"Very Little Anyone Can Do," About Snowden, At This Point

June 27, 2013 • 2:44PM

NSA Whistleblower Edward Snowden has a Plan B. Glenn Greenwald tells Eli Lake of the The Daily Beast that Snowden "has taken extreme precautions to make sure many different people around the world have these archives to insure the stories will inevitably be published." According to Greenwald, Snowden has given encoded files to several people, so that if anything happens to him, the files will be unlocked. Greenwald said that the people who are now in possession of these files "cannot access them yet because they are highly encrypted, and they do not have the passwords." But, if anything happens to Snowden, Greenwald said, "he told me he has arranged for them to get access to the full archives."

Thus, even if U.S. authorities are able to seize Snowden and the four classified laptops that he is reported to have taken with him to Hong Kong, the secret documents he has, will still likely be published.

Lake reports that a former U.S. counterintelligence officer told him that his contacts inside the U.S. intelligence community "think Snowden has been planning this for years and has stashed files all over the Internet.... At this point there is very little anyone can do about this."