Snowden's US Detractors Say He Was Smart Enough to Fool Americans But Not Russians

Over at The Daily Beast,

Eli Lake reports on how U.S. officials and pols are almost
certainly exaggerating the extent of the damage done by National
Security Agency (NSA) whisteblower Edward Snowden.

For instance,
the admitted liar and Director of National Intelligence James
Clapper

said a week ago that Snowden’s activities have placed the lives
of intelligence officers and assets at risk. Sen. Susan
Collins, a Republican from Maine, said if one were to stack the
documents stolen by Snowden it would be three miles high….

But the DIA [Defense Intelligence Agency] assessment is based on
two important assumptions. First, it assumes that Snowden’s master
file includes data from every network he ever scanned. Second, it
assumes that this file is already in or will end up in the hands of
America’s adversaries. If these assumptions turn out to be true,
then the alarm raised in the last week will be warranted. The key
word here is “if.”

Lake points out a huge number of
contingencies at play:

The DIA’s assessment assumed that every classified system
Snowden visited was sucked dry of its data and placed in a file.
DIA director Gen. Michael Flynn put it this way on Tuesday in
testimony before the House Permanent Select Committee on
Intelligence: “We assume that Snowden, everything that he touched,
we assume that he took, stole.”

According to various sources, it’s likely that many of the
documents that Snowden took are not only encrypted but that the
keys to the docs are distributed among various individuals in the
government to make it next to impossible for one person to decrypt
material. That’s done so spies can’t simply nab one person with the
goods.

But Rep. Mike Rogers (R-Mich.), who has accused Glenn
Greenwald without evidence
of selling state secrets and who
routinely exaggerates the role of mass NSA surveillance in
capturing terrorists, figures the Russkies have the drop of
Snowden:

“If [Snowden] really believes he has created something the
Russian intelligence services can’t get through, then he is more
naïve than I think he already is,” Rogers said. “That makes a huge
leap of assumption that a guy by the way who has not been quite
honest about how he got where he was and what he stole and for what
purpose to believe the fact that no one can get to this but me. I
don’t believe it.”

Read Lake’s full piece here.