The committee unanimously voted to endorse the report and all members signed a letter to President Obama urging him not to pardon Snowden.
Advertisement
The House Intelligence Committee conducted several assessments and estimates that “the U.S. Government has spent hundreds of millions of dollars and will eventually spend billions, to attempt to mitigate the damage Snowden caused”, the report says. Not this one. There is only a three-page unclassified summary of the House Intelligence Committee’s actual 36-page report, which remains classified.
First, officials say that the documents which Snowden stole had nothing to do with individual privacy interests, but were of great value to the Department of Defense’s military, defense, and intelligence programs.
The executive summary of the report comes amid a growing backlash from civil rights groups and some USA citizens saying that Snowden should be issued a pardon before Obama’s presidency finishes.
But a pardon appears especially unlikely in the current context of the presidential campaign. Snowden has expressed reluctance to return to the States without a pardon or guarantee of immunity from prosecution, as the Espionage Act of 1917, under which he would be tried, does not permit a public-interest defense.
Snowden dismissed the report on Twitter. The former National Security Agency contractor was the source of astonishing revelations of mass surveillance by the USA government and its allies. It has been widely reported that the NSA can not determine what data he copied and that it based its estimate on the number of documents to which he gained access.
The report by the US House Intelligence Committee said countries including China, Iran and North Korea are likely to have gained insights into US security capabilities as a result. That allegation appears to come from an NPR interview, and Wizner rejected it as “totally uncorroborated”, saying the lawmaker was “not in the loop”. “He claimed to have left Army basic training because of broken legs when in fact he washed out because of shin splints”.
His democratic counterpart Hillary Clinton has said Snowden should not be allowed to return to the United States “without facing the music”.
The US government has struggled to manage the effects of Snowden’s disclosures, which brought to light extensive its digital surveillance programmes and have led to dramatic changes in digital communications security and worldwide data-sharing arrangements, including the annullation of a data-sharing treaty between the US and the EU. But Snowden had already begun copying classified files many months before that congressional hearing, it noted. The latter being the NSA’s program to request user data from technology giants including Facebook and Google.
Advertisement
At the time, he was in Hong Kong.
