How America Lost Its Secrets by Edward Jay Epstein

Author:Edward Jay Epstein
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2017-01-16T16:00:00+00:00

A CRITICAL MISSING PIECE in the Snowden enigma is the whereabouts of the NSA documents. Greenwald told the Associated Press that the documents that Snowden had taken from the NSA constituted “the instruction manual for how the NSA is built” and that they “would allow somebody who read them to know exactly how the NSA does what it does, which would in turn allow them to evade that surveillance or replicate it.” Snowden, for his part, said on camera in his Hong Kong interview in June 2013 that NSA investigators would have “a heart attack” when they discovered the extent of the breach.

Ledgett, the NSA official who had conducted the damage assessment, while not having a heart attack, confirmed that Snowden had taken a massive number of documents and among them was what he deemed the NSA’s “keys to the kingdom.” These keys could presumably open up the mechanism through which the United States learns about the secret activities of other nations and, by doing so, bring down the American signals intelligence system that had for sixty years monitored government communications. It had also kept track of adversaries’ missile telemetry, submarine movements, and nuclear proliferation.

The Snowden breach was not without precedent at the NSA. There had been two Russian spies at the NSA during the Cold War, Jack Dunlap and David Sheldon Boone, who took a limited number of documents, but no one since the end of the Cold War is known to have taken a single NSA classified document. Now an insider had removed a vast number of the NSA’s documents. Many of these documents were classified TS/SCI—“Top Secret, Sensitive Compartmented Information”—which, as NSA secrets went, were deemed the gold standard of espionage because they revealed the sources used in communications intelligence. Whatever the assessment of Snowden’s motivation, the single question that needed to be answered was, what happened to these stolen files?

Recall the huge disparity between the number of documents that the NSA calculated that Snowden compromised and the number of documents he is known to have handed over to journalists in Hong Kong on a thumb drive. When the House and Senate Intelligence Committees asked the NSA how many documents Snowden took, the NSA could not come up with a definitive number despite having employed a world-class team of experts to reconstruct the crime. The NSA could say that 1.7 million documents had been selected in two dozen NSA computers during Snowden’s brief tenure at Booz Allen in 2013, including documents from the Department of Defense, the NSA, and the CIA. Of these “touched” documents, some 1.3 million had been copied and moved to another computer.

There was evidence that Snowden had used preprogrammed spiders to find and index the documents. He had said that he took the job at Booz Allen to get access to data that he copied. So as far as the NSA was concerned, of course, 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.

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