In recent days, articles have been released based on a publication in the "authoritative" Sunday Times, reporting that Russian and Chinese agents have allegedly decrypted the NSA files leaked by Edward Snowden, identifying the identities of British and US secret agents.
The Sunday Times newspaper is using unnamed government sources and British agents to support a story that MI6 agents have been withdrawn from overseas operations in hostile countries as their identities have been "burnt" as a result of Edward Snowden's leaks.
The Snowden team, led by his collaborator Glenn Greenwald, has denounced the publication as a smear based solely on the words of anonymous British officials.
The Sunday Times is uncritically supporting the UK government in its efforts to discredit whistleblower Snowden, according to Greenwald, who argues that none of the evidence presented supports the claim that Russia and China “cracked and read the top-secret caches of files.”
….Sunday Times…Let's put things in their place
An early version of the story incorrectly reported that David Miranda, a colleague of Greenwald, “was arrested at Heathrow Airport in 2013 and had 58,000 classified files seized in his possession, following his visit to Moscow and meeting with Snowden.”.
In fact, David Miranda was arrested while returning to Brazil, after visiting Laura Poitras in Berlin.
The Sunday Times claimed that this incorrect item in the online edition of the newspaper was due to an error, but it doesn't seem very convincing.
Snowden's team claims that Edward left the US with four top secret copies of documents he downloaded from the NSA intranet. Snowden has clearly stated that he took no files with him when he left Hong Kong, and that he gave them all to carefully selected journalists.
Snowden the Renegade
Snowden's critics, such as former NSA intelligence analyst John Schindler, dispute this version of events, arguing that when Edward defected to Russia he took the files with him.
Even assuming that Snowden is telling the truth, there is still the possibility that the encrypted documents were in the possession of Snowden's journalist colleagues and not the whistleblower himself.
A plausible scenario is that the journalists who had the files did not have Snowden's experience and were comparatively novices in handling secrets and not as well-practiced in operational security.
Mistakes may have been made in the use of PGP, TruCrypt and Tor, for example, as none of these applications are familiar to novice users. This, according to the analyst, left confidential documents exposed and vulnerable to hacking.
Of course, there is no doubt that government intelligence agencies have thrown their best agents into this case. But that does not mean that the government teams achieved anything for sure, or that Snowden's team was smarter.
Everyone agrees that the Snowden leaks are among the largest intelligence leaks in history. The Sunday Times claims that more than a million classified files were leaked. Greenwald says the claim is rubbish, but offers no alternative. Snowden's team has kept that number secret.
How many spies died because of Snowden?
Leaving aside whether China or Russia somehow managed to obtain the encrypted files, there are many reasons to be quite thoughtful about the Sunday Times' claims:
“The files contained identities of MI6 and CIA agents which were revealed, forcing Western agencies to send “rescue teams”.
When a US or UK intelligence officer (spy) operates under cover abroad, as a rule their cover is diplomatic.
That is, the officer pretends to be a normal diplomat at the embassy. Even if he had been exposed, he would still have diplomatic immunity. The worst that could happen is that he would be declared persona non grata and sent home.
But there are also those who do not use a diplomatic passport. They are the agents who have "physical cover" but their information is super tight.
Even people who have access to the inside of the intelligence community are not normally allowed to know who is who. This is not the kind of information that exists on the NSA intranet.
It could of course be that some spies were transferred a few days or weeks after Snowden's first leak as a precautionary measure.
The Sunday Times report claiming that Snowden's files "put British spies at risk" was nonsense according to diplomat Craig Murray, a former British ambassador to Uzbekistan.
Murray told the Daily Mirror: “The argument that MI6 officials are at risk of being killed by the Russians or the Chinese is nonsense.”
“Rule No. 1 in both the CIA and MI6 is that identities are never recorded – no names, not even a description that would allow them to be identified,” he added.
The Sunday Times story appears to be full of holes, and presents the facts as a fiction. Some points are even outright false.
The document quotes an official source from the British Home Office who stated that Snowden has “blood on his hands,” while claiming there is no indication that intelligence officials have been harmed as a result of Snowden’s actions.
The UK government is very good at end-to-end encryption, which limits the possibility of being monitored by spies or terrorists. In that regard, the Sunday Times article could still be a novel for the masses, as some security experts observe.
Crypto expert Halvar Flake said on Twitter: “If this thing about Snowden ‘cracking’ crypto caches is true, then all the arguments and encryption settings go :)”
Dave Waterson, founder of data security company SentryBay, added:
“So if the Russians and Chinese broke Snowden’s encryption, our government wouldn’t need our crypto keys, right #SnoopersCharter?
