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116 | HOW AMERICA LOST ITS SECRETS

Some secret methods that Snowden made public compromised the NSA’s state-of-the-art technology of which adversaries had been unaware. For example, the NSA had devised an ingenious technology in 2008 for tapping into computers abroad that had been “air-gapped,” or intentionally isolated from any network to protect highly sensitive information, such as missile telemetry, nuclear bomb development, and cyber-warfare capabilities. The secret method that the NSA used involved surreptitiously implanting speck-sized circuit boards into air-gapped computers. These devices then covertly transmitted the data back in bursts of radio waves. Once Snowden exposed this technology, and the radio frequency transmission it used, America lost this intelligence capability.

In addition, a considerable number of the published documents did not even belong to the NSA but were copies of reports sent to the NSA by its allies, including the British, Australian, Canadian, French, Norwegian, and Israeli intelligence services. Snowden provided journalists with secret documents from the British cyber service GCHQ, describing its plans to obtain a legal warrant to penetrate the Russian computer security firm Kaspersky to expand its “computer network exploitation capability.” What the GCHQ was revealing in this secret document was its own capabilities to monitor a Russian target of interest to British intelligence. While the release of these foreign documents might have embarrassed allies of the United States, they exposed no violations of U.S. law by the NSA. It was a legitimate part of the NSA’s job to share information with its allies. This raises the question: What constitutes whistle-blowing?

To the general public no doubt, a whistle-blower is simply a person who exposes government misdeeds from inside that government. But in the eyes of the law, someone who discloses classified information to an unauthorized person, even as an act of personal conscience, is not exempt from the punitive consequences of this act. Indeed, if a person deliberately reveals secret U.S. operations, especially ones that compromise the sources and methods of U.S. intelligence services, he or she may run afoul of American espionage laws.

In the past, when government employees have disclosed highly classified information to journalists to redress perceived government misconduct, they were almost always prosecuted. During

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