Snowden Damage Apparently Less Than Feared: Report

WASHINGTON – Edward Snowden does not appear to have taken as much as originally thought from NSA files, The Washington Post reported late Thursday.

The damage is still “profound” from the former NSA contractor who blew the cover on vast US surveillance programs of everything from everyday people’s phone calls to intrusions into high-tech companies’ servers, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper said, according to the Post.

Still, “it doesn’t look like he took as much” as first thought, Clapper was quoted as saying in what the Post called a rare interview Tuesday.

“We’re still investigating, but we think that a lot of what he looked at, he couldn’t pull down,” Clapper said. “Some things we thought he got he apparently didn’t,” the director was quoted as saying.

The Post said this view contrasts with the initial worse-case scenario in which the US intelligence community assumed that Snowden, who faces espionage charges, “compromised the communications networks that make up the military’s command and control system.”