Edward Snowden Warns of More Spying After Donald Trump’s Election

Edward Snowden Meets With German Green Party MP Hans-Christian Stroebele In Moscow

(Reuters) - Booz Allen Hamilton said on Thursday it had hired a former FBI chief to conduct an external review of its security practices, after the consulting firm learned for the second time in three years that an employee working under contract with the National Security Agency had been charged with stealing classified information. Booz Allen, which earns billions of dollars a year contracting with U.S. intelligence agencies, has come under renewed scrutiny in recent weeks after authorities took Harold Thomas Martin into custody. The firm also employed Edward Snowden, who leaked a trove of secret files to news organizations in 2013 that exposed vast domestic and international surveillance operations carried out by the NSA. Snowden, who was in Hong Kong when his disclosures surfaced, lives in Moscow under asylum. Former Federal Bureau of Investigation Director Robert Mueller is leading the audit of security, personnel and management practices, Booz Allen said in a statement. The review began on Oct. 19. Martin, 51, was taken into custody in August, but his arrest was not announced publicly until earlier this month. Prosecutors have alleged he spent more than two decades pilfering secret documents and hoarding them at his home in Maryland, where investigators said they seized at least 50 terabytes of data. Among the material allegedly stolen by Martin was a top secret document that contained "specific operational plans against a known enemy of the United States and its allies," the prosecutors said. The FBI is investigating possible links between Martin and the leak online this summer of secret NSA hacking tools used to break into the computers of adversaries such as Russia and China, U.S. officials said. "We fired Harold Martin as soon as we learned of his arrest, and we have been fully cooperating with the FBI's investigation," Booz Allen spokesman Craig Veith said. "We are determined to learn from this incident and look more broadly at our processes and practices."

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Donald Trump’s election as U.S. president raises concern that Washington may increase the intrusiveness of domestic intelligence gathering, former U.S. spy agency contractor Edward Snowden said on Monday, warning that democratic checks and balances were losing ground to authoritarianism.

Snowden lives in Moscow under an asylum deal after he leaked classified information in 2013 that triggered an international furor over the reach of U.S. spy operations. He spoke at a teleconference hosted by Buenos Aires University’s law school.

“We are starting to substitute open government for sheer authoritarianism, a government based not upon the principle of informed consent granted by people who understand its activities but rather a trust in personalities, a trust in claims, a trust in the hope that they will do the right thing,” Snowden said.

Washington pledged not to engage in indiscriminate espionage following Snowden’s 2013 disclosures. But Snowden questioned if that policy could be modified by new officials “who have a very different set of values and can govern in the dark.”

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“If government does actually win our trust, because they go for some years and they do operate in a way that we should support, what happens when it changes?” he asked. “This is kind of the challenge that we’re facing today in the United States with the result of the last election.”

Supporters see Snowden as a whistleblower who boldly exposed government excess. But the U.S. government has filed espionage charges against him for leaking intelligence information.

Trump, who scored an upset win over Democrat Hillary Clinton in last Tuesday’s election, broke with many in his own Republican Party during the campaign and emphasized his success as a businessman and reality TV show star. He promised sweeping security measures to deal with the threat of attacks on the United States.

His election was greeted with concern from the American Civil Liberties Union over statements he made during the campaign supporting increased surveillance of U.S. Muslims, mass deportation of illegal immigrants, reauthorization of waterboarding, and changing libel laws to increase press restrictions.

Snowden, asked if he thought the election of Trump, who has praised Russian President Vladimir Putin as a strong leader, might increase chances of him being pardoned by the U.S. government, responded: “Who knows?”