That is not a consensus view within the U.S. intelligence community, where officials have been divided over how much ISIS really learned from the Snowden leaks that it didn’t already know. The group didn’t begin seizing territory in Iraq until a year after the leaks began. And last year, a U.S. intelligence official with access to information about ISIS’ current tactics told The Daily Beast that while the group had “likely learned a lot” from the Snowden leaks, “many of their forces are familiar with the U.S. from their time in AQI, [and] they have adapted well to avoiding detection.”

The acronym refers to Al Qaeda in Iraq, the group from which ISIS sprang. It was the target of a massive surveillance and hacking campaign by the NSA and U.S. military forces in Iraq from 2007 to 2008, which primarily targeted fighters’ cell phones. Presumably, ISIS learned from their predecessors—long before Snowden appeared on the scene—that their communications were subject to surveillance and that they should be careful about how they used their phones and email.

But three current and former U.S. officials recently told The Daily Beast that the Snowden leaks had undoubtedly tipped off at least some terrorists to the fact that their communications could be monitored, particularly as part of the program that collects foreigners’ emails in the United States.