New Leaks, Are They Snowden's?

In the Sunday New York Times, Scott Shane put together some new information about what and where NSA was collecting intelligence about these things:

1.  Information about positions of the U.N. secretary general, prior to a meeting with our President.

2.  Interception of 478 e-mails which helped to foil a plan by jihadists to kill a Swedish artist.

3.  Surveillance information about  FARC rebels later turned over to over to the Colombian government.

4.  Surveillance of Iran's Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, aircraft entering and leaving the airspace around him, his vehicles, weapons, and conversations of aides, down to the details of what was discussed.

5.  Surveillance of Somali officials, a U.N. political officer communicating by e-mail, and a local rep from a charity World Vision.

(See: No Morsel Too Minuscule For All-Consuming N.S.A., New York Times, Nov 3, 2013)

The sources of most of these examples are said to be documents that came from Edward Snowden.  I watch for these documents, because they are sensitive intelligence matters that should not appear in public and they damage our national security.  I haven't seen that many, and I am starting to get the idea that the New York Times, the Guardian, and the Washington Post can write a ton of articles based on their own sources, and say they came from Snowden's stash of documents.  We wouldn't have any way of knowing the truth of it, anymore than we would know the truth of the source of the examples they are using.  Nobody in the government will acknowledge the truth of any of them, even when they appear in the public media.  Nobody can challenge the voracity of the newspapers' statements, nor question whether they really came from Snowden.

The inference in this article is that NSA collects, analyzes and distributes intelligence about almost every aspect of any persons life, anywhere in the world.  There would have never been an attack on 9/11, Somali pirates would never capture a ship on the open seas, the FARC would not exist as an organization, and Iran would not have a nuclear program, to speak of, if it were really true that NSA could sweep up everything, and use it to make predictions about what was going to happen anywhere, anytime.

That doesn't stop the press from bringing phony "charges" of NSA's abuses of their sanctioned mission.    What this does is undermine our intelligence collection capability, to the benefit of the Russians and Chinese who are the only other countries that can come close to us in that regard.  Does anyone think that Snowden picked Hong Kong at random, as the jumping off point for his escapades?  Do we think he sought asylum in Russia because he "just happened to be at the airport in Moscow"?  Both countries benefit from these disclosures.  What we need to find out, and the White House certainly could if they wanted, is where is this information the press is publishing really coming from?  I doubt that is just Snowden's documents.  It is an easy way to protect other sources by saying so, and we should try to find out who those sources really are.