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<\/a>Assange-Mannings-Snowden. Click to enlarge<\/p><\/div>\n
A former US intelligence official says the leak of classified National Security Agency documents by Edward Snowden \u201cis not staggering at all,\u201d rather it looks like a counterintelligence operation.<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n Scott Rickard, a former American intelligence linguist in Florida, made the remarks in a phone interview with Press TV on Saturday, commenting on a recent Pentagon report which describes the damage done to US intelligence capabilities by Snowden leaks as \u201cstaggering\u201d.<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n \u201cI find that a kind of misleading, in fact incredibly misleading. The information that Snowden supposedly leaked is not staggering at all. In fact, much of the information that was presented by Glenn Greenwald and other news outlets was previously very well-known for more than a decade,\u201d Rickard said.<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n \u201cAt the same time anybody that has read any recent books published in the last twenty years\u2026is also very well aware of a lot of the issues that Snowden has been\u201d providing to the press, he added.<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n \u201cAnd this is interesting because the handlers that are handling the press are suspicious as well. Glenn Greenwald has always been a very controversial investigative reporter,\u201d he said, referring to the American journalist who brought to light the whistleblower’s leaks about the US government\u2019s mass spying last year.<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n Snowden, a former NSA contractor, began leaking classified intelligence documents in June 2013, revealing the extent of the NSA’s spying activities.<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n The disclosures have revealed that the NSA has been collecting the phone records of millions of Americans and foreign nationals as well as political leaders around the world. In August, Russia granted him asylum for one year.<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n Rickard said that \u201canyone who worked in the industry or studied the industry knows that privacy went way a long time ago when financial issues were being tracked \u2013 more than half a century ago.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n He termed Snowden\u2019s revelations about surveillance of phone calls as \u201cwindow-dressing discussions around privacy that Congress just passed this week.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n \u201cI believe there\u2019s been too much fanfare given to Snowden and Greenwald in these issues around privacy whereby it\u2019s probably more of a counterintelligence type of operation whether or not Greenwald or Snowden are aware of it. It\u2019s certainly being used that way,\u201d Rickard noted.<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n He also said \u201cthe US has been known to send in \u2018defectors\u2019 into adversary or enemy countries in order to gain information and share misinformation with those countries whereby those countries are operating. A good example of that would be Lee Harvey Oswald [who] \u2018defected\u2019 to Russia in the sixties but then was allowed to return to the United States and he was not incarcerated as a military individual.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n