NSA Damage Assessment Claims Snowden Copied 1.7 Million Documents – Possible Inflation of Numbers

135 1.7 million had been selected in two dozen NSA computers during Snowden’s brief tenure at Booz Allen in 2013. This total included documents from the Department of Defense, NSA and CIA. Of these “touched” documents, some 1.3 million of them had been copied and moved to another computer. The selection of these documents by Snowden could hardly be considered an accident since Snowden had used pre-programmed spiders to find and index these documents. In addition he had stated that he took the job at Booz Allen to get access to data that had been copied. So, as far as the NSA was concerned the 1.3 million documents he copied and moved were considered compromised. On top of this haul, Snowden had copied files while working at Dell in 2012. The total number he stole there is unknown, however, because, as a system administrator there, he could download data without leaving a digital trail. At best, the NSA investigation could only count the documents that were published or referred to in the press and those found on the thumb drive intercepted in London that traced back to his 2012 work at Dell. As previously mentioned, more than half the published documents had been taken during Snowden’s time at Dell. Snowden supporters, to be sure, do not accept that Snowden stole such a large number of documents. According to Greenwald, the NSA vastly exaggerated the magnitude of the theft in order to “demonize” Snowden. Snowden also disputed the 1.7 million number. He told James Bamford of Wired in early 2014, that he took far less than the 1.7 million documents that the NSA reported was compromised. He further claimed in that same interview that he purposely left behind at the NSA base in Hawaii “a trail of digital bread crumbs” so that the NSA could determine which documents he “touched” but did not download. If so, these “bread crumbs” were missed by the NSA according to its statement. It is within the realm of possibility that the NSA Damage Assessment team under Ledgett falsified its finding to inflate the number of documents that Snowden stole. NSA executives also might have lied to Congress to the same end. But why would these officials engage in an orchestrated deception that made them look bad? Ledgett, after all, had been in charge of the National Threat Operations Center from which most of the Level 3 documents were stolen. By exaggerating the magnitude of the theft it would also magnify Ledgett and other NSA’s failure in its mission to protect US secrets. Certainly they had no reason to demonize him for legal reasons. Greenwald and Poitras had already effectively demonized him in this regard. They revealed that Snowden had given them a vast number of NSA classified documents on a thumb drive that revealed, as Greenwald put it, the “blueprints” of the NSA. This drive contained, it will be recalled, no few than 58,000 documents. As was discussed in Chapter I, just revealing the partial content of a single document to a journalist, as in the case of CIA officer Jeffrey Sterling, could result in two years in prison. So in the eyes of the law disclosing the full contents of 58,000 highly-classified documents constituted an unprecedented breach of the laws passed to protect communications intelligence. In any case, safely ensconced in Russia, Snowden was not in any legal jeopardy no matter how many documents it was claimed by the government that he stole. It is also makes little sense that the numbers were falsified by the Department to tarnish Snowden’s HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_020287