Former New York City Police Department Commissioner Bernard Kerik tells
Newsmax TV that he agrees with Adm. Mike Rogers, the director of the National Security Agency, that the damage caused by Edward Snowden's leaks have had a definite impact on combating terrorists.
"What Snowden did was take our intelligence capabilities and put it out publicly — how we're listening, who we're listening to," Kerik told J.D. Hayworth and Miranda Khan on "America's Forum" on Wednesday.
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Rogers, speaking at a conference Monday in Washington, said that Snowden "has had a
material impact on our ability to generate insights as to what terrorist groups around the world are doing."
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He added that "anyone who thinks this has not had an impact, I would say, doesn't know what they're talking about."
According to Kerik, "Al-Qaida and ISIS and these other radical extremist networks, they're monitoring everything that's going on here, and I'm sure that our enemies abroad ... like North Korea and like Russia and some others, they're distilling this, they're putting this information out publicly.
"They're sending it out to people that are really not our friends, and it's going to be extremely hurtful at some point."
And that, Kerik said, is the main problem — not the damage that has already been done by the leaks by the former CIA contractor, but what that damage means for future attacks.
"What's happened in the past, what's been exposed is one thing," Kerik said. "But giving these guys insight to what we do and how we do it, and where we get our information from going forward is extremely important, especially at a time when we are under more domestic and international threats from ISIS and al-Qaida and other radical groups than we've ever been before.
"So the damage is quite significant."
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