Vice. Snowden. Fantasy.
Ive read the Vice News report based on the FOIA-released documents three times now, and still do not see within it support for the headline, Exclusive: Snowden Tried to Tell NSA About Surveillance Concerns, Documents Reveal.
Perhaps there is more reporting to come based on this collection of documents, but if todays report was supposed to expose the smoking gun revealing that Snowden took substantial steps to lodge his complaints about the legality of NSA surveillance activities, then it just doesnt live up to the hype.
Instead, the report reveals:
An NSA workforce conducting a huge after-action search for documents seeking to affirm or refute Snowdens claim that he had raised red flags internally before resorting to leaking classified documents;
Numerous officials terrified that they would miss something in the search, knowing full-well how easily that could happen in NSAs giant and complex enterprise; and
The NSA and ODNI General Counsels, and others in the interagency process doing their job.
The emails in the report do reveal that government officials debated whether to release the one document that was evidence that Snowden did, in fact, communicate with the NSA Office of General Counsel. Its hard to be surprised by this. On one hand, the one email in and of itself does not support Snowdens public claim that he lodged numerous complaints; on the other hand, experienced senior government officials have been around the block enough times to know that as soon as you make a public statement that theres only one, there is a very high likelihood that your door will soon be darkened by a staff member telling you, wait, theres more. So it is no wonder that there was some interagency disagreement about what to do.
https://www.lawfareblog.com/vice-snowden-fantasy
What's also left unmentioned is that Snowflake was already stealing files for a year before lodging this "complaint"... So it seems a lot more like CYA than anything else...
brush
(53,876 posts)He was in contact with whoever was sponsoring him for months while he was stealing files.
My big wonder was that sponsor someone other than Greenwald and Poitras?
OnyxCollie
(9,958 posts)Tace
(6,800 posts)unc70
(6,121 posts)Whether they rose to your or even my standards, they seem from this evidence to confirm far more actions by Snowden than the single email. Those actions, now pieced together from FOIA documents, seem to support some of Snowden's version of things and call in doubt key aspects of the initial NSA version of things.
I only read it once, reread a few sections. Seemed fairly clear to me.