WASHINGTON, DC– In comments after giving the opening plenary presentation of the Intelligence & National Security Summit, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper said that the disclosures made by former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden had driven the intelligence community to become more transparent to citizens about how it does business. In response to a question about the impact of Snowden's disclosures on the intelligence community asked through moderator and former Director of National Intelligence Ambassador John Negroponte, Clapper said, "On one hand, it forced some needed transparency, particularly on programs that had an impact on civil liberties and privacy in this country. If that had been all he had done, I could have tolerated it."
But, Clapper added, Snowden "exposed so many other things that had nothing to do with" civil liberties and privacy, including information about the US intelligence community's operations that did tangible damage to operations. "He has [done] untold damage to our collection activities," Clapper said, asserting that "terrorists have gone to school on what Snowden leaked." And programs that had a real impact on the security of American forces overseas, including one program in Afghanistan, "which he exposed and Glenn Greenwald wrote about, and the day after he wrote about it, the program was shut down by the government of Afghanistan," Clapper noted.
That statement was likely an allusion to the NSA's monitoring of virtually all the phone calls in the Bahamas and one other country—a country that Wikileaks later outed as Afghanistan.