At Wednesday’s hearing, Sen. Susan Collins said she had read the DIA damage assessment. “Most of the documents stolen by Edward Snowden have nothing to do with the privacy rights and civil liberties of American citizens or even the NSA surveillance programs,” she said, referring to the report.

Gen. Michael Flynn, the DIA director, said the greatest cost of the Snowden leak is “unknown today,” but he said it would be borne in the “cost of human lives in tomorrow’s battlefield or in some place we will put our military forces in harm’s way.”

A U.S. intelligence official familiar with the DIA assessment told The Daily Beast the agency concludes that Snowden fabricated the identity of more than one “super user” or senior intelligence official who had access to vast troves of classified information. This allowed Snowden to extract documents that revealed the nature of how the United States coordinates its satellite coverage with other large signal collection platforms.