Snowden has sensitive NSA blueprints, says journalist

Edward Snowden has very sensitive ‘blueprints’ detailing how the National Security Agency operates which would allow someone who read them to evade or even duplicate NSA surveillance, a journalist close to the intelligence leaker said. 

Glenn Greenwald, a columnist with The Guardian which closely communicates with Snowden and first reported on his intelligence leaks, told Associated Press the former NSA systems analyst has ‘literally thousands of documents’ that constitute ‘basically the instruction manual for how the NSA is built.’

‘In order to take documents with him that proved that what he was saying was true he had to take ones that included very sensitive, detailed blueprints of how the NSA does what they do,’ Greenwald said, adding the interview was taking place about four hours after his last interaction with Snowden. Snowden emerged from weeks of hiding in a Moscow airport on Friday, and said he was willing to meet president Vladimir Putin’s condition that he stop leaking US secrets if it means Russia would give him asylum until he can move on to Latin America. 

Greenwald said Snowden has insisted the information from those documents not be made public. The journalist said it ‘would allow somebody who read them to know exactly how the NSA does what it does, which would in turn allow them to evade that surveillance or replicate it.’ Despite their sensitivity, Greenwald said he didn’t think disclosure of the documents would prove harmful to Americans or their national security.