A new Snowden?

The world's most famous whistleblower is currently in Russia. He is not a Russian citizen, and he doesn't work for an intelligence agency that keeps its records in Cyrillic script. Edward Snowden is a US citizen and has been granted political asylum in Russia. The famed whistleblow's location is important to bear in mind for those trying to link him to the lists published on the investigative website "The Intercept".

"Edward Snowden can't even have had access to these lists," says Dagmar Pepping, US correspondent with German public broadcaster ARD. "When those secret documents were written, Edward Snowden was no longer working for the NSA."

CNN reported on Tuesday (05.08.2014) that American government officials were aware of this fact and were already looking for a second leaker.

A well-known secret

Does that mean there's another whistleblower within the National Security Agency (NSA)? Not necessarily, says Erich Schmidt-Eenbohm, a German intelligence expert. He says one shouldn't limit the search for a second "leak" to the ranks of the NSA. The list had been distributed to many US government officials, he stresses, and one look at the sources of the list showed that, "The CIA provided 45 percent, the Defence Intelligence Agency (DIA) 39, and the NSA only 11 percent [of the content]."

The disclosures published by "The Intercept," Schmidt-Eenbohm says, did not rank particularly high in terms of quality. He explains it's important to remember that the information on the lists published "was shared with an extremely high number of private companies, such as airlines, so that there are hundreds of thousands of people who have access to this document that's been labeled 'secret.'"

Under suspicion

The files published by "The Intercept" on Tuesday prove that the US lists some 680,000 people as real or probable terrorists. Their names are found in the "Terrorist Screening Database" (TSDB). There's a second list with names of people who, according to US agencies, are believed to be within terrorists' social environments. The "Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment" (TIDE) is said to consist of as many as one million people.

Erich Schmidt-Eenbohm is unsurprised by these large numbers. He says the way data was registered is to blame for the high number of terrorist suspects. Profiling - also on the Internet - has been standard procedure among intelligence agencies. That means the agencies track people who have contact to "suspicious environments" and register them. If a given person appears again, even if it's on the periphery - as a witness in an investigation, for example - he or she is registered again. Depending on the definition, two or three such entries are enough for people to be put on lists such as TSDB or TIDE.

Schmidt-Eenbohm offers the example of a journalist to illustrate the procedure: "Let's say a journalist accesses suspicious websites operated by Islamist groups to follow their debates. The journalist then travels to Arab states to check out the situation on the ground. There's also proof that the journalist has communicated with terrorist suspects, because they called somebody in Syria or in the Turkish border area. That puts journalists at a particularly high risk of being put on those lists and of being subject to intelligence scrutiny."

Entry to the US denied

The sheer amount of people considered terrorist suspects by the US has surprised many. But intelligence expert Schmidt-Eenbohm is more concerned about something else: "There are some 500,000 face photos, and more than 144,000 people are registered with their full biometric data, including iris scans, et cetera."

Some of that information also flows in from non-American intelligence agencies, reaching a scope, says Schmidt-Eenbohm, "where there are 240 new entries every day."

Finding yourself on one such intelligence agency's list can have serious consequences. "You will first be put on a 'no-fly list,'" he explains, "which means you can no longer enter the US." And eventually, he adds, "If you are considered a terrorist suspect, the intelligence agencies will use all available means to find out every little detail about your personality."

Already embarrassing

Erich Schmidt-Eenbohm says he believes the latest disclosures haven't provided much additional information. But journalist Dagmar Pepping notes Snowden's NSA revelations were also only published step by step, and she says there might be more to come.

While this case appears less than spectacular, Pepping says it is an embarrassment for Obama: "If it turns out that intelligence services are not doing things differently - despite all the promises - and that they are pursuing the anti-terrorism fight to excess, then that's news that Barack Obama actually can't afford."