US confidential intelligence leaked again: there may be a "second Snowden"

Beijing time, August 6, morning news, according to Reuters, people familiar with the matter revealed that US intelligence officials are considering whether to ask the US Department of Justice to launch a criminal investigation into a confidential counterterrorism intelligence leak.

Intelligence officials said they were preparing to investigate a document released Tuesday by the news website The Intercept that provides a breakdown of the people whose names and personal information were included in two U.S. government data networks because of suspected ties to extremist groups.

Since the document was dated August 2013, the US media suspected that in addition to Edward Snowden, there may be another intelligence leaker in the United States.

But people familiar with the matter said the U.S. government is not yet sure whether there is a second leaker.

The documents disclosed this time involve information in the U.S. Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment (TIDE) and the Terrorist Screening Database.

The document, revealed by The Intercept and based on a multi-colored chart with a "Secret" label, lists 680,000 people on a "watch list" for a terrorist screening database, a network of unclassified data that is used to selectively screen watch lists for the government.

Of the 680,000, 280,000 are described by the U.S. government as having "no confirmed terrorist affiliation," and about the same number are suspected of having links to al-Qaeda, Hamas and Hezbollah, the document said.

In addition, the document also stated that the US government has designed a "no-fly" list of 47,000 people, indicating that these people may be prohibited from traveling by air. Another 16,000 people are included in the "call list" and may be subject to additional screening before boarding.

The document said the Terrorist Screening Database was filtered from TIDE, a larger confidential database that contains 320,000 more names than the Terrorist Screening Database and includes a lot of raw intelligence information.

U.S. intelligence officials said that because the document is classified as "secret," the National Counterterrorism Center, which developed the list, is responsible for reporting the matter to the U.S. Department of Justice, which will then decide whether to launch a criminal investigation.

Snowden, the founder of The Intercept, journalist Glenn Greenwald and filmmaker Laura Poitras, left the United States in Hawaii last May and appears to have lost access to classified U.S. intelligence since then.

The Intercept also published a lengthy document last month that revealed the criteria and process for selecting members of the terrorist watch list database. That document was marked “Unclassified/Official Use Only/Sensitive Security Information.”

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