14 DAY TRIAL // Regardless of what the US officials say, Edward Snowden denies claims that he made off with 1.7 million classified documents, saying that the number is far less than what has been speculated.
In an interview for WIRED, the young whistleblower claims that not only did he not take this many documents, but he also wanted the investigators to figure out exactly what documents he took after everything was exposed.
Snowden says that he tried to leave a trail of “digital bread crumbs” so investigators can figure out what documents he copied and which ones he simply viewed. He hoped that the NSA would see that he was trying to simply blow the whistle and not to provide classified information to foreign governments.
If investigators had managed to pick up the trail, the US government would have been able to prepare for future leaks, to change code words, to revise operational plans or to mitigate damage.
Alas, Snowden believes his trail of breadcrumbs has gone unnoticed by investigators, a conclusion he reached after hearing that the NSA thought he took 1.7 million files. “I figured they would have a hard time. I didn’t figure they would be completely incapable,” he says, certainly hurting someone’s ego.
The US government continues to want Snowden to return to the United States to face charges. While returning home is something that the whistleblower wants, it’s not something that he’d like to do under current conditions.
As for the attitude the US government has had so far towards himself and the leaks, Snowden believes they’re most likely speculating that the documents contain material that is quite damaging, secrets that are yet to come out in media reports. This is, of course, due to the NSA’s inability of figuring out what documents Snowden took.
“I think they think there's a smoking gun in there that would be the death of them all politically. The fact that the government's investigation failed—that they don't know what was taken and that they keep throwing out these ridiculous huge numbers—implies to me that somewhere in their damage assessment they must have seen something that was like, ‘Holy [redacted].’ And they think it's still out there,” Snowden reasons.
Even so, it is probably quite likely that such information could be on the files and Snowden, or the custodians of the documents, may not be aware of. The whistleblower refuses to say how he managed to gather the files, but it has been speculated for a while that he used a web crawler to find various keywords of keyword combinations.