Ex-NSA Chief Hayden Finally Admits Snowden Is a Whistleblower

Michael Hayden, former Director of both the CIA
and the National Security Agency (NSA), has said a lot of things
about Edward Snowden. He’s called the former government contractor
a “defector,” a “traitor,” and a
“morally arrogant, troubled young man.” He’s also joked about
getting the
“evil” Snowden
killed. So it comes as a bit of a surprise to hear Hayden
finally on pace with
the majority of Americans by finally referring to Snowden as a
whistle-blower.

First spotted by
one of Snowden’s legal advisers, Jesselyn Radack, Hayden said
during an
Aspen Institute Security Forum (a “gathering of top-level
present and former government officials from all relevant national
security agencies”) last week, “When Snowden blew the
whistle on the 215 program, that’s the metadata stuff, the
phone bills up at Fort Meade, I’ve got to tell you, people at the
fort thought they were cruising smooth.”
Here’s the video:

Techdirt‘s Mike Masnick
suggests that it might have been “something of a Freudian slip”
since “he goes on to insist that the program was clearly perfectly
legal based on all of the supposed ‘oversight'” though he
“conveniently leaves out the fact that many of the details of the
program were not actually known by those who did the approving” and
other facts that disrupt his narrative of a squeaky clean
NSA. 

Nevertheless, this is a surprising softening of rhetoric from
Hayden. He has in the past vigorously
refused to use the
term whistle-blower to describe Snowden, arguing
that “he did … not tell the appropriate authorities.”

Maybe Hayden’s changed tone has to do with the fact that the NSA
is losing interest in Snowden. “As time goes on” he becomes less
relevant, a current NSA official
said at the conference. “It’s been over a year since he had
access to our networks and our information so the need for us to
understand that greater level of detail is lesser and lesser.”

Snowden’s asylum in Russia is set to expire this Thursday, July
31. He has applied for an extension, but is still “awaiting
approval from Moscow,”
according to Al Jazeera.