Trading Barbs With the NSA? Just Another Day for Edward Snowden

NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden during a meeting with German Green Party MP Hans-Christian Stroebele regarding being a witness for a possible investigation into NSA spying in Germany, on Oct. 31, 2013 in Moscow, Russia.

By Colin Daileda2014-05-30 23:16:39 UTC

NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, who has provided a trove of evidence to show how the agency spies on Americans as well as other governments, was again assailing the NSA on Friday for doing something he considered untruthful.

On Thursday, the agency released a single email Snowden sent while he worked as a contractor at the NSA. In it, Snowden asked a legal question about whether executive orders have precedence over federal statute law. His question apparently referenced a portion of text from an NSA training manual he felt was incorrect.

Snowden has always said he tried to relay his concerns to the agency before going public with them, but the NSA has denied this claim. When Snowden restated this position during a Wednesday interview with NBC, the NSA released the single email mentioned above.

Which brings us to Friday's happenings.

In an interview with the Washington Post, Snowden called the NSA's release "incomplete" and said the agency released the single document to gain a "political advantage."

Snowden also brought up the fact that the NSA had previously said he had made no attempts to contact them with concerns, which this email proves to be untrue.

Snowden then mentioned that Senators Ron Wyden (D-Oregon) and Mark Udall (D-Colorado) knew about the NSA's mass surveillance in 2011 and thought it was "abusive," but felt they could do little about it. That alone, he said, "underscores how futile such internal action isand will remainuntil these processes are reformed."

Senator Udall's office offered a tepid response to Snowden's claim that Udall and Wyden have been unable to enact meaningful reform from inside the system.

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Trading Barbs With the NSA? Just Another Day for Edward Snowden