He did vastly more harm by revealing the reach of the PRISM program, which was extraordinarily effective because militant organizations in Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan and Pakistan believed the encryption and other safeguards used by internet giants such as Apple, Google, Twitter and WhatsApp protected their communications. They evidently did not know the NSA could intercept data before it was encrypted. Despite metaphors such as the cloud and cyberspace, all data on the internet initially travels through fiber cables, almost all of which run through the United States and the Bahamas. That includes tweets, social media postings, Skype conversations and even Xbox messages.
According to the documents Snowden made public on June 6, 2013, PRISM was, as U.S. intelligence put it, “the number one source of raw intelligence used for NSA analytic reports.” General Michael Hayden, who was the NSA director during the three years following the 9/11 attack, wrote that these surveillance powers, among other things, “uncovered illicit financing networks, detected suspect travel, discovered ties to aviation schools, linked transportation employees to associates of terrorists, drew connections to the illicit purchases of arms, tied U.S. persons to [9/11 mastermind] Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, and discovered a suspect terrorist on the no-fly list who was already in the United States.”
Both NSA and FBI officials have testified that PRISM helped thwart at least 45 terrorist attacks between 2007 and 2013, including a plot to put high explosives on the subways under New York City’s Grand Central Station and the Times Square subway station at rush hour.
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