I suspect that Edward Jay Epstein, author of the forthcoming book How America Lost Its Secrets: Edward Snowden, the Man and the Theft, was not on Mr. Snowden’s Christmas lists in 2016.
In a December 30, 2016 editorial for the Wall Street Journal, Epstein takes dead aim at Snowden, debunking many of Snowden’s best-known remarks.
... At the time [May 2013] Mr. Snowden was a 29-year-old technologist working as an analyst-in-training for the consulting firm of Booz Allen Hamilton at the regional base of the National Security Agency (NSA) in Oahu, Hawaii. On May 20, only some six weeks after his job there began, he failed to show up for work, emailing his supervisor that he was at the hospital being tested for epilepsy.
This excuse was untrue. Mr. Snowden was not even in Hawaii. He was in Hong Kong. He had flown there with a cache of secret data that he had stolen from the NSA…
That’s just the start:
...nearly every element of the narrative Mr. Snowden has provided, which reached its final iteration in Oliver Stone’s 2016 movie, “Snowden,” is demonstrably false.
[...]
At the heart of Mr. Snowden’s narrative was his claim that while he may have incidentally “touched” other data in his search of NSA files, he took only documents that exposed the malfeasance of the NSA and gave all of them to journalists.
Yet even as Mr. Snowden’s narrative was taking hold in the public realm, a secret damage assessment done by the NSA and Pentagon told a very different story. According to a unanimous report declassified on Dec. 22 by the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, the investigation showed that Mr. Snowden had “removed” (not merely touched) 1.5 million documents. That huge number was based on, among other evidence, electronic logs that recorded the selection, copying and moving of documents.
The number of purloined documents is more than what NSA officials were willing to say in 2013 about the removal of data, possibly because the House committee had the benefit of the Pentagon’s more-extensive investigation. But even just taking into account the material that Mr. Snowden handed over to journalists, the December House report concluded that he compromised “secrets that protect American troops overseas and secrets that provide vital defenses against terrorists and nation-states.” These were, the report said, “merely the tip of the iceberg.”
So what Snowden had wasn’t so much material on domestic spying — the stuff his pals Laura Poitras and Glenn Greenwald tell us he was most interested in revealing — but military data that would be most coveted by America’s enemies. Like, oh, the guy running the country where Snowden wound up.
Snowden had, in fact, stolen the crown jewels of America’s intelligence community — the NSA’s Level 3 toolkit:
It was not the quantity of Mr. Snowden’s theft but the quality that was most telling. Mr. Snowden’s theft put documents at risk that could reveal the NSA’s Level 3 tool kit—a reference to documents containing the NSA’s most-important sources and methods. Since the agency was created in 1952, Russia and other adversary nations had been trying to penetrate its Level-3 secrets without great success.
Yet it was precisely these secrets that Mr. Snowden changed jobs to steal. In an interview in Hong Kong’s South China Morning Post on June 15, 2013, he said he sought to work on a Booz Allen contract at the CIA, even at a cut in pay, because it gave him access to secret lists of computers that the NSA was tapping into around the world.
It gets skeevier from there. And it looks very much like Snowden’s intended destination was Moscow all along. (With help from WikiLeaks, which has been tagged as a front for Russian intelligence interests.)
UPDATE: Per Epstein and other writers, the whole “Snowden went to Moscow because he had no choice” was a lie from the start. The only question is if whether he intended to go to Moscow from the start or if he may have at first planned on Beijing, as his decision to go first to Hong Kong would seem to indicate. Either place (as well as many other foreign governments) would have welcomed someone with the NSA’s Level 3 toolkit.
Julian Assange himself has boasted of advising Snowden to go to Moscow instead of Latin America — which further undermines the Snowden myth that he had no choice but to go to Russia.
Speaking of Assange, real privacy advocates don’t ask the Ecuadorian embassy to give them FSB (formerly known as KGB) guards, as Assange did:
Just as telling is the recent report on Assange’s activities in Ecuador’s London embassy, where it turns out Ecuadorian intelligence has been keeping tabs on him. Which is no surprise given the PR mess Assange has created for Ecuador with his on-going antics.
Especially interesting is the revelation that, while holed up in London, Assange “requested that he be able to chose his own Security Service inside the embassy, suggesting the use of Russian operatives.” It is, to say the least, surpassingly strange that a Western “privacy advocate” wants Russian secret police protection while hiding out in a Western country. The original Spanish is clear: Assange “habría sido la elección de su propio Servicio de Seguridad en el interior de la embajada, llegando a proponer la participación de operadores de nacionalidad rusa.”
Why Assange wants FSB bodyguards is a question every journalist who encounters Julian henceforth should ask. Until he explains that, Wikileaks should be treated as the front and cut-out for Russian intelligence that it has become, while those who get in bed with Wikileaks — many Western “privacy advocates” are in that group — should be asked their feelings about their own at least indirect ties with Putin’s spy services.
UPDATE 2: For those who still say that Snowden’s actions didn’t hurt anyone, I give you this comment from longtime Kossack Ivorybill, who I thank for giving me permission to post it as part of a diary update:
Real whistle-blowers release information relevant to specific acts of government malfeasance, not enormous archives of secret information. I have a lot of respect for whistle-blowers, and had Snowden only stolen and released materials relevant to illegal collection of domestic communications, I would agree with you.
But that’s not what he did. That’s not what Manning did.
I work in Iraq. When Chelsea Manning released her huge dump of classified information, I had to call a human rights attorney to tell him that the Shia’ militias likely had his identity. He had been working on a project to prevent abuse of children in Iraq’s criminal justice system, and to defend victims of human trafficking. This attorney has more courage than Manning and Snowden combined. He continued the work; another attorney fled the country. It was not a fun phone call.
I was never a defender of Snowden, Manning or Assange. But seeing all that happened in 2016, I want even more strongly for all three to find themselves facing criminal prosecution in federal court. Whistle-blowing is one thing. This radical idea that secrets should be exposed as a matter of some sort of weird philosophy is dangerous and misguided. The way Snowden and Assange have collaborated with Vladimir Putin is truly horrible and alleged progressives should think long and hard about exactly who these two serve and what they are. They don’t serve you, that’s for sure.