A
protester holds a placard calling for Germany to give political asylum
to the fugitive former US spy agency contractor Edward Snowden, outside
the seat of the lower house of parliament, the Bundestag in Berlin last
month. Photograph: Thomas Peter/Reuters
National Security Agency officials are considering a controversial amnesty that would return Edward Snowden to the United States, in exchange for the extensive document trove the whistleblower took from the agency.
An amnesty, which does not have the support of the State Department,
would represent a surprising denouement to an international drama that
has lasted half a year. It is particularly unexpected from a
surveillance agency that has spent months insisting that Mr Snowden’s
disclosures have caused vast damage to US national security.
The NSA official in charge of assessing the alleged damage caused by Mr Snowden’s leaks, Richard Ledgett,
told CBS News an amnesty still remains controversial within the agency,
which has spent the past six months defending itself against a global
outcry and legislative and executive proposals to restrain its broad
surveillance activities.
“My personal view is, yes, it’s worth having
a conversation about,” Mr Ledgett, who is under consideration to become
the agency’s top civilian, said in an interview due to air yeterday on
60 Minutes. “I would need assurances that the remainder of the data
could be secured, and my bar for those assurances would be very high. It
would be more than just an assertion on his part.”
Mr Snowden is in Russia, having been granted a year-long asylum that has sparked international intrigue. In June, the Justice Department
filed a criminal complaint charging the 30-year old former contractor
with theft of government property, unauthorised communication of
national defence information and “wilful communication of classified
communications intelligence information to an unauthorised person”,
although he has not yet been indicted.
Any amnesty would have to come through the Justice Department, which did not respond to a request for comment.
The NSA’s director, General Keith Alexander,
told CBS that granting Mr Snowden amnesty would reward the leaks and
potentially incentivise future ones. But Gen Alexander is retiring in
the spring, joining his civilian deputy John C Inglis, and Mr Ledgett is rumored to be a top candidate to replace Mr Inglis.
Yesterday, the state department spokeswoman Marie Harf said that Ledgett was stating a “personal view”.
“Our
position has not changed,” Ms Harf said. “Mr Snowden is facing very
serious charges and should return to the United States to face them.”
Gen Alexander’s predecessor at the NSA, retired Air Force General Michael Hayden, also rejected an amnesty for Mr Snowden.
“I
wouldn’t do it. That simply motivates future Snowdens,” said Gen
Hayden, who began the bulk collection of Americans’ phone and internet
metadata in 2001 as a response to 9/11 that was initially unknown and
unauthorised by Congress and the courts.
But
Gen Hayden also said that Mr Snowden had kickstarted an important
debate in the US about the appropriate balance between liberty and
security.
“Snowden was important. He accelerated a debate, he misshaped the debate, but the debate was coming,” Gen Hayden said, on NBC.
Mr Snowden told the New York Times in October that he divested himself of the documents before leaving Hong Kong
for Russia, which he suggested was a preventive measure to keep the
documents out of the hands of Russian intelligence. Lack of access to
the documents, which are now in the hands of journalists, would likely
complicate the “assurances” Mr Ledgett indicated the government would
require for any amnesty.
The NSA does not believe that Mr Snowden’s documents
have escaped the collection capabilities of its Russian and Chinese
counterparts; a senior official told the New York Times on Saturday that
the government may never know how much material Mr Snowden took from
the agency.
The Guardian continues to publish
surveillance stories based on Mr Snowden’s leaks, as do the Washington
Post and other news organisations around the world, aided by the former
Guardian journalist Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras, the two journalists who maintain possession of the entire Snowden data trove.
Mr
Ledgett told Reuters that the NSA is worried about the large majority
of documents the agency believes to have been taken by Snowden that news
organizations have not yet published.
Whether or not Mr Snowden returns to the US a
free man, the Obama administration continues to grapple with the
aftershocks of his disclosures. Mr Ledgett and other NSA officials have
said that the agency is instituting new technical initiatives to prevent
new Snowdens by increasing internal data security. Alexander testified
last Wednesday that the agency would soon detail those to Congress, but
he said they included “compartmentalising and encrypting data”.
However,
NSA officials conceded in interviews that by the time of Mr Snowden’s
leaks, they had yet to fully implement data-security promises the
government pledged to institute after the 2010 leaks of war logs and
diplomatic cables by the Army private Chelsea Manning.
On Friday, a review group created by the White House provided President Barack Obama with a report recommending 40 potential surveillance reforms. National Security Council spokeswoman Caitlin Hayden said the administration would spend “several weeks” assessing which to implement, and would make the report public in January.
The
White House has already rejected one proposed initiative, which would
divorce the NSA from the military’s Cyber Command, which protects US
military data networks and attacks those of adversaries. Civil liberties
groups have already attacked the review group’s reported proposals as
cosmetic.
“The proposed recommendations from the Review Group do not go far enough,” said Alan Butler,
a lawyer for the Electronic Privacy Information Center. “Bulk
collection of personal data should simply end. And meaningful
constraints on the NSA should be re-established. The purpose of FISA was
to allow for electronic surveillance of foreign targets for foreign
intelligence purposes, and the current framework of bulk domestic
collection is upside down.”
Beyond the review
group, privacy advocates in Congress are pushing a bill, the USA Freedom
Act, that would prevent the government from collecting Americans’ phone
and other data in bulk without court-authorised and individualised
suspicion of wrongdoing. The USA Freedom Act has yet to clear any of its
relevant committees in the House and Senate, but supporters claim 120 co-sponsors in the legislature.
The
60 Minutes interview is part of an NSA initiative to rebuild its
reputation through increased public engagement. This week, the
sympathetic blog Lawfare will air a series of podcasted interviews with
NSA leaders. Senior NSA officials have also been making appearances on
college campuses to argue that their bulk surveillance activities are
necessary for national security and not intrusive on Americans’ privacy.
Guardian News
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