> It was Snowden himself who said is was office gossip.
I just checked and read back that part of the article and that's not at all how it is portrayed.
He says he was "told" about it by an intelligence officer. With an amount of detail that makes it hard to discount as just "rumour" (for Snowden, if the story was false, these details wouldn't have checked out, also someone had to have been deliberately spreading misinformation damaging to this TAO crew).
Also, in the context of the entire article, Snowden recounts this story as one of a number of reasons why he took the steps he decided to take to become a whistleblower. That's not something done over just office rumours.
Therefore, apart from the assumption that Snowden is deliberately passing off disinformation as truth himself, there's really no reason not to accept this story as fact, or what Snowden believes to be factual.
I just checked and read back that part of the article and that's not at all how it is portrayed.
He says he was "told" about it by an intelligence officer. With an amount of detail that makes it hard to discount as just "rumour" (for Snowden, if the story was false, these details wouldn't have checked out, also someone had to have been deliberately spreading misinformation damaging to this TAO crew).
Also, in the context of the entire article, Snowden recounts this story as one of a number of reasons why he took the steps he decided to take to become a whistleblower. That's not something done over just office rumours.
Therefore, apart from the assumption that Snowden is deliberately passing off disinformation as truth himself, there's really no reason not to accept this story as fact, or what Snowden believes to be factual.