The US foiled a plot to bomb the New York Stock Exchange because of the sweeping surveillance programmes at the heart of a debate over national security and personal privacy, officials said on Tuesday at a rare open hearing on intelligence led by lawmakers sympathetic to the spying.
The House Intelligence Committee hearing provided a venue for officials to defend the once-secret programmes and did little probing of claims that the collection of people’s phone records and internet usage has disrupted dozens of terrorist plots. Few details were volunteered.
Army General Keith Alexander, director of the National Security Agency, said the two recently disclosed programmes – one that gathers US phone records and another that is designed to track the use of US-based internet servers by foreigners with possible links to terrorism – are critical. But details about them were not closely held within the secretive agency. Alexander said after the hearing that most of the documents accessed by Edward Snowden, a 29-year-old former systems analyst on contract to the NSA, were on a web forum available to many NSA employees. Others were on a site that required a special credential to access. Alexander said investigators are studying how Snowden did that.
He told lawmakers Snowden’s leaks have caused “irreversible and significant damage to this nation” and undermined the US relationship with allies.
When deputy FBI director Sean Joyce was asked what is next for Snowden, he said, simply, “justice”. Snowden fled to Hong Kong and is hiding.
In a new example, Joyce said the NSA was able to identify an extremist in Yemen who was in touch with Khalid Ouazzani in Kansas City, Missouri, enabling authorities to identify co-conspirators and thwart a plot to bomb the New York Stock Exchange.