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image. The 35-page Defense Intelligence Agency’s damage assessment, for example, that said
that 900,000 Pentagon documents were compromised by Snowden, was nor made public. It was
only disclosed via a Vice magazine Freedom of Information request in June 2015.
What is known is the number of documents that Snowden gave to journalists in Hong
Kong. As will be recalled, Poitras and Greenwald were “writing partners.” When Greenwald
discovered that his copy of the documents were corrupted, Poitras made a copy of the thumb
drive that Snowden gave her in Hong Kong and sent it to her Greenwald in Rio de Janeiro by a
courier. That courier was intercepted by British authorities at Heathrow Airport. When
examined, the Poitras-Greenwald thumb drive contained some 58,000 documents. This meant
that the lion’s share of the 1.3 million documents that the NSA claimed were compromised had
not been given to journalists and is unaccounted for.
The numbers game is not only misleading nut unenlightening on the issue of the value of the
compromised documents. Many of the putative 1.3 million documents that the NSA says were
copied and moved were duplicate copies. Others were outdated or otherwise useless routing data.
So the quantity does not tell the story. Of far more importance than the quantity of the total haul
is the quality of some of the data that Snowden had copied. Just a single one of these documents
could cripple not just the NSA but America’s entire multi-billion dollar apparatus for intercepting
foreign intelligence. The previously-cited summary of requests by the CIA, FBI, Pentagon and
other agencies for communications intelligence, for example, which was 31,000 pages long, listed
all the gaps in U.S. coverage of adversaries, including those cited by President Obama’s national
security team. As Ledgett warned, this single document, if it fell into enemy hands, would provide
out adversaries with “a roadmap of what we know what we don’t know and imp/licitly a way to
protect themselves.” The “roadmap” was not found among the files on the thumb drive. Nor
were most of the missing level 3 lists concerning NSA activities in Russia and China found on the
thumb drive, even though Snowden said he took taken his final job at Booz Allen to get access to
these lists. If Snowden had not given these documents to Poitras, Greenwald or other journalists,
where were they?
The compartment logs showed that Snowden copied and transferred these level 3 documents in
his final week at the NSA. He presumably had them in his possession in Hong Kong after he
arrived on May 20, 2013. On June 3™, according to Greenwald, he was still sorting through the
material to determine which ones were appropriate to give to journalists. On June 12" 2013, he
told reporter Lana Lam in Hong Kong that he was going through the documents, country by
country, to determine which additional ones he should pass on to journalists. Eleven days later, he
departed Hong Kong for Moscow carrying at least one laptop computer. Even after arriving in
Moscow, he suggested he still had NSA secrets in his possession. "No intelligence service — not
even our own — has the capacity to compromise the secrets I continue to protect, “ he wrote to
former Senator Gordon Humphrey, “I cannot be coerced into revealing that information, even
under torture." Much of the material he copied while working at Booz Allen remained, as far as
the NSA could determine, missing. Had he brought these files under his “protection” to Russia?
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Dates
Document Details
| Filename | HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_020288.jpg |
| File Size | 0.0 KB |
| OCR Confidence | 85.0% |
| Has Readable Text | Yes |
| Text Length | 3,543 characters |
| Indexed | 2026-02-04T16:41:15.127122 |