite centrally and about the film is that from time to time we see that governments begin to redraw the boundaries of our rights behind closed doors”.
In a series of tweets, Snowden dismissed the findings of the report. The disclosure exposed the classified NSA surveillance program.
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Snowden himself said in an interview this week he would love to receive a pardon, but he would “never will” ask for one.
