US Congress report slams NSA leaker Snowden as a disgruntled employee, not a whistleblower

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Edward Snowden is seen via satellite from Moscow, Russia, during a press conference in New York on Wednesday about a new campaign to persuade US President Barack Obama to pardon him. Photo: EPA

Published: 12:47pm, 16 Sep 2016Updated: 8:23pm, 16 Sep 2016

A House intelligence committee report issued Thursday condemned Edward Snowden, saying the National Security Agency leaker is not a whistleblower and that the vast majority of the documents he stole were defence secrets that had nothing to do with privacy.

The Republican-led committee released a three-page unclassified summary of its two-year bipartisan examination of how Snowden was able to remove more than 1.5 million classified documents from secure NSA networks, what the documents contained and the damage their removal caused to US national security.

Snowden was an NSA contract employee when he took the documents and leaked them to journalists who revealed massive domestic surveillance programmes begun in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks. The programmes collected the telephone metadata records of millions of Americans and examined emails from overseas. Snowden fled to Hong Kong, then Russia, to avoid prosecution and now wants a presidential pardon as a whistleblower.

The committee report says that Snowden was a “disgruntled employee who had frequent conflicts with his managers.”

Representative Devin Nunes, the Republican chairman of the committee, said Snowden betrayed his colleagues and his country.

The National Security Agency (NSA) campus in Fort Meade, Maryland. Photo: AP

“He put our service members and the American people at risk after perceived slights by his superiors,” Nunes said in a statement. “In light of his long list of exaggerations and outright fabrications detailed in this report, no one should take him at his word. I look forward to his eventual return to the United States, where he will face justice for his damaging crimes.”