The Snowden Fact-Check
Three years ago, Edward Snowden’s leaks sent shockwaves through the U.S. intelligence services, disclosing information about surveillance programs and foreign intelligence operations and sparking a global conversation about the balance between national security and the privacy of citizens.
The revelations brought some aspects of the intelligence community out of the dark and accelerated the debate on encryption. At the same time, they also presented an opportunity to obscure and misrepresent U.S. surveillance activities, a number of top former intelligence officials told The Cipher Brief.
For privacy advocates, the revelations set the stage for massive government surveillance reform — something that has not come to fruition. Three years on, supporters say, the disclosures need to spur more substantive policy reforms.
In the second of our two-part series, we fact check what many believe are the misconceptions that continue to swirl around about the information leaked by Snowden.
For General Michael Hayden, former CIA director from 2006-09 and NSA director from 1999-2005, there are a number of misconceptions — which he dubbed “urban legends, aka urban lies” — in the public sphere about the Snowden leaks that still need to be fact-checked, three years on:
http://www.thecipherbrief.com/article/exclusive/north-america/snowden-fact-check-1093
(Snowden, Greenwald, and the rest of the cabal declined to be interviewed for this piece)
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