Internet Security Alliance (ISA) chief Larry Clinton accused whistleblower Edward Snowden of spying calling him a “criminal who must be prosecuted”. In his interview with TOI on Friday Clinton compared Snowden with Gandhi, and said his did was not honorable.
“Here in India, one of your great heroes, Gandhi, broke the law for the right reasons and yet took punishment for it. That’s the honorable way to do it. I think Snowden is a criminal who should be prosecuted,” he said.
Clinton blamed Snowden passed the secret documents to China. But he had vehemently denied it.
Snowden’s leaks weren’t as vast scaled as the number of Pentagon and State Department documents leaked to WikiLeaks.
“I wish there was a way to prevent it. Snowden has shared somewhere between 50 (thousand) and 200,000 documents with reporters. These will continue to come out,” the chief of NSA said. This is incomparable to 400,000 Pentagon reports on the Iraq war, and tens of thousands of documents on U.S. operations in Afghanistan obtained by anti secrecy group.
Many NSA documents leaked by Snowden were marked “Top Secret” or such with even more level of secrecy “Special Intelligence” stamp. The material includes highly technical details on U.S. and allied eavesdropping activities.
Matthew Olsen, director of the National Counterterrorism Center in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, called Snowden’s leaks as “extremely damaging.”
“There is no doubt that those disclosures have made our job harder. We’ve seen that terrorists or adversaries are seeking to learn about the ways that we collect intelligence and seeking to adapt and change the ways that they communicate,” he told at congressional hearing.
Snowden’ leaks also included at least 58,000 classified documents generated by Government Communications Headquarters, the NSA’s British eavesdropping partner, according to British authorities.
While working for National Security Agency Edward Snowden obtained secret passwords and downloaded tens of thousands of classified documents on vast NSA surveillance programs.
And leaked secret reports to journalists at The Guardian and The Washington Post.
Snowden has sought asylum in Russia.
If govts. weren’t so corrupt and secretive about their actions, whistleblowers wouldn’t find it necessary to expose them. Spying on other countries is bad enough; but, spying on their own citizens is unconscionable. What are they so afraid of that they have to have such intense and widespread surveillance on everyone?!