A new intelligence leak about the U.S.’s classified terrorist watchlist published Tuesday has led federal government officials to confirm a new leaker with access to high-profile secrets has emerged from the intelligence community.
According to unnamed U.S. officials cited by CNN, “the federal government has concluded there’s a new leaker.”
The new documents provided to journalist Glenn Greenwald’s The Intercept “from a source in the intelligence community” are from 2013, and reveal almost half of all 680,000 suspected terrorists on the National Counterterrorism Center’s terrorist watchlist have no connection to known terrorists. (RELATED: Half Of All People On Government Terrorist Watchlist Have No Terrorist Connections)
Greenwald released similar information late last month about the criteria used to identify terrorist suspects, which Attorney General Eric Holder recently tried to secure under a state secrets privilege. Greenwald is one of the journalists responsible for receiving and publishing a cache of classified National Security Agency intelligence documents detailing bulk surveillance programs leaked by Edward Snowden. (RELATED: Newly Released Document Reveals How The US Government Defines A Terrorist)
The documents published Tuesday were dated August of last year — months after Snowden fled the U.S. and outed himself as Greenwald’s source, and were not directly attributed to Snowden, as other documents in Greenwald stories have been.
In response to other NSA surveillance-related stories broken in the last half-year, Greenwald himself recently said on Twitter that “it seems clear” there is another leaker.
“The lack of sourcing to Snowden on this & that last article seems petty telling,” Greenwald said in July after German public broadcaster ARD reported that NSA was tracking Internet users researching details about privacy software.