14 DAY TRIAL // It looks like Edward Snowden may not be alone in leaking intelligence documents, or so the US officials believe.
The federal government has concluded that there must be a new leaker exposing national security documents, CNN writes.
It seems that the proof is in a series of documents published alongside a new article on the NSA topic by The Intercept. More specifically, the journalist cites documents that were created by the National Counterterrorism Center from August 2013, which is well after Snowden left the United States and after he was under the protection of the Russian government.
Officials have been suspecting that there’s another individual leaking secret materials for a long while, but things were only confirmed earlier this week.
Glenn Greenwald hasn’t exactly confirmed the news, but he hasn’t denied it either. In his tweets he suggested that it should be pretty clear at this point that there was another individual leaking information, while in an interview he cryptically said that people have certainly been inspired by Edward Snowden’s courage to speak up against the questionable activities of the NSA and the US government.
“I have no doubt there will be other sources inside the government who see extreme wrongdoing who are inspired by Edward Snowden,” Greenwald told CNN in February.
The identity of this new leaker is, of course, secret so far and the documents he or she shared aren’t meant to be shared with foreign governments. By comparison, many of the ones Snowden shared have been meant “for export,” in a way, namely for sharing with the friendly governments within the Five Eyes (UK, Australia, New Zealand, Canada and the US).
Snowden is accused of stealing about 1.7 million classified documents although the whistleblower hasn’t confirmed the number, nor has Greenwald or anyone else who received documents from Snowden.
According to Greenwald’s recent report that seems to be based on documents from someone other than Edward Snowden, the Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment database has about 1 million names, which is a huge pool of people who may or may not be involved in terrorist activities.
A good part of these was added to the list after the so-called underwear bomber tried to blow up a jetliner heading for the United States on Christmas Day in 2009. Before the incident, there were about 500,000 names on the list, but the number quickly grew to 875,000 in 2012.
The Intercept reports that about 40 percent of the Terrorist Watchlist, which includes 700,000 people, aren’t even affiliated with terrorism.