Just one day before the movie "Snowden" was released, the U.S. government labeled Edward Snowden, the prototype character and former NSA employee, as a "fabricator." Snowden himself disputed these claims.
According to the Los Angeles Times, a summary of the report released by a U.S. House of Representatives intelligence committee on Thursday stated that Snowden himself inflated his resume, plagiarized test answers and failed training on U.S. surveillance laws before copying approximately 1.5 million classified National Security Agency materials. The committee unanimously approved the report.
The report provides new details about Snowden's background and raises questions about Snowden's self-declared motives before his escape and his work at the National Security Agency. The report called him a "serial exaggerator and fabricator." After Snowden left the United States, he first fled to Hong Kong and finally to Russia.
The biographical film directed by the famous American director Oliver Stone obviously portrays Snowden as a heroic whistleblower. He himself quickly refuted the report's content. According to the BBC, Snowden said via his Twitter: "This report is so clumsy and distorted that it would be hilarious if it weren't so grossly dishonest." ”
Snowden himself has been charged with espionage. The report comes just a day after civil rights activists launched a public campaign across the country calling on President Obama to pardon Snowden. However, members of the House Intelligence Committee sent a joint letter to Obama urging him not to pardon him.
In a statement, the Intelligence Committee said, "Snowden portrayed himself as a principled whistleblower, but contrary to that, before he began downloading classified documents, he was a dissatisfied employee with the status quo." He had often clashed with his superiors and was reprimanded. ”
The committee stated that Snowden's leakage of digital versions of documents to media organizations in 2013 "caused serious damage to U.S. national security, jeopardized the intelligence community's counterterrorism efforts, and endangered the safety of the American people and active U.S. military forces." ”
Committee members said their two-year investigation found that most of the documents Snowden took had nothing to do with civil rights and instead revealed espionage programs targeting local and allied governments.
Rep. Devin Nunes, chairman of the Intelligence Committee, said in a statement: "Snowden is no hero - he is a traitor who knowingly betrayed his colleagues and his country." Given his long list of exaggerations and outright fabrications detailed in this report, no one should take him at his word. ”
The House report is said to be based on hundreds of secret documents and dozens of briefings from intelligence officials. The committee concluded that Snowden was not a whistleblower because he made no attempt to raise his concerns about his civil rights through official channels or to Congress. At the same time, most of the data he stole from the NSA did not involve privacy concerns.
The report did not describe specifically the damage to national security. Lawmakers simply said Snowden's leaks "intensified and accelerated" the "current trend" of adversaries and terrorist groups using encrypted information.
