Snowden claims NSA intelligence sharing with Israel was a “biggest abuse” and frames it as whistle‑blowing

118 | HOW AMERICA LOST ITS SECRETS democratic oversight in the U.S.” and, without question, caused a much-needed debate on government surveillance. In this ends-justify-the-means view, any person with access to government secrets can authorize him- or herself to reveal those secrets to the world if she or he believes it serves the public good. Further, because doing so would be an “act of conscience,” he or she should be immune from legal prosecution. For Snowden’s supporters, his “act of conscience” justifies his claim to being a whistle-blower, even though the preponderance of the secrets he disclosed had to do with the NSA’s authorized activ- ity of using its multibillion-dollar global arrays of sensors to inter- cept data in foreign countries. For example, one of the thirty allied intelligence services that the NSA cooperated with in 2013 was the cyber service of Israel. Because Snowden deemed this cooperation to infringe on privacy rights, he revealed documents bearing on the NSA’s data exchange with Israel. He subsequently told James Bamford, in an interview in Wired magazine in August 2014, that supplying such intelligence to Israel was “one of the biggest abuses © we've seen.” Snowden therefore believed he was justified in reveal- © ing information concerning Arab communications in Gaza, the West Bank, and Lebanon that the NSA had provided the Israeli cyber ser- vice, known as Unit 8200. In doing so, he compromised an Israeli source. But how could this act qualify as whistle-blowing? Providing Israel with such data was not some NSA rogue operation. It was part of a policy that had been approved by every American president— and every Congress—since 1948. Snowden had every right to per- sonally disagree with this established U.S. policy of aiding Israel with intelligence, but it is another matter to release secret documents to support his view. If the concept of whistle-blowing were expanded to cover intelligence workers who steal secrets because they disagree with their government's foreign policy, it would also have to include many notorious spies, such as Kim Philby. Snowden’s concept of whistle-blowing also applied to the NSA’s spying on adversary nations. “We've crossed lines,” Snowden said in regard to China. “We're hacking universities and hospitals and wholly civilian infrastructure.” The NSA’s operations against China were stich “a real concern” for Snowden that he targeted lists of | | Epst_9780451494566_2p_all_r1.z.indd 118 ® 9/29/16 5:51PM | | HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_019606