Don't trust Edward Snowden,
warns Michael Kelley in Business Insider.
Snowden, the ex-National Security Agency contractor who fled to Moscow, claims he did not cooperate with Russian or Chinese intelligence and that there was "a zero percent chance" those adversaries had analyzed NSA secrets as a result of his infidelities.
Snowden — who claimed in an extensive
New York Times email interview that he betrayed no secret NSA documents to Russia or China — could be telling the truth, though numerous discrepancies in his story raise questions, writes Kelley.
Snowden claims that by the time he fled to Moscow on June 23 he had turned over all the classified documents removed from NSA and handed them to journalists Laura Poitras, Glenn Greenwald, and Ewen MacAskill, who met with him in Hong Kong on or about June 9 or 10.
He says he that kept no copies, Kelley writes.
Yet on June 12, Snowden was able to leak additional NSA secrets regarding a specific IP addresse the NSA was using to hack into the South China Morning Post, according to Kelley.
Kelley notes that Greenwald was quoted as saying that he thought Snowden might have more secrets to reveal: "I don't know for sure whether [Snowden] has more documents than the ones he has given me. I believe he does."
On July 14, Greenwald told The Associated Press that Snowden "is in possession of literally thousands of documents . . . that would allow somebody who read them to know exactly how the NSA does what it does, which would, in turn, allow them to evade that surveillance or replicate it."
Lon Snowden told the Associated Press that his son had "much more to be shared."
Kelley concludes that even without documents, the information Snowden possesses is valuable to U.S. adversaries.
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