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image. The 35-page Defense Intelligence Agency’s damage assessment, for example, that said that 900,000 Pentagon documents were compromised by Snowden, was not made public. It was only disclosed via a Vice magazine Freedom of Information request in June 2015.

What is known is the number of documents that Snowden gave to journalists in Hong Kong. As will be recalled, Poitras and Greenwald were “writing partners.” When Greenwald discovered that his copy of the documents were corrupted, Poitras made a copy of the thumb drive that Snowden gave her in Hong Kong and sent it to her Greenwald in Rio de Janeiro by a courier. That courier was intercepted by British authorities at Heathrow Airport. When examined, the Poitras-Greenwald thumb drive contained some 58,000 documents. This meant that the lion’s share of the 1.3 million documents that the NSA claimed were compromised had not been given to journalists and is unaccounted for.

The numbers game is not only misleading nut unenlightening on the issue of the value of the compromised documents. 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 Others were outdated or otherwise useless routing data.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 story. Of far more importance than the quantity of the total haul is the quality of some of the data that Snowden had copied. Just a single one of these documents could cripple not just the NSA but America’s entire multi-billion dollar apparatus for intercepting foreign intelligence. The previously-cited summary of requests by the CIA, FBI, Pentagon and other agencies for communications intelligence, for example, which was 31,000 pages long, listed all the gaps in U.S. coverage of adversaries, including those cited by President Obama’s national security team. As Ledgett warned, this single document, if it fell into enemy hands, would provide out adversaries with “a roadmap of what we know what we don’t know and imp/licitly a way to protect themselves.” The “roadmap” was not found among the files on the thumb drive. Nor were most of the missing level 3 lists concerning NSA activities in Russia and China found on the thumb drive, even though Snowden said he took taken his final job at Booz Allen to get access to these lists. If Snowden had not given these documents to Poitras, Greenwald or other journalists, where were they?

The compartment logs showed that Snowden copied and transferred these level 3 documents in his final week at the NSA. He presumably had them in his possession in Hong Kong after he arrived on May 20, 2013. On June 3rd, according to Greenwald, he was still sorting through the material to determine which ones were appropriate to give to journalists. On June 12th 2013, he told reporter Lana Lam in Hong Kong that he was going through the documents, country by country, to determine which additional ones he should pass on to journalists. Eleven days later, he departed Hong Kong for Moscow carrying at least one laptop computer. Even after arriving in Moscow, he suggested he still had NSA secrets in his possession. "No intelligence service — not even our own — has the capacity to compromise the secrets I continue to protect, “ he wrote to former Senator Gordon Humphrey, “I cannot be coerced into revealing that information, even under torture." Much of the material he copied while working at Booz Allen remained, as far as the NSA could determine, missing. Had he brought these files under his “protection” to Russia?

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