N.S.A. Releases Email That It Says Undercuts Snowden’s Whistle-Blower Claim
WASHINGTON — The National Security Agency
on Thursday released what it said was the sole internal email from
Edward J. Snowden before he fled with a trove of agency secrets, and
officials asserted that the message undercut his argument that he
protested the legality of surveillance programs before he released any
of the documents he stole to journalists.
The email
to the N.S.A. general counsel’s office, dated April 8, 2013, makes no
reference to the government’s bulk collection of telephone data or other
surveillance or cyberprograms. Nor does it raise concerns about
violations of privacy.
Instead,
Mr. Snowden was seeking clarification about the hierarchy of laws
governing the N.S.A., based on what he had learned in an agency training
course about privacy protection rules for handling intercepted
information.
By
the time the email was sent, Mr. Snowden, who was a private contractor
and not an agency employee, had already implanted software in the N.S.A.
system that was copying its files automatically. Two months later, the
first of those files were made public by journalists who had received
them from Mr. Snowden.
The N.S.A. released the email in response to Mr. Snowden’s assertion in an interview
with Brian Williams of NBC News that was broadcast Wednesday night. In
the interview, Mr. Snowden said he had raised complaints both in Hawaii
and at the N.S.A. headquarters at Fort Meade, Md., about “real problems
with the way the N.S.A. was interpreting its legal authorities.”
Now
living in Moscow to avoid prosecution in the United States, he said the
response he received was “more or less” that he “should stop asking
questions.”
On Thursday, in an email exchange with The Washington Post,
Mr. Snowden said the N.S.A.’s response was a “clearly tailored and
incomplete leak” released for “political advantage.” He suggested that
for the full story, the White House should “ask my former colleagues,
management and the senior leadership team.”
The
email the N.S.A. released is from “ejsnowd,” an nsa.ic.gov address that
was taken out of service last year. It cites information in the N.S.A.
course about what he calls “The Hierarchy of Governing Authorities and
Documents.” Mr. Snowden lists the order of legal authorities this way:
■ “US constitution.”
■ “Federal Statutes/Presidential Executive Orders (EO).”
■ “Department of Defense (DoD) and Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) regulations.”
■ “NSA/CSS Directives and Policies.”
Lesser
regulations appear further down. Mr. Snowden was concerned about the
second line because “it seems to imply Executive Orders have the same
precedence as law.”
A
few days later, a lawyer in the N.S.A. general counsel’s office wrote
back in an email that begins “Hello Ed” and continues: “Executive Orders
(E.O.s) have the ‘force and effect of law.’ That said, you are correct
that E.O.’s cannot override a statute.”
Officials
who have examined the email said Thursday that they suspected Mr.
Snowden was trying to determine whether some espionage activities may
have been conducted under executive orders instead of laws passed by
Congress. “But we don’t know for sure,” said an official who requested
anonymity in discussing classified material. “We do know we can’t find
other complaints.”
The
email was released after the government again found itself on the
defensive concerning Mr. Snowden’s revelations. Some administration
officials had argued for releasing the document much earlier to rebut
Mr. Snowden’s case that he should be regarded as a whistle-blower.
His interview with Mr. Williams was not the first time Mr. Snowden said he had tried to complain about N.S.A. programs.
“I
had reported these clearly problematic programs to more than 10
distinct officials, none of whom took any action to address them,” he
said in testimony presented to the European Parliament in March. “As an
employee of a private company rather than a direct employee of the U.S.
government, I was not protected by U.S. whistle-blower laws.” The Obama
administration had resisted releasing the unclassified email from Mr.
Snowden. But its hand was forced after the NBC interview, and Senator
Dianne Feinstein, the California Democrat who is chairwoman of the
Senate Intelligence Committee, told administration officials that her
panel would release the email. “I believe this transparency is important
and should also be applied to the communication that Snowden referenced
in his recent interview,” she said in a statement. Ms. Feinstein has
been among his greatest critics.
The
Obama administration also denied that Mr. Snowden had been trained as a
spy, as he told Mr. Williams on NBC. The N.S.A.’s mission is to
intercept and decode signals intelligence and, increasingly, to conduct
cyberoperations. But while its employees frequently operate undercover,
they do not conduct operations the way the C.I.A. officers do. The
national security adviser, Susan E. Rice, told Charlie Rose in an
interview Thursday night that “we have no idea” where Mr. Snowden’s
“assertion comes from.”
COPY http://international.nytimes.com/
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