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Reports surfaced this week that Edward Snowden possesses a “doomsday cache” of agent identities. Put another way, US and UK officials expressed concern that if Snowden leaked agents' names, intelligence personnel and operations could be put at risk.
Current and former US officials, and other sources briefed on the situation, said that the data—stored in a cloud separately from the main NSA leaks—is highly encrypted, and requires multiple passwords to access the files. At least three people know the passwords, which only work in very specific windows of time each day.
Given the NSA’s embarrassment over the Snowden leaks, a knee-jerk reaction would be to view the reports as a well-crafted PR campaign against the elusive whistleblower. However, exposing intelligence personnel names could indeed cause a great deal of economic and political damage. It’s worth noting that WikiLeaks endured similar accusations in the wake of Cablegate. That notion was only put to rest when Brigadier General Robert Carr, the senior counter-intelligence officer in charge of the Information Review Task Force in the WikiLeaks Cablegate dump, determined the leaks didn’t result in any known deaths.
No reasonable person would deny that exposing intelligence personnel might sour diplomatic relations, or damage the US government’s ability to ensure a modicum of international stability. But, all of this assumes that Snowden possesses the cache in the first place; and that he would threaten to unveil it as an insurance policy against arrest, extradition, prosecution, torture, or even assassination.
The real question becomes: Does Snowden even need a "doomsday cache" as an insurance policy? It seems more likely that he does not, for a couple of reasons. Snowden has played his hand so well, trickling out leaks slowly and carefully, that exposing intelligence personnel in a doomsday leak would destroy the whistleblower reputation he worked so hard to cultivate.
Could Snowden be so moronic and megalomaniacal as to consider it a viable option? Or for that matter, would Glenn Greenwald, Snowden’s de facto manager, let him? It also seems unlikely that even the most rambunctious of media outlets, such as The Guardian, would publish agent identities.
Snowden wants to change the nature of state surveillance and reinforce the value of whistleblowing. Dropping a doomsday cache of secret agent identities would not only diminish his anti-surveillance work, but essentially prove the US government’s case that intelligence whistleblowers are a threat to national security.
Snowden already has the US government by the balls. Why provide the ammunition for character assassination?