Allegations of Government Defamation of Snowden and Historical NSA Defector Smears

The Great Divide | 115 from Moscow, “They [Greenwald and Poitras] actually recorded me on camera saying this before I revealed my identity.” The purpose of this demonization was to divert attention from the government's own crimes. To be sure, it is not unprecedented for the government to release defamatory information about individuals who have embarrassed USS. intelligence by defecting. When two NSA analysts, William Martin and Bernon Mitchell, defected to Russia in the 1960s and accused the NSA of violating international law after arriving in Moscow, U.S. government officials responded by putting out the story that they were homosexual lovers, which was both untrue and irrelevant to the intelligence secrets that they had compromised. It is certainly possible that the government put out information to intentionally defame Snowden. Secretary of State John Kerry char- acterized him as a coward who should “man up” by returning to the United States. While one can discount such characterizations against Snowden by government officials as demonization, as I do, one cannot as eas- © ily dismiss the independent evidence that undermines Snowden’s © assertion that his sole motive was blowing the whistle on illicit sur- veillance in the United States. For example, in 2014, the Lawfare Institute, a nonprofit organization that publishes a blog on national security concerns, in cooperation with the Brookings Institution, did an independent analysis of all the published documents that Snowden provided to the media. It concluded that with some notable exceptions, such as the two documents initially published by The Guardian and the Post, the now-famous FISA Verizon warrant and the PRISM slides, few of the other documents that Snowden had given Poitras and Greenwald for publication had anything to do with either domestic surveillance or infringements on the privacy of Americans. By the Lawfare Institute’s count, 32 of Snowden’s leaks to these journalists concerned the NSA’s overseas sources and meth- ods, 9 identified overseas locations of the NSA’s intelligence bases, 25 revealed the identities of foreign officials of interest to U.S. intel- ligence agencies, 14 disclosed information about Internet companies legally cooperating with the NSA, and 19 concerned technology products that the NSA had been using or researching. | | Epst_9780451494566_2p_all_r1.z.indd 115 ® 9/29/16 5:51PM | | HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_019603