AP's breaking this story via the NY Times, within the past hour...
Greenwald: Snowden Docs Contain NSA 'Blueprint'
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS (via NY Times)
July 14, 2013 at 8:01 PM ET
RIO DE JANEIRO — The Guardian journalist who first reported Edward Snowden's disclosures of U.S. surveillance programs says the former National Security Agency analyst has "very specific blueprints of how the NSA do what they do."
Glenn Greenwald says Snowden has "literally thousands of documents" that constitute "basically the instruction manual for how the NSA is built," but that Snowden has insisted details from the documents not be made public.
Greenwald says he doesn't think national security would be harmed if the secret documents were to be published, but he added that he did think revelations from them could harm the U.S. government….
Earlier this weekend, Greenwald called allegations published by Reuters, “absurd,” with regard to Edward Snowden “blackmailing” the United States…
About the Reuters article
Greenwald
Guardian UK
Saturday 13 July 2013 15.53 EDT
When you give many interviews in different countries and say essentially the same thing over and over, as I do, media outlets often attempt to re-package what you've said to make their interview seem new and newsworthy, even when it isn't. Such is the case with this Reuters article today, that purports to summarize an interview I gave to the daily newspaper La Nacion of Argentina.
Like everything in the matter of these NSA leaks, this interview is being wildly distorted to attract attention away from the revelations themselves. It's particularly being seized on to attack Edward Snowden and, secondarily, me, for supposedly "blackmailing" and "threatening" the US government. That is just absurd.
That Snowden has created some sort of "dead man's switch" - whereby documents get released in the event that he is killed by the US government – was previously reported weeks ago, and Snowden himself has strongly implied much the same thing. That doesn't mean he thinks the US government is attempting to kill him - he doesn't - just that he's taken precautions against all eventualities, including that one (just incidentally, the notion that a government that has spent the last decade invading, bombing, torturing, rendering, kidnapping, imprisoning without charges, droning, partnering with the worst dictators and murderers, and targeting its own citizens for assassination would be above such conduct is charmingly quaint).
I made three points in this La Nacion interview, all of which are true and none of which has anything remotely to do with threats:
1) The oft-repeated claim that Snowden's intent is to harm the US is completely negated by the reality that he has all sorts of documents that could quickly and seriously harm the US if disclosed, yet he has published none of those. When he gave us the documents he provided, he repeatedly insisted that we exercise rigorous journalistic judgment in deciding which documents should be published in the public interest and which ones should be concealed on the ground that the harm of publication outweighs the public value. If his intent were to harm the US, he could have sold all the documents he had for a great deal of money, or indiscriminately published them, or passed them to a foreign adversary. He did none of that…