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The new director of the National Security Agency says he believes whistleblower Edward Snowden was "probably not" working for a foreign intelligence agency, despite frequent speculation and assertion by the NSA's allies to the contrary. In one of his first public remarks since becoming NSA director in April, Admiral Michael Rogers, who also leads the militarys cybersecurity and cyberattack command, distanced himself on Tuesday from contentions that Snowden is or has been a spy for Russia or another intelligence service. Could he have? Possibly. Do I believe thats the case? Probably not, Rogers said during a cybersecurity forum hosted by Bloomberg Government.
The recently installed NSA director struck a more nuanced tone on the man he called our gentleman in Moscow than his predecessor, Keith Alexander, or many of his congressional champions chief among them his namesake Mike Rogers, the chairman of the House intelligence committee, who has frequently intimated that Snowden is a Russian spy. You gotta be very balanced. I thought he was an intelligent individual, articulate. [He] seemed fairly arrogant to me, the NSAs Rogers said on Snowdens interview with NBC last week. He clearly believes in what hes doing. I question that; I dont agree with it. I fundamentally disagree with what he did. I believe it was wrong, I believe it was illegal.
Rogers declined to say that there were no other Snowdens waiting to leak documents from the NSA. He sounded cautious about how many documents Snowden actually took from the NSA, despite a still-classified Defense Intelligence Agency assessment asserting that Snowden absconded with 1.7 million documents an assessment based on Snowdens internal access to NSA documents. We have a fairly good idea here, and Im not going to get into specifics here, Rogers said.
In another departure from past practice, Rogers confirmed the broad outline of a New York Times story based on the Snowden disclosures that reported NSAs mass collection of digitized images of peoples faces and other biometric identifiers. We use facial recognition as a tool to help us understand these foreign intelligence targets. Counter-terrorism is another big area this has probably had more impact for us in the counterterrorism arena than anywhere else, Rogers said.
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