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The Keys to the Kingdom Are Missing | 171

Snowden's supporters do not accept that he stole such a large number of documents. According to Greenwald, the NSA vastly exaggerated the magnitude of the theft in order to "demonize" Snowden. Snowden also disputed the magnitude of the 1.7 million number. He told James Bamford of Wired in early 2014 that he took far fewer than the 1.7 million documents that the NSA reported were compromised. He offered, however, no more specific details on the magnitude of his theft. Nor did he offer Bamford any way to verify his assertion other than to say that he had purposely left behind "a trail of digital bread crumbs" at the NSA base in Hawaii so that the NSA could determine which documents he "touched" but did not download. A government official familiar with the investigation said no such "bread crumbs" were found by the NSA.

It is possible that the NSA Damage Assessment team under Ledgett falsified its findings or otherwise inflated the number of documents that Snowden stole. NSA executives might have also lied to Congress to exaggerate the loss. But why would these officials engage in an orchestrated deception that made them look bad? Exaggerating the magnitude of the theft would only magnify Ledgett and the NSA's failure in its mission to protect U.S. secrets.

Officials had no reason to demonize Snowden for legal reasons. He already had been. Greenwald and Poitras had already revealed that Snowden had given them a vast number of NSA classified documents on a thumb drive that revealed, as Greenwald put it, the "blueprints" of the NSA. This drive contained, it will be recalled, no fewer than 58,000 highly classified documents. In the eyes of the law, that constituted an unprecedented breach of the laws passed to protect communications intelligence. In any case, in Russia Snowden was not in any jeopardy, no matter how many documents he was said to have stolen. Interestingly, the thirty-five-page Defense Intelligence Agency's damage assessment reports that 900,000 Pentagon documents compromised by Snowden were not made public. That was only disclosed via a Vice magazine Freedom of Information request in June 2015.

Many of the putative 1.3 million documents that the NSA says were copied and moved were duplicate copies. Others were outdated or otherwise useless routing data. So the quantity does not tell the

Epst_9780451494566_2p_all_r1.z.indd 171 9/29/16 5:51 PM HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_019659