Brazil senator pushes Snowden for Peace Prize
A Brazilian senator has nominated National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden for the 2014 Nobel Peace Prize. Sen. Vanessa Grazziotin, who heads thepanel investigating U.S. espionage in Brazil, said Snowden’s revelations have contributed to a more “stable and peaceful world.” Two Norwegian politicians have also jointly nominated Snowden for the prize. Anyone can be nominated for the prestigious honor. Snowden’s revelations showed that Brazil was the top NSA target in Latin America.
Associated Press
A top U.S. military intelligence official said Tuesday that the Pentagon will have to make costly changes to programs and personnel because of leaks by former National Security Agency analyst Edward Snowden.
Defense Intelligence Agency chief Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn told the House Intelligence Committee that his agency has to assume that Snowden took every document he accessed, and that much of it concerned Pentagon programs.
“We assume the worst case in how we are reviewing all of the Defense Department’s actions… events, exercises around the world,” said Flynn, whose agency produced a classified report assessing the fallout of the Snowden leaks.
He said he thinks there will likely have to be changes in all branches of the U.S. military because investigators have to assume the information is compromised.
“What he potentially made off with … transcends” the NSA’s telephone and Internet collection programs, said Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, speaking before the committee’s annual threat assessment hearing. “Less than 10 percent has to do with domestic surveillance programs,” he said.
Clapper has called on Snowden and anyone who is helping him to return the remaining documents that have not yet been published.
Documents released over the past year by Snowden have revealed that the NSA sweeps up millions of Americans’ phone and Internet records.
Revelations about the NSA’s spy programs were first published in the Guardian and The Washington Post newspapers in June, based on some of the thousands of documents Snowden handed over to Barton Gellman of the Post, Brazil-based American journalist Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras, a U.S. filmmaker.
The subsequent controversy has led President Barack Obama to ask agencies and Congress to consider some reforms.
Officials have said Snowden downloaded some 1.7 million documents. U.S. intelligence officials have said some of those documents include the identities of undercover operatives.
The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly about the case.
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In describing the effect of Snowden’s leaks, Clapper appeared to carefully retreat from his contention last week to the Senate Intelligence Committee that the disclosures were “the most massive and most damaging theft of intelligence information in our history.”
Some historians and researchers reacted to that comment by questioning whether the Snowden leaks were more damaging than Soviet spy rings that stole U.S. atomic bomb designs in the 1940s and lethally exposed American informants in Russia in the 1980s and 1990s.
Instead, in his opening statement Tuesday, Clapper told the House panel that Snowden’s leaks were “potentially the most massive and most damaging theft of intelligence information in our history.”
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