Allegations that NSA Damage Assessment inflated Snowden document theft numbers

The Keys to the Kingdom Are Missing | 171 Snowden’s supporters do not accept that he stole such a large num- ber of documents. According to Greenwald, the NSA vastly exagger- ated the magnitude of the theft in order to “demonize” Snowden. Snowden also disputed the magnitude of the 1.7 million number. He told James Bamford of Wired in early 2014 that he took far fewer than the 1.7 million documents that the NSA reported were com- promised. He offered, however, no more specific details on the mag- nitude of his theft. Nor did he offer Bamford any way to verify his assertion other than to say that he had purposely left behind “a trail of digital bread crumbs” at the NSA base in Hawaii so that the NSA could determine which documents he “touched” but did not down- load. A government official familiar with the investigation said no such “bread crumbs” were found by the NSA. It is possible that the NSA Damage Assessment team under Led- gett falsified its findings or otherwise inflated the number of doc- uments that Snowden stole. NSA executives might have also lied to Congress to exaggerate the loss. But why would these officials engage in an orchestrated deception that made them look bad? Exag- © gerating the magnitude of the theft would only magnify Ledgett and © the NSA’s failure in its mission to protect U.S. secrets. Officials had no reason to demonize Snowden for legal reasons. He already had been. Greenwald and Poitras had already revealed that Snowden had given them a vast number of NSA classified docu- ments ona thumb drive that revealed, as Greenwald put it, the “blue- prints” of the NSA. This drive contained, it will be recalled, no fewer than 58,000 highly classified documents. In the eyes of the law, that constituted an unprecedented breach of the laws passed to protect communications intelligence. In any case, in Russia Snowden was not in any jeopardy, no matter how many documents he was said to have stolen. Interestingly, the thirty-five-page Defense Intelligence Agency’s damage assessment reports that 900,000 Pentagon docu- ments compromised by Snowden were not made public. That was only disclosed via a Vice magazine Freedom of Information request in June 2015. Many of the putative 1.3 million documents that the NSA says were copied and moved were duplicate copies. Others were outdated or otherwise useless routing data. So the quantity does not tell the | | Epst_9780451494566_2p_all_r1.z.indd 171 ® 9/29/16 5:51 Pa | | HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_019659