Submitted by Mike Krieger via Liberty Blitzkrieg blog [5],
Anyone who has been following Edward Snowden’s heroic whistleblowing, and the reporting of Glenn Greenwald on the classified documents that prove egregious violations of the United States Constitution by the NSA, will also be aware of speculation that a “second leaker” had emerged earlier this year. It appears this person may have been identified by the FBI.
Yahoo News’ Michael Isikoff reports [6] that:
The FBI has identified an employee of a federal contracting firm suspected of being the so-called “second leaker” who turned over sensitive documents about the U.S. government’s terrorist watch list to a journalist closely associated with ex-NSA contractor Edward Snowden, according to law enforcement and intelligence sources who have been briefed on the case.
The FBI recently executed a search of the suspect’s home, and federal prosecutors in Northern Virginia have opened up a criminal investigation into the matter, the sources said.
Marc Raimondi, a spokesman for the Justice Department, declined to comment on the investigation into the watch-list leak, citing department rules involving pending cases.
The case in question involves an Aug. 5 story published by The Intercept, an investigative website co-founded by Glenn Greenwald, the reporter who first published sensitive NSA documents obtained from Snowden.
The story, co-authored by Jeremy Scahill and Ryan Devereaux, was accompanied by a document “obtained from a source in the intelligence community” providing details about the watch-listing system that were dated as late as August 2013, months after Snowden fled to Hong Kong and revealed himself as the leaker of thousands of top secret documents from the NSA.
This prompted immediate speculation that there was a “second leaker [7]” inside the U.S. intelligence community providing material to Greenwald and his associates.
That point is highlighted in the last scene of the new documentary about Snowden released this weekend, called “Citizenfour,” directed by filmmaker Laura Poitras, a co-founder with Greenwald and Scahill of The Intercept.
Greenwald tells a visibly excited Snowden about a new source inside the U.S. intelligence community [8] who is leaking documents. Greenwald then scribbles notes to Snowden about some of the details, including one briefly seen about the U.S. drone program and another containing a reference to the number of Americans on the watch list.
During Obama’s first five years as president, the Justice Department and the U.S. military brought seven criminal prosecutions for national security leaks [9] — more than twice as many as all previous presidents put together.
May as well add another to the list, right Barry?
