Either Edward Snowden Is Lying—or His Former Boss Is
Either Edward Snowden is lying or his former boss is. That’s one way to read contradictory statements from the two men about whether Snowden actually knew that much about one of the most controversial surveillance programs that he exposed to the world three years ago.
It’s a program that gives the National Security Agency access to data from the world’s biggest technology companies, including Facebook and Google, and it features prominently in the new Oliver Stone biopic “Snowden,” which premieres Friday and portrays its namesake as a genius hacker who saw first-hand how the NSA abused its formidable powers. That movie has renewed a long-simmering battle between Snowden and his critics. And it’s revealing new information about the biggest leak from the U.S. intelligence community in decades.
For the first time, the man who hired Snowden as a contractor for Booz Allen Hamilton at an NSA facility in Hawaii said Snowden actually didn’t have any access to that program, known commonly as PRISM. What’s more, Steven Bay said, Snowden failed to understand the regime of oversight and legal scrutiny in place to prevent unauthorized spying on Americans.
“He asked me two or three times on how to get access to what essentially was the PRISM data—we didn’t call it that internally, but that’s kind of what everyone knows it is,” Bay told the national security publication The Cipher Brief this week.
“That’s one of the interesting things about his story is that people don’t realize,” Bay continued, “he never actually had access to any of that data. All of the quote domestic collection stuff that he revealed, he never had access to that. So he didn’t understand the oversight and compliance, he didn’t understand the rules for handling it, and he didn’t understand the processing of it.”
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/09/17/either-edward-snowden-is-lying-or-his-former-boss-is.html
At least the "hero" myth is officially dead...
