WASHINGTON (AP) A House intelligence committee report is calling National Security Agency leaker Edward Snowden a “serial exaggerator and fabricator” who doesn’t fit the profile of a whistleblower.
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Snowden himself, through a long series of tweets, has strongly denied the claims issued by the House of Representatives report.
Separately, all members of the committee sent a bipartisan letter to President Barack Obama on Thursday urging him not to pardon Snowden.
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 global data-sharing arrangements, including the annullation of a data-sharing treaty between the US and the EU.
But US officials, while adopting measures past year that regulate the National Security Agency’s (NSA) collection of US citizens’ telephone call metadata, have argued that the surveillance programmes are justified in that they protect US interests.
Ben Wizner, Mr Snowden’s lawyer at the American Civil Liberties Union, blasted the report, saying it was an attempt to discredit a “genuine American hero”.
“Contrary to his public claims that he notified numerous NSA [National Security Agency] officials about what he believed to be illegal intelligence collection, the Committee found no evidence that Snowden took any official effort to express concerns about United States intelligence activities – legal, moral or otherwise – to any oversight officials in the USA government, despite numerous avenues for him to do so”, said the report.
In a letter sent to President Obama on Thursday signed by every single member, the committee urged the president not to pardon the man “who perpetrated the largest and most damaging public disclosure of classified information in our nation’s history”, and said that if and when Snowden returns from Russian Federation, where he has been living since 2013, he should be held accountable.
“The vast majority of what he took has nothing to do with American privacy”, said Adam Schiff of California, the leading Democrat on the committee.
He added: “What I will say about the candidates is that I’m disappointed we’re not hearing much about the constitution in this election cycle”. Americans were alarmed to learn just how extensively our government, without judicial warrants, pried into the phone calls, emails and other records of ordinary citizens.
Mr Snowden is seeking a presidential pardon because he says he helped his country by revealing secret domestic surveillance programmes.
The site is now password protected, but shows the involvement of both ACLU and Amnesty International in the campaign.
“His conduct put American lives at risk and it risked American national security”, he told reporters. “I look forward to his eventual return to the United States, where he will face justice for his damaging crimes”. In June, he revealed classified NSA documents to several journalists.
In the ensuing debate over surveillance, leaders of intelligence oversight committees – particularly in the House – were some of the most outspoken defenders of the programs he had disclosed and some of his harshest critics.
Lawmakers said that in order to avoid interfering with a criminal investigation, the committee did not interview Snowden, who is living in Moscow, or any witnesses who may be called should Snowden face trial.
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.
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It also states that this began to happen eight months before the 2013 Senate testimony from Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, which purportedly prompted Snowden to go rogue, in disgust at his boss’s prevarication.
