The US Intelligence Community has a Third Leaker
Ever since the Intercept published this story about the US government’s Terrorist Screening Database, the press has been writing about a “second leaker”:
The Intercept article focuses on the growth in U.S. government databases of known or suspected terrorist names during the Obama administration.
The article cites documents prepared by the National Counterterrorism Center dated August 2013, which is after Snowden left the United States to avoid criminal charges.
Greenwald has suggested there was another leaker. In July, he said on Twitter “it seems clear at this point” that there was another.
Everyone’s miscounting. This is the third leaker:
- Leaker #1: Edward Snowden.
- Leaker #2: The person who is passing secrets to Jake Appelbaum, Laura Poitras and others in Germany: the Angela Merkel surveillance story, the TAO catalog, the X-KEYSCORE rules. My guess is that this is either an NSA employee or contractor working in Germany, or someone from German intelligence who has access to NSA documents. Snowden has said that he is not the source for the Merkel story, and Greenwald has confirmed that the Snowden documents are not the source for the X-KEYSCORE rules. I have also heard privately that the NSA knows that this is a second leaker.
- Leaker #3: This new leaker, with access to a different stream of information (the NCTC is not the NSA), whom the Intercept calls “a source in the intelligence community.”
Harvard Law School professor Yochai Benkler has written an excellent law-review article on the need for a whistleblower defense. And there’s this excellent article by David Pozen on why government leaks are, in general, a good thing.
Chase • August 7, 2014 12:24 PM
Hi Bruce,
I have been following your work for a year or two and would like to say thank you for all the great work you do.
I also want to speculate on the third leaker. Given that Jeremy Scahill has been working with The Intercept (and given his recent work in Dirty Wars), I suspect he has sources in the NCTC and JSOC that likely provided the material.
Food for thought.