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28 Intelligence Agency that the military files compromised by Snowden included documents bearing on military plans and weapons systems; foreign government’s intelligence activities (including special activities), intelligence sources, or methods or cryptology; Scientific and technological matters relating to national security;; vulnerabilities systems, installations, infrastructures, projects, plans, or protection services relations to national security and the development, production, or use of weapons of mass destruction. The members of the House and Senate Intelligence Committees, but not the public, also have been privy to an NSA investigation that established the chronology of his actions, including changing jobs, copying more than one million classified documents at the Signals Intelligence Center in Hawaii and flying to Russia. Nor does additional information necessarily change the minds of people who already have a firm view. In the field of social psychology, the testing of “confirmation theory” consistently shows that people tend to more readily reject new information that contradicts their pre-existing beliefs. For example, when Lee Harvey Oswald was arrested in the Texas Theater on November 22, 1963, he said famously, “I haven’t shot anybody.” Ten months later, the Warren Commission presented evidence, including ballistic tests that it clamed showed that Oswald had shot three people, including President John F. Kennedy, less than an hour before making his statement. Yet, many of those who believed Oswald’s public proclamation his innocence chose to believe that the government had falsified all the incriminating evidence to tarnish Oswald (who had been killed on November 24, 1963) rather than accept that they had been wrong in believing Oswald. The charges, countercharges and defamatory name-calling in the Snowden case therefore only deepened the great divide. Those who saw Snowden as a democratic hero exposing the abuses of power of an out-of-control national security state tended to dismiss anything that depicts Snowden in a negative light as a fabrication while those who saw Snowden as a “traitor” tended to dismiss anything that depicted him in a more positive light. When it comes to the murky universe of spy agencies, the problem in deciding where the truth lies is further heightened by the possibility of deliberate deception. Spy masters are, after all, in the business of concealing their most sensitive operations. It is often considered essential that important secrets be protected by what Winston Churchill famously termed “a bodyguard of lies.” Top intelligence officials are not exempt from this practice. Consider, for example, the response to a question concerning the NSA’s operations made by James D. Clapper, the Director of National Intelligence to the Senate Intelligence Committee on March 12, 2013. Senator Ron Wyden (D-Oregon) of the Committee asked the spy master if the NSA collected data on Americans. Clapper answered that the NSA did not knowingly “collect any type of data” on millions of Americans. Clapper’s answer was clearly untrue. However, it did not mislead Senator Wyden or any other members of the Senate Intelligence Committee because Clapper had truthfully testified that the NSA did collect American’s telephone records in a classified session of the Committee earlier that week. Who was being misled was the American public. Yet, none of the Senators on the Committee, including Senator Wyden, corrected this obviously false answer. When Clapper realized he had misspoken, he could not publically correct the record of the public HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_020180