A Pentagon report described the damage to national security by Edward Snowden's leaks of confidential National Security Agency documents as 'staggering'
The Defence Intelligence Assessment defined the report on the harm done to US Intelligence competence as 'grave' but did not provide any explicit information to support the assessment.
According to the Guardian, the assessment excluded NSA-related information and dealt exclusively with non-NSA defense materials. The report was distributed to multiple US military commands around the world and all four military branches.
Steven Aftergood, director of the project on Government Secrecy at the Federation of American scientists, said that the essence of the report is contained in the statement that 'the scope of the compromised knowledge related to US intelligence capabilities is staggering', but all elaboration of what this striking statement means has been withheld.
