A year after the emergence of Edward Snowden, the whistleblower who rattled the American establishment by exposing the mammoth global surveillance operation by its National Security Agency, the US authorities now suspect the existence of a second leaker.
The deep suspicion follows a recently-launched investigative website’s publication of new material from the US terrorism watch list, providing a statistical breakdown of the number of people thought to have affiliations with terrorist groups and the number of suspects put on the US’s “no-fly list”.
The material, representing a 12-page classified text, was published on Tuesday by Intercept, the website launched by Glenn Greenwald, the American journalist who had extensively reported on the Snowden leaks in the Guardian last year. The Intercept claimed the material had been “obtained from a source in the intelligence community”.
“Nearly half of the people on the US Government’s widely shared database of terrorist suspects are not connected to any known terrorist group,” the Intercept reports, citing classified Government documents.
Of the 680,000 people caught up in its Terrorist Screening Database, more than 40 per cent have been described by the Government as having “no recognized terrorist group affiliation”, says the website, adding: “That category — 280,000 people — dwarfs the number of watchlisted people suspected of ties to al Qaeda, Hamas, and Hezbollah combined.” It goes on to say that the number of people on the US no-fly list has grown more than 10-fold to an all-time high of 47,000 under President Obama. “The Government adds names to its databases, or adds information on existing subjects, at a rate of 900 records each day,” it writes. “The CIA uses a previously unknown programme, code-named Hydra, to secretly access databases maintained by foreign countries and extract data to add to the watchlists.”
Citing officials, CNN suggested that it is not a mere suspicion, but a conclusion already reached by the US Government that Greenwald’s website may have received the classified material from a new leaker. “The article (by Intercept) cites documents prepared by the National Counterterrorism Center dated August 2013, which is after Snowden left the United States to avoid criminal charges,” it said.
Greenwald refused to answer questions on the report about the existence of a new intelligence leaker. “Can’t comment on that CNN claim,” Greenwald said. Instead, he spoke of his plan to publish more information based on documents given to him Snowden, saying: “There are definitely still more stories based on Snowden documents coming.”