US officials believe there is now another whistleblower leaking sensitive documents, following high profile disclosures by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, according to reports.
A federal government source confirmed the conclusion to CNN, after Glenn Greenwald site The Intercept published a new story on Tuesday based partly on freshly leaked national security documents.
The article in question claims that 40% of people on a government terrorist watch list of 680,000 names actually have no “recognized terrorist group affiliation”, raising the question of why they are still on the list.
It also reveals that a “no-fly” list preventing people in the US from travelling has now grown to 47,000 names, the highest number since the list was created 13 years ago.
Both lists are part of a bigger database, known as the Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment (TIDE), which agencies including the CIA, NSA and FBI have access to and which includes biometric data from over 700,000 suspects.
Unsurprisingly, the report refused to name the leaker but referred instead to a rather generic “source in the intelligence community”.
However, Greenwald has hinted recently that “another” Snowden exists in the intelligence community.
In response to a Tweet by Bruce Schneier on July 4 which read “I think there’s a second [NSA] leaker out there…”, he wrote “Seems clear at this point”.
It’s still unclear how many documents the new leaker – if there is one – has shared and what impact they might have on the Obama administration and America’s standing in the world.
It is only known that they are "Secret" and "NOFORN" – ie not to be shared with foreign governments – although this is actually one level down from the docs leaked by Snowden, according to CNN.
The US has paid a heavy price already for the revelations emanating from Snowden’s leaks, not least in its relationship with China.
They were a shot in the arm for Beijing – so often on the back foot after countless US claims of cyber espionage from its operatives – and have lent credibility to its oft-played argument that China is a victim, not a perpetrator, of cyber attacks.
It seems even to have led to a clampdown on US made technology products.
First Windows 8 government sales were banned and then more recently it was claimed by the People’s Daily that Symantec and Kaspersky Lab products would not be allowed to be sold into central government customers.