Did Snowden provide state secrets to Russian intelligence?

[Axulus]

One more consideration... looking back, it seems that the flight Snowden was on departed from Hong Kong at about 7am local time on June 23rd. In Washington DC, that would still be 7pm on June 22nd. And of course Snowden could have been on the airport sooner, so if the system is not real-time it is very plausible that he could have slipped through:

1) Maybe he was at the airport already at night before the request was processed.
2) Maybe HK bureocracy slowed down the process.
3) Maybe China deliberately dragged its feet to avoid getting involved in the debacle, and looked away.

As for getting into the plane, his final destination was Havana, not Moscow, so he would not need a Russian visa. Just a passport for identification.

Good points. It is still unclear on what exactly happened.

 

[barbos]

One more consideration... looking back, it seems that the flight Snowden was on departed from Hong Kong at about 7am local time on June 23rd. In Washington DC, that would still be 7pm on June 22nd. And of course Snowden could have been on the airport sooner, so if the system is not real-time it is very plausible that he could have slipped through:

1) Maybe he was at the airport already at night before the request was processed.
2) Maybe HK bureocracy slowed down the process.
3) Maybe China deliberately dragged its feet to avoid getting involved in the debacle, and looked away.

As for getting into the plane, his final destination was Havana, not Moscow, so he would not need a Russian visa. Just a passport for identification.

So he did not appear to lie about that part, thanks.

 

[barbos]

Another thing I don't really get - why would russia, cuba and/or ecuador care if Snowden's passport is revoked? If they are willing to grant asylum against the wishes of the U.S. government then why wouldn't the U.S. revocation of the passport be irrelevant to these countries for purposes of allowing him to travel between these countries? IOW, why can't he get permission from them to continue his journey?

That's what eventually happened. But it was clear that he could not fly from Moscow because US was prepared to start forcing planes down.

 

[barbos]

You expect Snowden to sift through 1.5 million files and select only the ones which are relevant? And what germans or Merkel think about relevance or lack of it anyway?

He should've located the several dozen relevant files on the illegal NSA spying program and taken those and only those.

He obviously sifted through the info because he released only a little bit at a time to the journalists. He even told them the first story they should do is on Verizon's cooperation with the NSA and provided the journalists the documents relevant to that. By not doing that, there is a good possibility that Russia ended up with some or even all of that additional info, even if Snowden never intended that to happen.

And who cares what Germany and Merkel think of the wiretapping? Completely irrelevant to the claim that all he did was reveal an illegal NSA spying program on the US public. He leaked that plus additional embarassing info that was unreleated.

I think nobody would have believed him if it was just a few powerpoints. Nowadays you need a massive dumps with a lot of juicy context which can be independently verified to look genuine

 

[whichphilosophy]

Investigative journalist Edward Jay Epstein thinks so, and caught Snowden in several lies:

For example, in October 2014, he told the editor of the Nation, “I’m in exile. My government revoked my passport intentionally to leave me exiled” and “chose to keep me in Russia.” According to Mr. Snowden, the U.S. government accomplished this entrapment by suspending his passport while he was in midair after he departed Hong Kong on June 23, thus forcing him into the hands of President Vladimir Putin’s regime.

None of this is true. The State Department invalidated Mr. Snowden’s passport while he was still in Hong Kong, not after he left for Moscow on June 23. The “Consul General-Hong Kong confirmed that Hong Kong authorities were notified that Mr. Snowden’s passport was revoked June 22,” according to the State Department’s senior watch officer, as reported by ABC news on June 23, 2013.

Mr. Snowden could not have been unaware of the government’s pursuit of him, since the criminal complaint against him, which was filed June 14, had been headline news in Hong Kong. That the U.S. acted against him while he was still in Hong Kong is of great importance to the timeline because it points to the direct involvement of Aeroflot, an airline which the Russian government effectively controls. Aeroflot bypassed its normal procedures to allow Mr. Snowden to board the Moscow flight—even though he had neither a valid passport nor a Russian visa, as his newly assigned lawyer, Anatoly Kucherena, said at a press conference in Russia on July 12, 2013.

By falsely claiming his passport was invalidated after the plane departed Hong Kong—instead of before he left—Mr. Snowden hoped to conceal this extraordinary waiver. The Russian government further revealed its helping hand, judging by a report in Russia’s Izvestia newspaper when, on arrival, Mr. Snowden was taken off the plane by a security team in a “special operation.”

....

Mr. Snowden’s own narrative asserts that he came to Russia not only empty-handed but without access to any of the stolen material. He wrote in Vanity Fair in 2014 that he had destroyed all of it before arriving in Moscow—the very data that he went to such lengths to steal a few weeks earlier in Hawaii.

As it turns out, this claim is also untrue. It is belied by two Kremlin insiders who were in a position to know what Mr. Snowden actually brought with him to Moscow. One of them, Frants Klintsevich, was the first deputy chairman of the defense and security committee of the Duma (Russia’s parliament) at the time of Mr. Snowden’s defection. “Let’s be frank,” Mr. Klintsevich said in a taped interview with NPR in June 2016, “Mr. Snowden did share intelligence. This is what security services do.”

The other insider was Anatoly Kucherena, a well-connected Moscow lawyer and Mr. Putin’s friend. Mr. Kucherena served as the intermediary between Mr. Snowden and Russian authorities. On Sept. 23, 2013, Mr. Kucherena gave a long interview to Sophie Shevardnadze, a journalist for Russia Today television.

When Ms. Shevardnadze directly asked him if Mr. Snowden had given all the documents he had taken from the NSA to journalists in Hong Kong, Mr. Kucherena said Mr. Snowden had only given “some” of the NSA’s documents in his possession to journalists in Hong Kong. “So he [Mr. Snowden] does have some materials that haven’t been made public yet?” Ms. Shevardnadze asked. “Certainly,” Mr. Kucherena answered.

This disclosure filled in a crucial piece of the puzzle. It explained why NSA documents that Mr. Snowden had copied, but had not given to the journalists in Hong Kong—such as the embarrassing revelation about the NSA targeting the cellphone of German Chancellor Angela Merkel—continued to surface after Mr. Snowden arrived in Moscow, along with NSA documents released via WikiLeaks.

As this was a critical discrepancy in Mr. Snowden’s narrative, I went to Moscow in October 2015 to see Mr. Kucherena. During our conversation, Mr. Kucherena confirmed that his interview with Ms. Shevardnadze was accurate, and that Mr. Snowden had brought secret material with him to Moscow.

Mr. Snowden’s narrative also includes the assertion that he was neither debriefed by nor even met with any Russian government official after he arrived in Moscow. This part of the narrative runs counter to findings of U.S. intelligence. According to the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence report, Mr. Snowden, since he arrived in Moscow, “has had, and continues to have, contact with Russian intelligence services.” This finding is consistent with Russian debriefing practices, as described by the ex-KGB officers with whom I spoke in Moscow

Mr. Snowden also publicly claimed in Moscow in December 2013 to have secrets in his head, including “access to every target, every active operation. Full lists of them.” Could Mr. Snowden’s Russian hosts ignore such an opportunity after Mr. Putin had authorized his exfiltration to Moscow? Mr. Snowden, with no exit options, was in the palm of their hands. Under such circumstances, as Mr. Klintsevich pointed out in his June NPR interview: “If there’s a possibility to get information, they [the Russian intelligence services] will get it.”

http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-fable-of-edward-snowden-1483143143

If he really did pass along intelligence to the Russian government, then he does not deserve a pardon, in my view.

Any investigation must include the US, Russia, and other countries with an impartial body to adjudicate.

Se article printed August 2016


http://www.mintpressnews.com/snowden-leak-nsa-hacking-tools-russias-warning-us-government/219660/

USTIN, Texas — According to whistleblower Edward Snowden, a recent leak of secret NSA hacking tools reflects an escalation in tensions between Russia and the United States. For others, though, it highlights concerns about what, if any, privacy is afforded to the general public.

The NSA whistleblower lit up Twitter on Tuesday with suggestions of “Russian responsibility” in the recent release of the NSA tools, noting that it could be a response to accusations by the Hillary Clinton campaign that Russian hackers leaked internal Democratic National Convention emails.


https://www.rt.com/op-edge/372372-russia-hack-nsa-director/



http://theduran.com/nsa-whistleblower-says-dnc-hack-not-done-russia-us-intelligence/

Aaron Klein Investigative Radio” (broadcast on New York’s AM 970 The Answer and Philadelphia’s NewsTalk 990 AM), US government whistleblower William Binney threw his hat into the DNC hack ring by stating that the Democratic National Committee’s server was not hacked by Russia but by a disgruntled U.S. intelligence worker.
Binney referenced testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee in March 2011 by then-FBI Director Robert S. Mueller in which Meuller spoke of the FBI’s ability to access various secretive databases “to track down known and suspected terrorists.”
Stated Binney: “Now what he (Mueller) is talking about is going into the NSA database, which is shown of course in the (Edward) Snowden material released, which shows a direct access into the NSA database by the FBI and the CIA. Which there is no oversight of by the way. So that means that NSA and a number of agencies in the U.S. government also have those emails.”
“So if the FBI really wanted them they can go into that database and get them right now,” he stated of Clinton’s emails as well as DNC emails.

NB The above are from sources which tend to biased to the current US government, but the content seems valid.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/post...nd-the-election-hacks/?utm_term=.c610586e34c4

Why the CIA won’t want to go public with evidence of Russia’s hacking
The above is from the very pro Clinton Washington Post
Nonetheless it's not exactly a fair system if the evidence does not get made public.

The public know too well that everyone pretty much tries to hack each other's information (definition gaining unauthorized access to data in a system or a computer).
It's not clear how any such information in itself somehow influenced the voters in an election. Is there going to be a series of opinion polls to find that out.

 

[whichphilosophy]

Investigative journalist Edward Jay Epstein thinks so, and caught Snowden in several lies:

For example, in October 2014, he told the editor of the Nation, “I’m in exile. My government revoked my passport intentionally to leave me exiled” and “chose to keep me in Russia.” According to Mr. Snowden, the U.S. government accomplished this entrapment by suspending his passport while he was in midair after he departed Hong Kong on June 23, thus forcing him into the hands of President Vladimir Putin’s regime.

None of this is true. The State Department invalidated Mr. Snowden’s passport while he was still in Hong Kong, not after he left for Moscow on June 23. The “Consul General-Hong Kong confirmed that Hong Kong authorities were notified that Mr. Snowden’s passport was revoked June 22,” according to the State Department’s senior watch officer, as reported by ABC news on June 23, 2013.

Mr. Snowden could not have been unaware of the government’s pursuit of him, since the criminal complaint against him, which was filed June 14, had been headline news in Hong Kong. That the U.S. acted against him while he was still in Hong Kong is of great importance to the timeline because it points to the direct involvement of Aeroflot, an airline which the Russian government effectively controls. Aeroflot bypassed its normal procedures to allow Mr. Snowden to board the Moscow flight—even though he had neither a valid passport nor a Russian visa, as his newly assigned lawyer, Anatoly Kucherena, said at a press conference in Russia on July 12, 2013.

By falsely claiming his passport was invalidated after the plane departed Hong Kong—instead of before he left—Mr. Snowden hoped to conceal this extraordinary waiver. The Russian government further revealed its helping hand, judging by a report in Russia’s Izvestia newspaper when, on arrival, Mr. Snowden was taken off the plane by a security team in a “special operation.”

....

Mr. Snowden’s own narrative asserts that he came to Russia not only empty-handed but without access to any of the stolen material. He wrote in Vanity Fair in 2014 that he had destroyed all of it before arriving in Moscow—the very data that he went to such lengths to steal a few weeks earlier in Hawaii.

As it turns out, this claim is also untrue. It is belied by two Kremlin insiders who were in a position to know what Mr. Snowden actually brought with him to Moscow. One of them, Frants Klintsevich, was the first deputy chairman of the defense and security committee of the Duma (Russia’s parliament) at the time of Mr. Snowden’s defection. “Let’s be frank,” Mr. Klintsevich said in a taped interview with NPR in June 2016, “Mr. Snowden did share intelligence. This is what security services do.”

The other insider was Anatoly Kucherena, a well-connected Moscow lawyer and Mr. Putin’s friend. Mr. Kucherena served as the intermediary between Mr. Snowden and Russian authorities. On Sept. 23, 2013, Mr. Kucherena gave a long interview to Sophie Shevardnadze, a journalist for Russia Today television.

When Ms. Shevardnadze directly asked him if Mr. Snowden had given all the documents he had taken from the NSA to journalists in Hong Kong, Mr. Kucherena said Mr. Snowden had only given “some” of the NSA’s documents in his possession to journalists in Hong Kong. “So he [Mr. Snowden] does have some materials that haven’t been made public yet?” Ms. Shevardnadze asked. “Certainly,” Mr. Kucherena answered.

This disclosure filled in a crucial piece of the puzzle. It explained why NSA documents that Mr. Snowden had copied, but had not given to the journalists in Hong Kong—such as the embarrassing revelation about the NSA targeting the cellphone of German Chancellor Angela Merkel—continued to surface after Mr. Snowden arrived in Moscow, along with NSA documents released via WikiLeaks.

As this was a critical discrepancy in Mr. Snowden’s narrative, I went to Moscow in October 2015 to see Mr. Kucherena. During our conversation, Mr. Kucherena confirmed that his interview with Ms. Shevardnadze was accurate, and that Mr. Snowden had brought secret material with him to Moscow.

Mr. Snowden’s narrative also includes the assertion that he was neither debriefed by nor even met with any Russian government official after he arrived in Moscow. This part of the narrative runs counter to findings of U.S. intelligence. According to the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence report, Mr. Snowden, since he arrived in Moscow, “has had, and continues to have, contact with Russian intelligence services.” This finding is consistent with Russian debriefing practices, as described by the ex-KGB officers with whom I spoke in Moscow

Mr. Snowden also publicly claimed in Moscow in December 2013 to have secrets in his head, including “access to every target, every active operation. Full lists of them.” Could Mr. Snowden’s Russian hosts ignore such an opportunity after Mr. Putin had authorized his exfiltration to Moscow? Mr. Snowden, with no exit options, was in the palm of their hands. Under such circumstances, as Mr. Klintsevich pointed out in his June NPR interview: “If there’s a possibility to get information, they [the Russian intelligence services] will get it.”

http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-fable-of-edward-snowden-1483143143

If he really did pass along intelligence to the Russian government, then he does not deserve a pardon, in my view.

It's more likely he shared it with everyone.

In fact he himself said the leaks didn't come from the Russians but from within the Democratic Party. This should go to an international Tribunal/court as it would be claims and counter claims from two countries. This may take months or even years to untangle.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

I believe that passports are checked twice at the airport, once when you go through security (which would be handled by HK authorities) and second time when you board the plane, which is handled by the airline, and exceptions could be made. I can see how Russia could have handwaved the second check, but how did Snowden get past airport security with an invalid passport? Did they just look at the passport, but not check whether it was valid? I guess it is plausible, given my airport experiences (though not in HK).

The story seems a bit fishy, but it is marginally possible.

In my experience gate checks are not done against the computer (I've seen it done without touching the computer) and thus couldn't catch an invalid passport. All you need to show is a non-expired passport and if required a visa.

They always use the computer at check-in so I have no way of knowing if they're actually looking up anything about the validity of the passport. They most definitely check visas at the gate--twice now they have questioned us when at first glance we didn't have a valid visa. (The first time they found a discarded, expired visa and quit looking. The second time they found no visa at all and didn't look at the extra passports we handed them--hint: when two people hand you four passports there's a reason!)

 

[Loren Pechtel]

I am not an expert but I doubt Word has a system where you can invalidate passports in real time. I mean I hear all these stories where suspect have to give up his/her physical passport in order prevent fleeing the country. I think airlines don't really care if your passport valid, their only concern is money loss in case they have to fly you back. So they look at your passport/Visa and see if looks real enough and let you pass.

America has no outbound passport control. I'm sure not every place a ship can land has the connectivity for a realtime passport check.

You are always checked by the airline when you fly because there's a $10k penalty for flying a passenger that they should have known is inadmissible.

 

[tupac chopra]

Is it possible that the US lied about when his passport was revoked? What is the proof of the revocation date?

The US is saying Hong Kong authorities were notified of the revocation on June 22nd. If they are lying, you don't think the HK authorities would dispute it?

How would that benefit HK?

 

[Axulus]

The US is saying Hong Kong authorities were notified of the revocation on June 22nd. If they are lying, you don't think the HK authorities would dispute it?

How would that benefit HK?

The US is, in part, blaming HK for letting him travel on a revoked passport.

Also, why wouldn't HK want to clear up an inaccuracy?

 

[tupac chopra]

The justification for Snowden's leaks was to reveal an illegal and unconstitutional spying program to the US public. If that is all that he had stolen and provided to the media, I could agree and accept that.

However, why steal 1.5M files, the vast majority of which had nothing to do with revealing the existence of the illegal NSA spying program and the cooperation among other governments and companies within that program?

Perhaps only Snowden can tell us that. Maybe he already commented somewhere.