The former intelligence analyst, British Ambassador to Uzbekistan, and chancellor of the University of Dundee, Craig Murray, wrote yesterday:

As Julian Assange has made crystal clear, the leaks did not come from the Russians. As I have explained countless times, they are not hacks, they are insider leaks – there is a major difference between the two. *** I know who leaked them. I’ve met the person who leaked them, and they are certainly not Russian and it’s an insider. It’s a leak, not a hack; the two are different things.

In other words, Murray – a close friend of Julian Assange – says he knows for a fact that there were no hacks at all … instead, an American insider leaked the information to Wikileaks.

Today, Murray writes:

If you set up the super surveillance state, hoovering up all the internet traffic of pretty well everybody, that is not just going to affect the ordinary people whom the elite despise. There is also going to be an awful lot of traffic intercepted from sleazy members of the elite connected to even the most senior politicians, revealing all their corruption and idiosyncracies. From people like John Podesta, to take an entirely random example. And once the super surveillance state has intercepted and stored all that highly incriminating material, you never know if some decent human being, some genuine patriot, from within the security services is going to feel compelled to turn whistleblower. Than they might turn for help to, to take another entirely random example, Julian Assange.

This confirms what the NSA executive who created the agency’s mass surveillance program for digital information, who served as the senior technical director within the agency, who managed six thousand NSA employees, the 36-year NSA veteran widely regarded as a “legend” within the agency and the NSA’s best-ever analyst and code-breaker, who mapped out the Soviet command-and-control structure before anyone else knew how, and so predicted Soviet invasions before they happened (“in the 1970s, he decrypted the Soviet Union’s command system, which provided the US and its allies with real-time surveillance of all Soviet troop movements and Russian atomic weapons”) – previously said: the leaker was from U.S. intelligence services. And see this.

And Murray confirmed to Washington's Blog by email that Binney "was on the mark." And see this.

In other words, Russia did not hack the Democratic party emails. Instead, an American intelligence whistleblower leaked them.

It wouldn't be the first time.

Update: David Swanson interviewed Murray today, and obtained additional information. Specifically, Murray told Swanson that: (1) there were two American leakers ... one for the emails of the Democratic National Committee and one for the emails of top Clinton aide John Podesta; (2) Murray met one of those leakers; and (3) both leakers are American insiders with the NSA and/or the DNC, with no known connections to Russia.

And see this.

Postscript: As we've pointed out for years, the NSA is collecting all digital communications, including emails, in America.

The NSA then shares this information with numerous other agencies, including the FBI, DEA, etc.

We've noted that the NSA’s big data collection itself creates an easy mark for hackers. Remember, the Pentagon itself sees the collection of “big data” as a “national security threat” … but the NSA is the biggest data collector on the planet, and thus provides a tempting mother lode of information for foreign hackers.

And we've documented that the Obama administration has prosecuted more whistleblowers than all other presidents combined.

It sounds like this witches brew of bad policy is what led to the Democratic email leaks from an insider in the intelligence services.

But if anyone wants to try to prove Murray and Binney wrong, it should be easy to check.