The (spy) game’s afoot in hunt for NSA leaker Snowden One twist in the fugitive hunt for asylum-seeking Edward Snowden is that the man who has revealed the most secrets about the National Security Agency in history now is undoubtedly one of its chief targets. A subplot in this international thriller is a cat-and-mouse game: Will the NSA penetrate his communications or will the master leaker outwit all the agency’s high-tech gadgets — since he, as well as anyone, knows how they work? “NSA is probably doing what it does best, which is sweeping the ‘electronicshere’ for communications, voice and data, indicating his next chess move,” former CIA officer Bart Bechtel says. “They may also be looking at known and suspected collaborators.” A second analyst, a former intelligence operative, says that the same methods Mr. Snowden, an ex-NSA contractor, disclosed in documents leaks to the press are now being turned on him. The documents told of super-secret NSA programs to spy on social media such as Facebook and Twitter, bug computers, penetrate telephone cables and scoop up of billions of telephone call records. As Mr. Snowden stays based at the Moscow airport and works with the anti-secrecy group WikiLeaks, the Obama administration has at its disposal a wide array of intercept tools for emails, Internet postings and messaging, and cell and land-line phone calls. And since Mr. Snowden is a fugitive, the Justice Department would have no problem in getting a federal court to approve all sorts of wiretaps on him, and perhaps, family members, to try to learn his next move. “Clearly, the courts would approve at this point, and we have a vested interest in finding out what he knows,” says the former operative, who worked with the NSA. “He may be smarter than that, though, and using couriers instead of phone and email. I think that’s what the Wiki clowns are helping with.” In other words, as as an adept in the NSA’s computer networks and how it listens in, Mr. Snowden, a computer whiz, is in a good position to avoid being heard. Glenn Greenwald, who first exposed Mr. Snowden’s leaked documents for stories in the British newspaper The Guardian, wrote that the leaker used an encrypted email computer program. He insisted that Mr. Greenwald install the same technology before he would engage in providing some of the U.S.’ most sensitive, top-secret intelligence collection methods.
Posted on: Sun, 14 Jul 2013 12:26:56 +0000
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