China and Russia “have information” that led to agents being moved but until now there was “no evidence” to show that any officers had been harmed.
According to the senior UK government source the files that the two countries were able to decipher contained “knowledge of how we operate” and had obstructed the UK from getting “vital information”. Back in July 2013 Snowden told former US Senator Gordon Humphrey that “no intelligence service – not even our own – has the capacity to compromise the secrets I continue to protect. … I cannot be coerced into revealing that information, even under torture.” Then, according to different US sources, the former U.S. National Security Agency contractor gave close to 200,000 “tier 2 and 1” documents that detailed the NSA’s global surveillance apparatus to American journalists Laura Poitras and Glenn Greenwald.
Edward Snowden repeatedly said that Russia and China could not have possibly received documents because he “destroyed” all documents in his possession before he even transited through Russia. What Snowden gave to Poitras and Greenwald allegedly included 58,000 “highly classified UK intelligence documents,” According to the UK government, the problem was that while the information in those files was encrypted along with them was also the password stored in plain-text for anyone to use. It is believed that the information from these files ended up in the hands of China and Russia. What is really scary is that between March 2012 and May 2013 Snowden allegedly stole more than 1.7 million NSA documents while working at two consecutive jobs for US government contractors. Besides the tier 1 and tier 2 documents, up to 1.5 million are “tier 3” documents. These include documents detailing NSA offensive cyber operations, 900,000 Department of Defense files and many others.
