CIA, John Brennan, Gus Hall and that Polygraph Test

Posted on September 21, 2016September 21, 2016 by Denise Simon

This is the same guy who defended Jihad as ‘Legitimate Tenet of Islam’.

John Brennan: The President’s strategy is absolutely clear about the threat we face. Our enemy is not “terrorism” because terrorism is but a tactic. Our enemy is not “terror” because terror is a state of mind, and as Americans we refuse to live in fear. Nor do we describe our enemy as “jihadists” or “Islamists” because jihad is a holy struggle, a legitimate tenet of Islam, meaning to purify oneself or one’s community, and there is nothing holy or legitimate or Islamic about murdering innocent men, women, and children. More here.

CIA director fretted his vote for communist

CNN:John Brennan on Thursday recalled being asked a standard question for a top security clearance at his early CIA lie detector test: Have you ever worked with or for a group that was dedicated to overthrowing the US?

“I froze,” Brennan said during a panel discussion about diversity in the intelligence community at the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation’s annual conference. “This was back in 1980, and I thought back to a previous election where I voted, and I voted for the Communist Party candidate,”

Brennan was responding to a question about barriers to recruiting diverse candidates for the intelligence fields, including whether past records of activism could hurt someone applying for a clearance later in life.

The CIA director said the agency’s mission is to protect the values of the Constitution — which include free speech.

“We’ve all had indiscretions in our past,” he said, adding neither some drug experimentation nor activism was a non-starter. “I would not be up here if that was disqualifying.”

He proceeded to tell the story of his test.

“I froze, because I was getting so close to coming into CIA and said, ‘OK, here’s the choice, John. You can deny that, and the machine is probably going to go, you know, wacko, or I can acknowledge it and see what happens,'” Brennan said.

He said he chose to be forthcoming.

“I said I was neither Democratic or Republican, but it was my way, as I was going to college, of signaling my unhappiness with the system, and the need for change. I said I’m not a member of the Communist Party, so the polygrapher looked at me and said, ‘OK,’ and when I was finished with the polygraph and I left and said, ‘Well, I’m screwed.'”

But he soon got his admission notice to the CIA and was relieved, he said, saying that though the agency still had long strides to make in accepting gay recruits and minorities, even then it recognized the importance of freedom.

“So if back in 1980, John Brennan was allowed to say, ‘I voted for the Communist Party with Gus Hall’ … and still got through, rest assured that your rights and your expressions and your freedom of speech as Americans is something that’s not going to be disqualifying of you as you pursue a career in government.”

So, who was Gus?

Well he died in circa 2000 in New York and did run for president of the United States more than once.

By the end of his life he had become a lonely Communist stalwart in a post-Communist world. Those who sought him out for interviews at party headquarters on West 23rd Street in Manhattan found a genial white-haired man presiding over ”a museum of history,” as he put it. Pictures of his family shared space with a portrait of Lenin (a gift from Leonid I. Brezhnev); a wood sculpture from Fidel Castro and a tapestry of Karl Marx, courtesy of Erich Honecker, the former leader of East Germany.

”The struggle between those who own the wealth and those whose labor produces the wealth is one flaw in capitalism that will lead to socialism,” Mr. Hall said in 1996, repeating the familiar Marxist formulation.

Mr. Hall was first elected general secretary of the Communist Party, U.S.A., in 1959, when the federal government considered the organization an outpost of the Kremlin and all its members potentially dangerous subversives.

Yet, in the Communist world, Mr. Hall remained an important figure. He enjoyed the patronage of every Soviet head of state, from Nikita S. Khrushchev to Mikhail S. Gorbachev, and was received as a dignitary on his yearly pilgrimages to Moscow. A high point came in 1981 when he addressed the 26th Party Congress, at the invitation of Mr. Brezhnev, the Soviet leader Mr. Hall most esteemed. He was less admiring of Mr. Gorbachev, whose reforms a few years later, Mr. Hall said, ”literally destroyed the basis for socialism.”

As long as the cold war raged, however, Mr. Hall’s Soviet sponsors delighted in the presence of this unmistakably American comrade, an authentic product of the working class, nearer in spirit to Joe Sixpack, it seemed, than to Joe Stalin. A rock-jawed, barrel-chested six-footer, Mr. Hall weighed more than 200 pounds and had the powerful hands of the lumberjack and steelworker he had been in his youth. Simple in his tastes and habits, he was married to one woman, Elizabeth Turner, for 65 years, living with her in the three-bedroom house they bought in a middle-class neighborhood in Yonkers in 1962. She survives him, as do his two children, Barbara and Arvo, and three grandchildren.

To his adversaries, Mr. Hall’s rough-and-ready manner was a cynical pose that concealed a dedicated apparatchik. Even political associates sometimes found Mr. Hall’s obeisance to the Soviet Union excessive, and they grumbled, especially in his later years, that his inflexible views and dictatorial personality were hampering the party and isolating it from the wider political world.

”I told Gus 10 years ago that he should be grooming new leadership, but he would have none of it,” Carl Bloice, a former colleague, said in 1993. ”He sees himself as a man on a mission, the last holdout.”

Although Mr. Hall insisted that the American Communist Party was an independent organization, in 1992 the Moscow daily Izvestia reported that Mr. Hall had been the recipient of $40 million in Soviet assistance between 1971 and 1990.

Radical Roots Lead From Logging to Lenin

Gus Hall was born Arvo Kusta Halberg on Oct. 8, 1910, in Iron, Minn., one of 10 children reared by Matt Halberg, a miner, and his wife, Susannah. His parents were Finnish immigrants who belonged to the Industrial Workers of the World, the militant labor organization. Their son said that after Mr. Halberg was blacklisted from the mines for joining an I.W.W. strike the family grew up ”in semi-starvation,” in a log cabin Mr. Halberg built with his own hands.

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Mr. Hall left school after the eighth grade and found work in a logging camp. His parents’ radical teachings were reinforced, he later recalled, by the hardships of that experience, which once included bunking alongside the corpse of a man who had died on the job.

”When you work in the woods literally from sunup to sundown and it’s 50 degrees below zero and you eat slop and you make $30 a month, then what was said at home begins to make sense,” Mr. Hall once said.

In 1927, he was recruited into the American Communist Party by his father, a member of the organization since its inception in 1919. An apprenticeship in the Young Communist League qualified him to attend the Lenin Institute in Moscow, where he was trained for two years in sabotage and guerrilla tactics. He returned, in 1933, to a country devastated by the Great Depression. A growing number of Americans, convinced that the existing political and economic structures had become outmoded, were attracted to the Communist Party’s promise of a workers’ state. One of many who plunged into the labor movement, Mr. Hall made his name organizing union locals in the Midwest.

Militant and bold, he drew on some of the conspiratorial tactics he had learned in Moscow. One such tactic was the adoption of a sequence of aliases, all variations on his given name, before he settled on Gus Hall. He took the name legally in the mid-1930’s. More here from the NYT’s.

DOJ, Civil Rights Division on Ferguson, Baltimore etc.

Posted on September 21, 2016September 21, 2016 by Denise Simon

DOJ Civil Rights Chief Links Local Distrust of Police to ‘Unconstitutional’ Tactics

Law: The chief of the U.S. Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division told more than 200 lawyers and community activists at an Atlanta symposium Tuesday at Georgia State University that she and her Justice Department colleagues in Washington and across the nation “see a very clear link” between the criminalization of poverty by law enforcement authorities and the growing distrust of police and the government by the public.

Civil rights chief Vanita Gupta’s comments on law enforcement tactics came just hours before unrest erupted in Charlotte over the latest police shooting of an African-American man, Keith Lamont Scott. A second African-American man, Terence Crutcher, was also shot by police, in Tulsa, on Friday.

“Unconstitutional policing undermines community trust,” Gupta said. “Blanket assumptions and stereotypes about certain neighborhoods and certain communities can lead residents to see the justice system as illegitimate and authorities as corrupt. Those perceptions can drive resentment. And resentment can prevent the type of effective policing needed to keep communities and officers safe.”

Gupta noted that in Baltimore, the city’s African-American residents, concentrated in two small districts that accounted for just 11 percent of the city’s population, represented an estimated 44 percent of police stops. There, as well as in Ferguson, Missouri, where a white police officer shot and killed an unarmed 16-year-old African-American teen in 2014, Gupta said Justice Department staff saw a trend toward criminalizing the poor coupled with a focus on policing in order to generate revenue. That strategy, Gupta said, “resulted in a system where the police department and municipal court advanced policies that broke the law.”

Gupta said at the symposium that more than 60 percent of all inmates in county jails across the nation are defendants awaiting trial. Many of them, she said, “have committed nonviolent offenses and are there because they cannot pay bail.” Those practices “translate into devastating consequences—for individuals, communities and society as a whole,” she said. For people living on the financial edge, an arrest or a fine can cost a defendant his or her job, family, children, home and health care, trapping “the most vulnerable among us in perpetual cycles of poverty, debt and incarceration,” Gupta said. That, in turn, “undermines the legitimacy of our justice system,” she added. “It threatens the integrity of our democracy.”

She said the division also found when people living in poverty could not pay the court’s fines and fees, “they were subjected to multiple arrests, jail time and payments that far exceeded the cost of the original ticket.”

The seminar was sponsored by the Southern Center for Human Rights, which has filed lawsuits across Georgia challenging practices by counties and municipalities, and the private probation companies many of them have retained, that incarcerate misdemeanor defendants because they have no money to pay their fines or post a bond.

The Civil Rights Division has brought its considerable weight to two of those Georgia cases. Last month, Gupta joined with the U.S. attorney in Atlanta and the American Bar Association to ask the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit to affirm a trial court ruling on behalf of indigent misdemeanor defendants who had faced jail because they could not afford to post a bond.

Seems Gupta is traveling the country hosted several seminar essentially broadcasting variations of a DoJ mission as noted here: DOJ Official: Slavery to Blame for Riots in Ferguson and Baltimore

Need more on Gupta and Loretta Lynch at the DoJ?

CJR: Top Justice Department officials, including Attorney General Loretta Lynch, have worked with an organization dedicated to interfering with law enforcement efforts to monitor activities at the most radical mosques.

Lynch and DOJ Civil Rights Division head Vanita Gupta have appeared at gala events for an organization called Muslim Advocates. The George Soros-funded charity has badgered the New York City Police Department away from monitoring the most radical mosques in the city.

Civil Rights Division head Gupta appeared at the sold-out annual gala event for Muslim Advocates in Millbrae, California. Muslim Advocates lobbies the administration heavily to oppose any link between terrorist acts and radical Islam, and opposes monitoring of radical mosques. Gupta told the crowd:

To anyone who feels afraid, targeted, or discriminated against because of which religion you practice or where you worship, I want to say this — we see you. We hear you. And we stand with you. If you ever feel that somehow you don’t belong, or don’t fit in, here in America, let me reassure you you belong.

Muslim Advocates also conducts recruitment and training for lawyers designed to help FBI terrorist targets and interviewees navigate the interviews. Their annual report states:

Throughout the year we grew our internal volunteer referral list for FBI interviews. Today, the list is over 130 lawyers nationwide who are ready and able to assist community members contacted by the FBI.

The purported non-partisan tax exempt 501(c)(3) charity is conducting a campaign against corporations like Coca-Cola to hector them into not sponsoring the Republican convention in Cleveland.

Muslim Advocates gave Vanita Gupta their Thurgood Marshall Award “for her commitment to criminal justice reform and to holding perpetrators of anti-Muslim hate accountable” at the California gala. Read more here.

Sheik Anwar and Yaafghankid78, the NY/NJ Bomber

Posted on September 21, 2016September 21, 2016 by Denise Simon

The full criminal complaint by the FBI on Federal charges for Ahmad Khan Rahami is here.

Ahmad kept a journal and it was on his body when he was wounded in a shooting exchange with police near his home.

Much of the references in this journal are to Anwar al Alawki who was an American born cleric and major target for the Obama administration to begin the defeat of al Qaeda. He was in fact killed in a drone strike in Yemen. Major Nadal Hassan, the Ft. Hood killer was also a devoted follower of al Alawki.

This journal does have a very small reference to Islamic State, however Rahami was radicalized during one of his last trips to Afghanistan and Pakistan where the Taliban and al Qaeda maintain a foothold of power. Islamic State on the days of the bombings in New York and New Jersey did not claim any connection however they did to the knife attack in St. Cloud, Minnesota.

There was immediate chatter and concern that there was a functioning terror cell in that does appear to be the case in some form. Rahami did not act alone. The FBI has published a wanted poster for 2 other individuals.

Rahami’s father brought the family to the United States under asylum conditions and there have been several legal cases with members of the family with law enforcement. Ahmad has a first wife (Dominican) and a daughter and he is known to have married a second wife in Afghanistan and has a child with her. The second wife was returning to the United States and was detained by the FBI in the United Arab Emrites. Ahmad’s father wanted his 8 children to remain loyal to their heritage and such has been the case at least for some. One son moved back to the border region between Afghanistan and Pakistan and the father in fact himself was part of the mujahedeen as a fighter against the Soviets as did Usama bin Ladin.

Not only has the father travel back to Afghanistan but the son, Ahmad did so more than once.

Rahami, 28, spent several weeks in Kandahar, Afghanistan, and Quetta, Pakistan, in 2011, according to a law enforcement official who reviewed his travel and immigration record.

Two years later, in April 2013, he went to Pakistan and remained there until March 2014 before returning to the US, official said.

So, how did the FBI and DHS miss all the signals?

In part from Vocativ: The [FBI] should have launched a formal surveillance investigation as Rahami clearly followed a path towards radicalization and mobilization over the past two years,” said Nicholas Glavin, a senior research associate at the U.S. Naval War College.

Tracking all potential terror threats, however, is not easy. The FBI claims it already has more than 1,000 active Islamic State probes alone, which does not include investigations related to other Islamist groups. And Rahami is by no means the only terror suspect to avoid detection. Analysts who spoke with Vocativ noted that Mohammad Youssef Abdulazeez, the man who killed four marines at a pair of Tennessee military sites in July 2015, had not been monitored by the FBI. Neither had Syed Farook and Tashfeen Malik, the husband and wife who carried out the ISIS-inspired slaughter in San Bernardino, California, last year.

Even those known to law enforcement as would-be jihadists manage to conduct horrific attacks. The FBI had investigated Omar Mateen on two separate occasions before the Florida man executed 49 people and wounded 53 others during a shooting massacre at the Pulse Nightclub in Orlando this summer.

“The U.S. has the most robust counterterrorism apparatus [in the world], yet it is already stretched thin,” Glavin said. FBI Director James Comey previously admitted that his agency has struggled to keep up with surveillance demands.

Experts also concede that there’s no predictable path toward radicalization, making it a persistent challenge to suss out extremists. Some studies have argued that a uniform profile of a “lone-wolf” terrorist does not exist. Peter Bergen, who has researched more than 300 jihadist terrorism cases in the U.S. since 9/11, told Vocativ that they lead largely normal lives.

Bergen’s data shows that four-fifths of these homegrown jihadists are U.S. citizens. They are no more likely to have criminal backgrounds than other Americans and are less likely to suffer from mental illness. Many of them attended college and are married.

“The big takeaway is that they’re ordinary Americans,” Bergen, who published the book The United States of Jihad: Investigating America’s Homegrown Terrorist earlier this year, told Vocativ. Like most, Rahami was not a foreigner, a refugee or a recent immigrant.

Which presents a daunting challenge of its own.

“We’ve created political culture where we want 100 percent success in stopping them,” Bergen said. “Unfortunately, that is not a realistic expectation.”

Ineligible Individuals Have Been Granted U.S. Citizenship

Posted on September 19, 2016September 19, 2016 by Denise Simon

Sheesh….fingerprints eh? And those migrants, refugees and asylees don’t have any reference database for fingerprint history much less any travel documents applications.

As citizens they can vote, seek and hold sensitive jobs and more. Don’t you just wonder what DHS Secretary Jeh Johnson has to say on this? Oh wait….more money from Congress will solve it all.

Summary of the Inspector General’s report:

USCIS granted U.S. citizenship to at least 858 individuals ordered deported or removed under another identity when, during the naturalization process, their digital fingerprint records were not available. The digital records were not available because although USCIS procedures require checking applicants’ fingerprints against both the Department of Homeland Security’s and the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s (FBI) digital fingerprint repositories, neither contains all old fingerprint records. Not all old records were included in the DHS repository when it was being developed. Further, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has identified, about 148,000 older fingerprint records that have not been digitized of aliens with final deportation orders or who are criminals or fugitives. The FBI repository is also missing records because, in the past, not all records taken during immigration encounters were forwarded to the FBI. As long as the older fingerprint records have not been digitized and included in the repositories, USCIS risks making naturalization decisions without complete information and, as a result, naturalizing additional individuals who may be ineligible for citizenship or who may be trying to obtain U.S. citizenship fraudulently.

As naturalized citizens, these individuals retain many of the rights and privileges of U.S. citizenship, including serving in law enforcement, obtaining a security clearance, and sponsoring other aliens’ entry into the United States. ICE has investigated few of these naturalized citizens to determine whether they should be denaturalized, but is now taking steps to increase the number of cases to be investigated, particularly those who hold positions of public trust and who have security clearances.

****

In July 2014,^{3 OPS provided the Office of Inspector General (OIG) with the names of individuals it had identified as coming from special interest countries or neighboring countries with high rates of immigration fraud, had final deportation orders under another identity, and had become naturalized U.S. citizens. OIG’s review of the list of names revealed some were duplicates, which resulted in a final number of 1,029 individuals. Of the 1,029 individuals reported, 858 did not have a digital fingerprint record available in the DHS fingerprint repository at the time U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) was reviewing and adjudicating their applications for U.S. citizenship.}

USCIS checks applicants’ fingerprint records throughout the naturalization process. By searching the DHS digital fingerprint repository, the Automated Biometric Identification System (IDENT) and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) digital fingerprint repository, the Next Generation Identification (NGI) system,^{5 USCIS can gather information about an applicant’s other identities (if any), criminal arrests and convictions, immigration violations and deportations, and links to terrorism. When there is a matching record, USCIS researches the circumstances underlying the record to determine whether the applicant is still eligible for naturalized citizenship.}

If USCIS confirms that an applicant received a final deportation order under a different identity, and there are no other circumstances to provide eligibility, USCIS policy requires denial of naturalization. Also, USCIS may refer the applicant’s case to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) for investigation. Likewise, if a naturalized citizen is discovered to have been ineligible for citizenship, ICE may investigate the circumstances and refer the case to the Department of Justice for revocation of citizenship. Read the complete report here.

House Office Report on Edward Snowden

Posted on September 16, 2016September 16, 2016 by Denise Simon

Edward Snowden, Defending His Patriotism, Says Disclosures Helped Privacy

© REUTERS/Andrew Kelly

In this file photo, American whistleblower Edward Snowden delivers remarks via video link from Moscow to attendees at a discussion regarding an International Treaty on the Right to Privacy, Protection Against Improper Surveillance and Protection of Whistleblowers in New York City on Sept. 24, 2015. More here.

Executive Summary of Review of the Unauthorized Disclosures of Former National Security Agency Contractor Edward Snowden

UNCLASSIFIED

In June 2013, former National Security Agency (NSA) contractor Edward Snowden

perpetrated the largest and most damaging Public release of classified information in U.S.

intelligence history. In August 2014, the Chairman and Ranking Member of the House

Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI) directed Committee staff to carry out a

comprehensive review of the unauthorized disclosures. The aim of the review was to allow the

Committee to explain to other Members of Congress-and, where possible, the American

people-how this breach occurred, what the U.S. Government knows about the man who

committed it, and whether the security shortfalls it highlighted had been remedied.

Over the next two years, Committee staffrequested hundreds ofdocuments from the

Intelligence Community (IC), participated in dozens ofbriefings and meetings with IC

personnel, conducted several interviews with key individuals with knowledge of Snowden’s

background and actions, and traveled to NSA Hawaii to visit Snowden’s last two work locations.

The review focused on Snowden’s background, how he was able to remove more than 1.5

million classifled documents from secure NSA networks, what the 1.5 million documents

contained, and the damage their removal caused to national security.

The Committee’s review was careful not to disturb any criminal investigation or future

prosecution of Snowden, who has remained in Russia since he fled there on June 23, 2013.

Accordingly, the Committee did not interview individuals whom the Depatment of Justice

identified as possible witnesses at Snowden’s trial, including Snowden himself, nor did the

Committee request any matters that may have occurred before a grand jury. Instead, the IC

provided the Committee with access to other individuals who possessed substantively similar

knowledge as the possible witnesses. Similarly, rather than interview Snowden’s NSA

coworkers and supervisors directly, Committee staffinterviewed IC personnel who had reviewed

reports o finterviews with Snowden’s co-workers and supervisors. The Committee remains

hopeful that Snowden will retum to the United States to face justice.

The bulk of the Committee’s 36-page review, which includes 230 footnotes, must remain

classified to avoid causing further harm to national security; however, the Committee has made

a number of unclassified findings. These findings demonstrate that the public narrative

popularized by Snowden and his allies is rife with falsehoods, exaggerations, and crucial

omissions, a pattem that began befiore he stole 1.5 million sensitive documents.

First, Snowden caused tremendous damage to national security, and the vast

majority of the documents he stole have nothing to do with programs impacting individual

privacy interests-they instead pertain to military, defense? and intelligence programs of

great interest to America,s adversaries. A review ofthe materials Snowden compromised

makes clear that he handed over secrets that protect American troops overseas and secrets that

provide vital defienses against terrorists and nation-states. Some of Snowden’s disclosures

exacerbated and accelerated existing trends that diminished the IC’s capabilities to collect

against legitimate foreign intelligence targets, while others resulted in the loss of intelligence

streams that had saved American lives. Snowden insists he has not shared the full cache of 1.5

million classified documents with anyone; however, in June 2016, the deputy chairman of the

Russian parliaments defense and security committee publicly conceded that “Snowden did

share intelligence” with his govemment. Additionally, although Snowden’s professed objective

may have been to inform the general public, the infiormation he released is also available to

Russian, Chinese, Iranian, and North Korean govemment intelligence services; any terrorist

with Internet access; and many others who wish to do harm to the United States.

The full scope ofthe damage inflicted by Snowden remains unknown. Over the past

three years, the IC and the Department ofDefiense (DOD) have carried out separate

reviews with differing methodologies-fthe damage Snowden caused. Out of an abundance of

caution, DOD reviewed all 1.5 million documents Snowden removed. The IC, by contrast, has

carried out a damage assessment fior only a small subset ofthe documents. The Committee is

concerned that the IC does not plan to assess the damage ofthe vast majority of documents

Snowden removed. Nevertheless, even by a conservative estimate, the U.S. Govemment has

spent hundreds of millions of dollars, and will eventually spend billions, to attempt to mitigate

the damage Snowden caused. These dollars would have been better spent on combating

America’s adversaries in an increasingly dangerous world.

Second, Snowden was not a whistleblower. Under the law, publicly revealing

classifled information does not qualify someone as a whistleblower. However, disclosing

classified information that Shows fraud, Waste, Abuse, Or Other illegal activity to the

appropriate law enforcement or oversight personnel-including to Congressuloes make someone

a whistleblower and affords them with critical protections. Contrary to his public claims that he

notified numerous NSA officials about what he believed to be illegal intelligence collection, the

Committee found no evidence that Snowden took any official effort to express concems about

U.S. intelligence activities-legal, moral, or otherwise-to any oversight officials Within the

U.S. Govemment, despite numerous avenues for him to do so. Snowden was aware of these

avenues. His only attempt to contact an NSA attomey revolved around a question about the

legal precedence ofexecutive orders, and his only contact to the Central Intelligence Agency

(CIA) Inspector General (IG) revolved around his disagreements with his managers about

training and retention ofinfiormation technology specialists.

Despite Snowden’s later public claim that he would have faced retribution for voicing

concems about intelligence activities, the Committee found that laws and regulations in effect at

the time of Snowden’s actions afforded him protection. The Committee routinely receives

disclosures from IC contractors pursuant to the Intelligence Community Whistleblower

Protection Act of 1998 (IC WPA). If Snowden had been worried about possible retaliation for

voicing concerns about NSA activities, he could have made a disclosure to the Committee. He

did not. Nor did Snowden remain in the United States to flee the legal consequences of his

actions, contrary to the tradition of civil disobedience he professes to embrace. Instead, he fled

to China and Russia, two countries whose governments place scant value on their citizens’

privacy or civil liberties-and whose intelligence services aggressively collect information on

both the United States and their own citizens.

To gather the files he took with him when he left the country for Hong Kong, Snowden

infringed on the privacy of thousands of govemment employees and contractors. He obtained

his colleagues, security credentials through misleading means, abused his access as a systems

administrator to search his co-workers, personal drives, and removed the personally

identifiable information of thousands of IC employees and contractors. From Hong Kong he

went to Russia, where he remains a guest of the Kremlin to this day.

It is also not clear Snowden understood the numerous privacy protections that govern the

activities of the IC. He failed basic annual training for NSA employees on Section 702 of the

Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) and complained the training was rigged to be

overly difficult. This training included explanations of the privacy protections related to the

PRISM program that Snowden would later disclose.

Third, two weeks before Snowden began mass downloads of classified documents,

he was reprimanded after engaging in a workplace spat with NSA managers. Snowden was

repeatedly counseled by his managers regarding his behavior at work. For example, in June

2012, Snowden became involved in a fiery e-mail argument With a Supervisor about how

computer updates should be managed. Snowden added an NSA senior executive several levels

above the supervisor to the e-mail thread, an action that earned him a swift reprimand from his

contracting officer for failing to follow the proper protocol for raising grievances through the

chain of command. Two weeks later, Snowden began his mass downloads of classified

information from NSA networks. Despite Snowden’s later claim that the March 2013

congressional testimony of Director of National Intelligence James Clapper was a “breaking

point” for him, these mass downloads predated Director Clapper’s testimony by eight months.

Fourth, Snowden was, and remains) a serial exaggerator and fabricator. A close

review of Snowden’s official employment records and submissions reveals a pattern of

intentional lying. He claimed to have left Army basic training because of broken legs when in

fact he washed out because of shin splints. He claimed to have obtained a high school degree

equivalent when in fact he never did. He claimed to have worked for the CIA as a “senior

advisor,” which was a gross exaggeration of his entry-level duties as a computer technician. He

also doctored his performance evaluations and obtained new positions at NSA by exaggerating

his resume and stealing the answers to an employment test. In May 2013, Snowden informed

his supervisor that he would be out of the office receive treatment for worsening epilepsy. In

reality, he was on his way to Hong Kong with stolen secrets.

Finally, the Committee remains concerned that more than three years after the start

of the unauthorized disclosures, NSA, and the IC as a whole, have not done enough to

minimize the risk of another massive unauthorized disclosure. Although it is impossible to

reduce the chance of another Snowden to zero, more work can and should be done to improve

the security of the people and computer networks that keep America’s most closely held secrets.

For instance, a recent DOD Inspector General report directed by the Committee found that NSA

has yet to effectively implement its post-Snowden security improvements. The Committee has

taken actions to improve IC information security in the Intelligence Authorization Acts for

Fiscal Years 2014, 2015, 2016, and 2017, and looks forward to working with the IC to continue

to improve security.