Snowden Denies Being Source of Middle East Surveillance Report
Ran in The Independent, not The Guardian
Here's the latest twist in Edward Snowden's Incredible Adventure. Friday morning, The Independent ran with a big exclusive claiming that the UK has a "secret internet-monitoring station in the Middle East to intercept and process vast quantities of emails, telephone calls and web traffic on behalf of Western intelligence agencies". The Indie says that its information came from the "leaked documents obtained from the NSA by Edward Snowden" – from which we can infer that the newspaper was given them either by Snowden or an associate of his.
"Not so!" cried Snowden and his unofficial handler Glenn Greenwald (of Miranda In The Airport fame). Snowden and Greenwald say that they didn't hand over this information and that it's the kind of disclosure – revealing sensitive details of security operations – that they decided never to share. So if they didn't give the stuff to the Indie, who did?