NSA defenders still won't tell the whole truth, but a newly revealed damage assessment offers a window into government damage control – not any actual damage done by Snowden
• Exclusive: Scope of intelligence from Snowden 'staggering'
• Document: Read the full Defense Intelligence Agency report
Edward Snowden, shown here in an image from an NBC News interview to be broadcast next week, copied documents classified as top secret, so they can be expected to cause exceptionally 'grave' damage, almost by definition. Photograph: NBC NewsFor months, defenders of America's spy agencies have been touting a classified Pentagon report as proof that Edward Snowden's unprecedented disclosures have grievously harmed intelligence operations and placed American lives at risk. But heavily redacted excerpts of that report, obtained by the Guardian under a Freedom of Information Act request and published on Thursday, suggest that those harms may be largely hypothetical – an attempt to scare spy-loving legislators with the phantoms of lost capability.
The first thing to note is that the Pentagon report does not concern the putative harm of disclosures about the National Security Agency programs that have been the focus of almost all Snowden-inspired stories published to date. Rather, the Defense Intelligence Agency's damage assessment deals only with the potential impact of "non-NSA Defense material" that the government believes Snowden may have obtained. Any harm resulting from the disclosure of NSA-related material – in other words, almost everything actually made public thus far – is not included in this assessment.
In fact, the unredacted portions of the report don't discuss published material at all.
MORE @ http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/may/22/pentagon-report-snowden-grave-threat-overblown
Comment
For a few months now, the NSA's defenders -- primarily Director of National Intelligence James Clapper and House Intelligence Committee boss Rep. Mike Rogers -- have been waving around a "classified" report from the Pentagon, concerning how much "damage" Snowden's leaks have caused. Rogers had put out a press release about the report as if it was proof of how much harm was caused -- and based on that release, people quickly realized that the claims of harm were based on two very questionable assumptions
As many people have highlighted -- both of those claims are extremely questionable. Glenn Greenwald and Ewan Macaskill have both admitted publicly that Snowden only gave them around 60,000 documents.
Either way, the Guardian has a new report with a redacted version of the Pentagon's report, obtained via a FOIA request by FOIA champion Jason Leopold. Leopold wrote a summary of the report, noting that the Pentagon claims "the scope of the compromised knowledge related to US intelligence capabilities is staggering."
However, Julian Sanchez quickly pointed out that the Pentagon is playing word games. It's saying (as noted in our assumptions) that the scope of what Snowden touched is staggering, not the actual damage. As Sanchez points out:
"Destroying the New World Order"
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