I don’t think the NSA has ever been able to directly link any deaths to the Snowden leaks.
I also don’t see how the disclosure of NSA sources and methods had any impact on the Russians ability to get John Podesta to click on a phishing email.
The NSA’s TAO (tailored access operations), the group that wrote Stuxnet and is known to the cybersecurity community as The Equation Group, is not known to work with outside contractors to develop malware. They’re more likely to collaborate with GCHQ and Israel’s Unit 8200, but not contractors. The NSA does some of the most advanced malware and vulnerability research internally, no contractor has the capabilities they do internally. They might buy some premade malware from contractors, but for a highly targeted piece of malware like Stuxnet it would be developed internally.
People with security clearances spill their guts and tell all on their security clearance forms, because not doing so is a felony that the DOJ takes incredibly seriously. People’s most personal and intimate secrets are in those forms.
Never, ever lie or knowingly omit information on a security clearance form. If you tell the truth and you are disqualified, it’s extremely unlikely that information will be used against you. The FBI isn’t going to come after you for doing mushrooms. If you lie to the federal government while trying to obtain a security clearance, they will put you in federal prison.
During the first days of the Washington Post’s reporting on the Snowden documents, the outlet misreported the mechanism for how PRISM obtained it’s data. It was initially reported, seemingly based on Snowden’s misunderstanding of PRISM, that the NSA has a direct connection into the servers of Apple, Google, Microsoft, etc. That wasn’t actually true, as the data for PRISM was obtained through Section 702 requests the FBI sent to tech companies which was a practice established in the FISA Amendments Act of 2008.
I also don’t see how the disclosure of NSA sources and methods had any impact on the Russians ability to get John Podesta to click on a phishing email.