Following last year's revelations of mass surveillance by American security agencies after the defence contractor Edward Snowden stole confidential files and fled into exile, US authorities have now confirmed that another security worker is leaking files.
Snowden, 31, left the US in May 2013 with a large number of confidential security documents from the National Security Agency and flew to Hong Kong, where he handed some of the sensitive material to journalists, whose newspapers then published the explosive details of mass spying by the NSA and other agencies on the public, creating global outrage and forcing governments to place checks on their intelligence bodies. Snowden subsequently flew on to Russia, where he is living in temporary asylum.
According to US media reports, a new trove of secret files has been leaked by another intelligence operative in the US. The main journalist in the Snowden reporting, Glenn Greenwald, has obtained confidential documents from a contact in the "intelligence community", some of them published on his website The Intercept.
These newly published files reveal that under the administration of President Obama, the country's terror watch-list has greatly expanded, up to 10 times its previous length, to include many more Americans that are not permitted to fly.
Even prior to Greenwald's publishing of the new revelations, the journalist had tweeted several weeks earlier that it seemed evident that somebody else was leaking files to the media. Backing up these suspicions is the date on the newly leaked classified files: August 2013, which was three months after Snowden left his job and the United States and so would not have had access to intelligence files.
In addition, Snowden has made no secret of his whistleblowing, declaring to the world shortly after his initial leaks that he was the source. He has not made any such claim with the new release.
The latest files come from the National Counterterrorism Centre and show that globally, the US suspects there are some 680,000 people involved in terrorist activities. Officials in the US are now bracing for a wider leak of new files to the media by the purported second intelligence officer, according to US news reports.
