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302 | HOW AMERICA LOST ITS SECRETS even though they had been isolated from any network. This innova- tion had provided President Obama and his national security team an edge of which our adversaries were unaware from 2008 to 2013. However, Snowden deliberately nullified this advantage in 2013 by revealing this technology (which was published in The New York Times and other newspapers). The vast number of documents that he compromised contained many other secret sources and methods. The full extent of the damage Snowden did may never be fully known, even though the Department of Defense spent the better part of a year, and tens of thousands of investigative man-hours, trying to sort out just the compromised sources and methods per- taining to military and cyber-defense operations. In addition to the direct and significant cost to taxpayers represented by this investiga- tion, one measure of how serious the loss has been was revealed by Michael McConnell, the vice-chairman of the company for which Snowden had worked at the time of the breach. McConnell stated publicly, “Snowden has compromised more capability than any spy in U.S. history.” McConnell had no obvious reason to exaggerate the ® loss because his company, Booz Allen Hamilton, was partly respon- © sible for the damage. It hired Snowden, as will be recalled, even after its vetters had detected an untruthful statement in his application. McConnell said, “This will have impact on our ability to do our mission for the next twenty to thirty years.” By any measure, two decades of lost intelligence is a steep price to pay. To be sure, the practical value of peacetime intelligence about the activities of adversary states is not always evident. What is far clearer to the public is the value of intelligence that can thwart ter- rorist attacks against subways, theaters, and other civilian targets. We have seen that Snowden also deprived the NSA of much of the effectiveness of its PRISM program by revealing it, through the arti- cles published at his specific behest in The Guardian and The Wash- ington Post that explained how it worked. This single revelation compromised a system, duly authorized by Congress and the presi- dent, that had been the government's single most effective tool for learning in advance about attacks in America and Europe by jihadist terrorists. | | Epst_9780451494566_2p_all_r1.indd 302 ® 9/3016 8:13AM | | HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_019790