Today in an interview with Reuters, NSA Deputy Director Richard Ledgett essentially vindicated the actions of Edward Snowden in revealing the massive (and likely illegal) extent of NSA data collection of the phone records of American citizens.
Asked whether that program should have been disclosed publicly prior to Snowden’s revelations, Ledgett replied:
"That's one where I might have to say, yes," Ledgett said in his office at NSA headquarters in Fort Meade, Maryland. "That's one where maybe it would have been less shocking when Snowden did what he did."
As a direct result of Snowden’s 2013 revelations, and the firestorm of controversy that ensued (including Congressional hearings), the NSA in 2014 revised its procedures to minimize collection of US phone records, and then revised its procedures again in 2015, again to minimize the collection of American phone records.
And now the NSA is saying — oops, our bad, we should have done a Snowden and told you guys a long time ago.
Meanwhile, Snowden is still stuck in Moscow without a valid passport.
In other Snowden news, three-time Pulitzer Prize winner Barton Gellman of the Washington Post totally debunked one of the many fantastic lies-disguised-as-speculations in Edward Epstein’s disreputable Snowden-slander trash-tome How America Lost Its Secrets. In his sorry excuse for a book, Epstein had pointed to a supposedly “missing” eleven days in Snowden’s timeline in Hong Kong during May and June 2013. These days were “missing” because Epstein couldn’t find any hotel records for Snowden for those days. Epstein used the “missing days” theory to speculate (on no evidence) that Snowden had travelled to Beijing, or maybe to Moscow, to brief his (utterly fictitious) Chinese-or-maybe-Russian spy handlers during that time.
But Gellman actually talked to Snowden’s attorney in Hong Kong, Robert Tibbo, who was able to find Snowden’s hotel bills for every day he was there, from May 20 to June 10. Charlie Savage’s blog has the details, including .pdf’s of the docs. Oh, and Tibbo also personally witnessed Snowden destroying his hard drives before leaving town.
Sorry, Epstein, you were wrong about Snowden. Again.