The House Intelligence Committee report was ordered in August 2014 by high-ranking United States officials, well over a year after Snowden started releasing documents through selected journalists, in June 2013.
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Separately, all members of the committee sent a bipartisan letter to President Barack Obama on Thursday urging him not to pardon Snowden.
“Snowden”, Oliver Stone’s new film about NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden (played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt) hits theaters Friday and, for many Americans, it will be the first time they hear Snowden’s story.
The committee rejects the characterization of Snowden as a whistle-blower, arguing, as other intelligence officials have in the past, that “the Committee found no evidence that Snowden took any official effort to express concerns about US intelligence activities – legal, moral, or otherwise – to any oversight officials within the USA govemnent, despite numerous avenues for him to do so”.
At the movies premiere at the Toronto Film Festival on 9 September, Stone said that while he hopes Obama would pardon Snowden, he was unsure of the likelihood of the whistleblower receiving a pardon, especially given the Obama administrations expansion of mass surveillance programs after Snowden documents first revealed United States government surveillance activities.
The report also claims that Snowden shared over 1.5 million files, the “vast majority” of which “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”. Administration spokesman Josh Earnest said the information “harmed USA national security and put the American people at greater risk”.
In the statement accompanying the report, Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.), the committee’s chairman, called Snowden a traitor who put lives at risk and justified his actions with “exaggerations and outright fabrications”.
Ben Wizner, Snowden’s attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union, said the committee’ report was an attempt to discredit a “genuine American hero”.
Wherabouts: In 2013, Snowden fled to Russian Federation where he was granted a one-year asylum, which was later extended.
The report appeared to focus on supposed workplace transgressions Snowden committed while working for the NSA, such as cc’ing a higher-level manager on an email thread reporting a critical problem with Central Intelligence Agency software, “doctoring performance evaluations” when he was in fact reporting that the evaluation program was susceptible to hacking, and calling in sick when he was leaking the documents detailing the NSA’s extensive global wiretapping of private citizens.
According to Snowden, he “could go on”.
Fourth, officials say Snowden exaggerated and sometimes fabricated events. We meet a young, earnest and patriotic Snowden who believes in his government and is eager to serve in the Army special forces before starting a promising career in the Central Intelligence Agency.
“A close review of Snowden’s official employment records and submissions reveals a pattern of intentional lying”, the report said.
The report said Snowden “doctored his performance evaluations” and exaggerated his resume to obtain “new positions at the NSA”.
Snowden thanked human rights groups for seeking a pardon from President Obama.
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Stay on topic – This helps keep the thread focused on the discussion at hand. We don’t know everything that he took, but we know a lot of what was taken.
