Snowden’s surveillance comments ‘dangerous’

Demonstrators listen as civil rights and legal advocates and residents hold a press conference yesterday outside One Police Plaza in New York to discuss planned legal action challenging the city police department’s surveillance of businesses frequented by Muslim residents and area mosques.

Reuters/Washington

US House of Representatives Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Rogers, speaking ahead of a hearing on the disclosures, also said concerns remain that Snowden may not have acted alone in leaking information on the federal government’s top-secret surveillance programs.

“Anything that he talks about is dangerous,” Rogers said on NBC’s Today programme.

Snowden, a former employee of government contractor Booz Allen Hamilton who worked in a US National Security Agency facility in Hawaii, revealed details to the media earlier this month about the US phone and Internet data tracking. Speaking in an Internet chat on Monday, he defended his actions and vowed to release more details on the extent of the agency’s access.

Rogers said that it remains unclear how a low-level outside contractor was able to gain such access to so much classified information. No evidence has emerged yet that anyone else was involved in releasing details about the programmes.

“We’re a little nervous that some of the things he was trying to do exceeded his capability. So we’re curious: how did he get that capability, was somebody helping him trying to download this?” Rogers told NBC.

Yesterday, the congressional panel was to hear from NSA director Keith Alexander, who Rogers said is expected to offer more information on terrorism threats that were halted by the surveillance efforts.