House Report, Evidence Redacted, Ties Snowden to Russian Agencies
WASHINGTON — The House Intelligence Committee on Thursday released a 33-page report portraying the former intelligence contractor Edward J. Snowden, who in 2013 disclosed classified files about American surveillance operations, as a habitually disgruntled worker who damaged national security and has been in contact with Russian intelligence services in Moscow.
“Although Snowden’s objective may have been to inform the public, the information he released is also available to Russian, Chinese, Iranian and North Korean intelligence services; any terrorist with internet access; and many others who wish to do harm to the United States,” the report said.
Mr. Snowden, who has been living as a fugitive in Russia since disclosing archives of National Security Agency files to journalists in Hong Kong in June 2013, responded with a series of posts on Twitter that ridiculed the report as riddled with “obvious falsehoods” and said that his critics “can present no evidence of harmful intent, foreign influence, or harm.”
“Bottom line: this report’s core claims are made without evidence, and are often contrary to both common sense and the public record,” he added.
The intelligence panel had released a three-page executive summary of its report in September ahead of the premiere of “Snowden,” a movie by the director Oliver Stone that portrayed him as a heroic whistle-blower. At the time, the more detailed report remained classified.
The full report was not the result of an independent intelligence investigation by the committee. Rather, it was a review of the N.S.A.’s response to Mr. Snowden’s leaks and of the findings from an executive branch investigation. The committee said it did not conduct witness interviews, to avoid jeopardizing any future trial of Mr. Snowden.
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Important sections of the report remain redacted, including descriptions of the harms and risks to American troops it said Mr. Snowden’s actions had created. Also blacked out were any details backing the committee’s claim that since his “arrival in Moscow, he has had, and continues to have, contact with Russian intelligence services.”
The redactions made it hard to judge whether the report’s conclusions were merely a reiteration of the intelligence community’s contempt for Mr. Snowden or were based on new evidence.
For example, the report stated as fact that Mr. Snowden stole 1.5 million documents, a “vast majority” of which “were unrelated to electronic surveillance or any issues associated with privacy and civil liberties.” The notion that he took all those files to Hong Kong is a foundational premise for more alarming interpretations of his actions.
However, intelligence officials have said that the government was unable to determine which files he took, and that the 1.5 million figure was based on how many files were “touched” by an indexing program that Mr. Snowden used to trawl N.S.A. servers. The unredacted portions of the report do not indicate whether the panel learned anything new to clear up that murkiness.
Still, the report offered some new information about Mr. Snowden’s actions leading to the leaks, including descriptions of episodes in which he tussled with various supervisors.
The report described a June 2012 clash in which Mr. Snowden, then a Dell contractor working as a systems administrator at the N.S.A.’s outpost in Hawaii, uploaded a patch to fix a security vulnerability on a set of servers, which then crashed. A middle manager sent a group email chastising him for not having tested it first.
In a reply email in which Mr. Snowden copied a senior manager in Washington, the report said, he accused the middle manager of focusing on “evasion and finger-pointing rather than problem resolution.” The senior manager sharply rebuked Mr. Snowden, replying that under “no circumstances will any contractor call out or point fingers at any government manager whether you agree with their handling of an issue or not.”
The report portrayed this episode as potential motivation for Mr. Snowden’s decision to begin illicitly copying documents, which it said he started just a few weeks later, on July 12, 2012. It contrasted that timeline with Mr. Snowden’s later statement that “the breaking point” was false testimony by James R. Clapper Jr., the director of national intelligence, in March 2013.
In that testimony, Mr. Clapper said the N.S.A. did not collect records about millions of Americans; in fact, the agency was secretly collecting bulk records of domestic phone calls. After Mr. Snowden’s revelations, an appeals court ruled the practice illegal, and Congress enacted legislation ending it.
The report portrays the gap of several months between Mr. Snowden’s initial copying of files and Mr. Clapper’s false testimony as an example of the misleading narrative Mr. Snowden had presented. Still, in the interview in which Mr. Snowden called Mr. Clapper’s testimony “the breaking point,” he said that moment was when he had decided that there was “no going back,” not that it was his initial inspiration.
When the committee put out the summary in September, several of its assertions in support of its argument that Mr. Snowden was a “serial exaggerator and fabricator” came under scrutiny. It said, for example, that Mr. Snowden had lied about having earned a high school equivalency diploma and having washed out of Army basic training because of broken legs, when he really just had shin splints.
In response, Barton Gellman, one of the journalists to whom Mr. Snowden gave documents and who is completing a book about the saga, wrote in a blog post that he had seen Mr. Snowden’s official educational and Army records. Mr. Snowden, he said, earned a high school equivalency diploma in June 2004, and an Army doctor had made a diagnosis of “bilateral tibial stress fractures” in his legs.
In language that a congressional staff member said was added later, the report acknowledged the criticism by Mr. Gellman, whom it referred to only as “one of Mr. Snowden’s associates.” The new language said the panel had based those claims on various pieces of information provided to it by executive branch officials.
P.C: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/22/us/politics/snowden-national-security-russia.html
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