Glenn Greenwald, one of the journalists who has worked closely with exiled whistleblower Edward Snowden to reveal the National Security Agency’s mass surveillance programs, says there may be a second leaker providing the NSA’s secrets to the press.

Two German media reports co-authored by former WikiLeaks volunteer and current Tor Project employee Jacob Appelbaum are the cause of his suspicion.

The first report was published in December by Der Spiegel and describes a 50-page catalog of NSA surveillance tools. The second came last week from the German broadcasters Norddeutscher Rundfunk (NDR) and Westdeutscher Rundfunk (WDR), detailing NSA surveillance of people who use Tor and other online privacy services.

Both articles “notably fail to mention anything about the sourcing for the documents,” Greenwald tells U.S. News. “That's particularly notable given that virtually every other article using Snowden documents – including Der Spiegel – specifically identified him as the source.”

Bruce Schneier, a technology security expert who worked with Greenwald to evaluate the cache of documents Snowden leaked, offered similar speculation on his blog Thursday.

“I do not believe that this [information about Tor surveillance] came from the Snowden documents,” Schneier wrote. “I also don't believe the TAO catalog came from the Snowden documents. I think there's a second leaker out there.”

“Seems clear at this point,” Greenwald tweeted Friday with a link to the blog post.

NDR and WDR did not immediately respond to requests for clarification on their sourcing.

A spokeswoman for the NSA didn’t respond to questions about the possibility there is a second active leaker.

Applebaum is an American living in Germany and has a significant connection to the Snowden leaks. Berlin-based American filmmaker Laura Poitras, whom Snowden originally supplied with documents, reached out to Appelbaum for help with an email-facilitated interview with Snowden in May 2013, a month before the whistleblower’s first disclosures were published, Der Spiegel reported in July 2013.



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Citing his proximity to the leaks, Business Insider fingered Appelbaum as a possible source for WikiLeaks’ claim in May that the NSA records all phone calls in Afghanistan – made after Greenwald and Poitras reported for The Intercept that Snowden-sourced documents show the NSA records all mobile calls in the Bahamas and a second country they declined to identify “in response to specific, credible concerns that doing so could lead to increased violence.”

Greenwald, who says he maintains regular contact with Snowden, is hopeful his suspicion of a second leaker is correct.