Glenn Greenwald calls latest allegations against Snowden a joke

The journalist central to Edward Snowden’s disclosures about the National Security Agency labels as “a self-parodying joke” new allegations that the former’s NSA contractor essentially helped terrorists evade U.S. surveillance.

“It’s a self-parodying joke,” Glenn Greenwald wrote in an email to me. He lives in Rio de Janeiro.

He was deriding claims in a new book by Michael Morrell, former deputy director of the CIA, that Snowden’s 2013 disclosures “played a role in the rise of ISIS.”

In a Daily Beast story by national security writer Shane Harris, it’s revealed that Morrell’s book implicates Snowden in the emergence and rise of ISIS.

“Within weeks of the leaks, terrorist organizations around the world were already starting to modify their actions in light of what Snowden disclosed. Communications sources dried up, tactics were changed,” he writes in the book.

According to Harris, Morrell believes the damaging disclosures included one that detailed an NSA program that collects the emails of foreigners as they are transmitted through telecommunications equipment in the U.S.

I sent the story to Greenwald who also wrote:

“For decades CIA officials have smeared everyone who shines unwanted light on them as traitors and terrorists, but suggesting Snowden played a role in creating ISIS is a new low in desperation.”