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The Great Divide | 127 the privacy issue.” Instead, as Morell put it, “he backed up a virtual tractor trailer and emptied a warehouse full of documents—the vast majority of which he could not possibly have read and few of which he would likely understand—[and] he delivered the documents to a variety of news organizations and God knows who else.” As a result, Morell concluded, “Snowden’s disclosures will go down in history as the greatest compromise of classified information ever.” General Alexander, the head of the NSA at the time of the theft, asserted that Snowden did “the greatest damage to our combined nations’ intel- ligence systems that we have ever suffered.” Obviously, military intelligence officers would not be on Snowden’s side of the divide (and the Snowden breach ended the careers of many of them, includ- ing Alexander). But political leaders in both parties could also be found on the anti-Snowden side of the divide. “I don’t look at this as being a whistle-blower,” the Democratic senator Dianne Feinstein of California, the head of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said after she was briefed on Snowden’s theft. “I think it’s an act of treason.” The Republican representative Mike Rogers of Michigan, her coun- ) terpart on the House Intelligence Committee, said on the NBC pro- © gram Meet the Press that Snowden might be working for a foreign intelligence service. And a former prominent member of President Obama’s cabinet went even further, suggesting to me off the record in March 2016 that there are only three possible explanations for the Snowden heist: (1) it was a Russian espionage operation; (2) it was a Chinese espionage operation; (3) it was a joint Sino-Russian opera- tion. These severe accusations generated much heat but little light. They were not accompanied by any evidence showing that Snowden had acted in concert with any foreign power in stealing the files or, for that matter, that he was not acting out of his own personal con- victions, no matter how misguided they might have been. On this side of the divide, Snowden’s critics regard the whistle- blowing narrative as at best incomplete and at worst fodder for the naive. They point out that the FISA document that gave him cre- dentials as a whistle-blower was only issued in the last week of April 2013, which was four months after he first contacted Greenwald and almost nine months after he began illegally copying secret docu- ments. They further believe that the evidence contradicts Snowden’s | | Epst_9780451494566_2p_all_r1.z.indd 127 ® 9/29/16 5:51 Pa | | HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_019615