> “The Committee further found no evidence that Snowden attempted to communicate concerns about the legality or morality of intelligence activities to any officials, senior or otherwise, during his time at either CIA or NSA.”
The documents were obtaied thru a news/search service built by him as IT. The explanation is documented, plausible, likely, and verifiable to some degree.
Contrast that with your message from a vested interest that it's "a lie." You'll need a lot more than that to be convincing.
If true...is the assertion that Snowden waved a magic wand and made the air-gapped information in VA grow wings and fly to Hawaii?
Or is the assertion that some separate (and never caught?) source operating in VA was passing out copies of air-gapped data, and Snowden just happened to be one of the recipients of that?
Or - far more plausible, in light of details we've heard recently about the Teixeira leak - the actual practices in VA were so shoddy that the whole "...air-gapped...not internet enabled..." claim is just CYA BS?
You are the first person in 10 years that I see coming up with that theory. Are sure it wasn't some other operative who simply ignored rules and shared files where he shouldn't?
Because that would be a far more plausible reason than framing as traitor a guy that so far can't really be portraited that way.
> Investigators also need to determine whether anyone else was involved in disclosing the information to reporters, officials said.
> Officials questioned some of Snowden’s assertions in his interview with the Guardian, saying that several of his claims seemed exaggerated. Among them were assertions that he could order wiretaps on anyone from “a federal judge to even the president.”
> “When he said he had access to every CIA station around the world, he’s lying,” said a former senior agency official, who added that information is so closely compartmented that only a handful of top-ranking executives at the agency could access it.
> Current and former administration officials were flummoxed by Snowden’s claim that he was authorized to access the orders from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.
It seems very reasonable to believe he never actually got these type of air-gapped files, he just thought he did and also confused intelligence officials. It's also worth pointing out that he himself has been incredibly coy about how he actually got data out of the secure facility (I seem to remember the movie portraying a Rubik's cube).
I was of the opinion until a few months ago that he was a solo actor until that conversation I had with that IT guy. He said the US Gov response to the Snowden leaks was not a hardening of the classification systems, but a doubling down on background checks and training on foreign agents. Especially seeing how Russia has acted the last few years, I an now more open to the idea than I was before.
The Swedish government didn't say that, some researcher did, and it was talked about in the public service news, afaik. The part of the government they asked on the topic said it was unsafe to have sensitive conversations in any brand of car.
