NSA chief says Edward Snowden leaked up to 200, 000 secret documents

[Lee J <lee () riskbasedsecurity com>]

http://articles.economictimes.indiatimes.com/2013-11-15/news/44113893_1_edward-snowden-nsa-chief-nsa-operations

WASHINGTON: Former US National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden
leaked as many as 200,000 classified US documents to the media, according
to little-noticed public remarks by the eavesdropping agency's chief late
last month.

In a question-and-answer session following a speech to a foreign affairs
group in Baltimore on Oct. 31, NSA Director General Keith Alexander was
asked by a member of the audience what steps US authorities were taking to
stop Snowden from leaking additional information to journalists.


"I wish there was a way to prevent it. Snowden has shared somewhere between
50 (thousand) and 200,000 documents with reporters. These will continue to
come out," Alexander said.

Alexander added that the documents were "being put out in a way that does
the maximum damage to NSA and our nation," according to a transcript of his
talk made available by NSA.

US officials briefed on investigations into Snowden's activities have said
privately for months that internal government assessments indicate that the
number of classified documents to which Snowden got access as a systems
operator at NSA installations ran into the hundreds of thousands.

Officials said that while investigators now believe they know the range of
documents that Snowden accessed, they remain unsure which documents he
downloaded for leaking to the media.

By comparison, the number of Pentagon and State Department documents leaked
to WikiLeaks by a disgruntled US Army private was much larger. The
anti-secrecy group obtained around 400,000 Pentagon reports on the Iraq
war, as well as 250,000 State Department cables and tens of thousands of
documents on US operations in Afghanistan.

None of the WikiLeaks material was classified higher than "Secret" but many
NSA documents leaked by Snowden were marked "Top Secret" or with an even
more restrictive "Special Intelligence" stamp. The material includes highly
technical details on US and allied eavesdropping activities.

Snowden's revelations, which first surfaced in June, are still causing a
headache for the government of President Barack Obama, particularly in its
dealing with allies.

For example, Germany was outraged by reports that the NSA monitored
Chancellor Angela Merkel's cellphone.

Matthew Olsen, director of the National Counterterrorism Center in the
Office of the Director of National Intelligence, said Snowden's leaks were
"extremely damaging."

  "There is no doubt that those disclosures have made our job harder. We've
seen that terrorists or adversaries are seeking to learn about the ways
that we collect intelligence and seeking to adapt and change the ways that
they communicate," he told a congressional hearing on Thursday.

In the past few days, US officials say, a panel of former officials and
experts set up by Obama to review NSA operations in the wake of Snowden's
disclosures has privately reported interim conclusions to the White House.
The group's final report is due on Dec. 15.

The report, along with the White House's own review, is likely to lead to
policy changes to be announced by year's end. These are expected to include
some constraints on the NSA's wide-ranging eavesdropping.

Also included in documents leaked by Snowden are at least 58,000 classified
documents generated by Government Communications Headquarters, the NSA's
British counterpart and eavesdropping partner, according to British
authorities.

Snowden is in Russia, where he was granted asylum in August for at least a
year.

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