Bogus Asylum Seeker
I hope Eric Snowden has a well developed sense of irony because there's something almost funny about his whistleblowing behaviour in America only to jump ship and seek political asylum in Russia, a country which is much more authoritarian and state controlled than the one he left.
I've yet to read of any harm done by the USA or UK security agencies in carrying out secret surveillance of suspected terrorists, other than against the bad guys.
Yet as this report in The Times confirms the Snowden leaks have helped al-Qaeda and like-minded groups change the ways they communicate which makes the job of the security services that much more difficult.
Way to go, Snow!
Full damage of Snowden leaks revealed
The report says Edward Snowden 'has polluted ongoing operations' Getty Images
The report says Edward Snowden 'has polluted ongoing operations' Getty Images
By Deborah Haynes - The Times
Intelligence leaks by the whistleblower Edward Snowden have devastated Britain’s ability to fight terrorism and organised crime, according to the first public analysis of their impact.
Terrorist suspects are harder to detect, encrypted emails take longer to penetrate and operations at the government’s listening post had to be aborted after the revelations, the Henry Jackson Society think-tank said.
Its report said that terrorist suspects were using human couriers instead of email and mobile phones in what one US intelligence officer was quoted as calling the “most significant” change in terrorist behaviour since the Snowden files were released in June 2013.
Drawing on intelligence sources, Robin Simcox, the author of the report, demonstrated the impact of the leaks on day-to-day operations of British and US spies.
“Snowden, by revealing information concerning intelligence-gathering techniques, has polluted ongoing operations,” he wrote. “As they can no longer be run safely, due to fear of discovery and/or attribution, such intelligence gathering has had to stop.”
Technology companies were also said to be less willing to co-operate in requests by the security services for information on private communications.
A British security official was quoted as saying that, because of Mr Snowden, technology companies were “disengaging from the security apparatus after years of being helpful within the law”. Another official said that the public would be shocked to learn how little the state could do because of the actions of big technology companies in offering automatic encryption.
Theresa May, the home secretary, said yesterday that Mr Snowden had caused damage and hampered the security services. “I think it would be fair to say this had an impact not just on agencies in the UK,” she told the Commons home affairs select committee.
Mr Simcox’s 65-page report, which will be published next month, is the first comprehensive study of the impact of the Snowden leaks to enter the public domain. It flagged up a comment by Admiral Mike Rogers, the head of America’s National Security Agency, from November 2013 that the disclosures had prompted three al-Qaeda- affiliated organisations to change the way they communicate.
There was evidence of militants becoming more aware of the need to protect digital communications. The report said that earlier issues of Inspire, an English-language magazine produced by al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), provided a public key to access their encryption software program, letting readers email the group.
“Yet the issue after the Snowden leaks stated that ‘due to technical and security reasons’ they had suspended their email addresses,” the report said. “If we were previously accessing those emails in order to help track AQAP’s attack planning in both Yemen and the US, that was lost,” Mr Simcox said.
He added that encryption tools were more readily available for jihadists. He quoted an analysis that found that three encryption tools were released within months of the leaks.
