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the jewels in their crown of omniscience. “ Snowden also suggested that to avoid being automatically “targeted” by the NSA, one should avoid “jihadi forums.” These tips for evading U.S. and British surveillance, far from being an off-hand leakage of information, were supplied by him in written answers to interrogatives sent to him by Laura Poitras and Jacob Appelbaum while Snowden was still on the NSA payroll in May 2013. If he intended to damage the NSA’s ability to monitor unsuspecting individuals abroad, he clearly succeeded. Just as Robert Hanssen had compromised the NSA’s interception of communication at the Soviet Embassy in the 1990s, Snowden compromised the NSA’s interception of Jihadist targets on the Internet.
The Snowden intervention was soon felt by the CIA. “Within weeks of the leaks,” writes Michael Morell, then CIA deputy director. He notes that “Terrorist organizations around the world were already starting to modify their actions in light of what Snowden disclosed. Communication sources dried up.” What heightened Morell’s concern about this loss of intelligence sources was the discovery a 26-page document on an ISIS computer in Syria indicating that the terrorist group had been considering using plague germs and other biological weapons on foreign targets. The NSA was also seeing the Snowden effect on the war on terrorists. In 2013, the FBI, CIA, and DIA had compiled a watch list of some 400 foreign terrorist targets for NSA’s PRISM program. Up until June 6th, many of these targets frequently used Internet services, such as Twitter, Facebook, and Xbox live, to send what they believed would be hidden messages. After the PRISM story broke in the Washington Post on June 6th, the NSA “saw one after another target go dark,” according to a senior executive involved in that surveillance. In 2014, Admiral Rogers, the new NSA director, was even blunter. Asked whether or not the disclosures by Snowden had reduced the NSA’s ability to pursue terrorist, he answered: “Have I lost capability that we had prior to the revelations? Yes.”

In Moscow, Snowden insists that not a single death has been traced back to his disclosures. I agree that it would be unfair to jump to the conclusion that he is responsible for any single event, such as the massacre in Paris in November 2015, because we cannot know whether or not a jihadist involved in the event, such as Abdelhamid Abaaoud in the case of Paris, would have used the Internet if Snowden had not exposed the interception of it by the NSA. But however sincere were his intentions, Snowden cannot escape his responsibility for his actions. He totally and purposefully compromised an intelligence operation that could prevent such villainous attacks.

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