A trove of classified documents supplied to The Guardian newspaper by NSA leaker Edward Snowden has been copied and shared with several people around the globe, journalist Glenn Greenwald told The Daily Beast on Tuesday.
Greenwald, the Guardian reporter who first began publishing National Security Agency documents earlier this month after meeting with the former intelligence contractor, told journalist Eli Lake that Snowden made arrangements to ensure others around the world have encrypted copies of that information should any circumstances allow the data or its source to be compromised.
Snowden ?has taken extreme precautions to make sure many different people around the world have these archives to insure the stories will inevitably be published,? Greenwald said. He added that the files are ?highly encrypted? and corresponding passwords to render them readable have not yet been distributed.
According to Lake, Greenwald said, ?if anything happens at all to Edward Snowden, he told me he has arranged for them to get access to the full archives.? Greenwald previously claimed that Snowden provided him with the archives of "thousands" of documents, dozens of which he considered to be newsworthy. Revelations published thus far by The Guardian and attributed to Snowden have generated international headlines and responses from presidential administrations worldwide.
