STATE SECRETS

U.K. Paper Defends Snowden Slam

Says it wasn’t fed by British government.

London Sunday Times reporter Tom Harper insisted that the paper was not fed a story by the British government that Russia and China allegedly hacked into documents taken by Edward Snowden. “We picked up on the story from a while back from an extremely well-placed source in the Home Office, and then carried on trying to substantiate what was going on through various sources in various agencies throughout Britain, and then finally presented the story to the government, and they effectively confirmed what you read in today’s Sunday Times,” he told CNN’s George Howell. “It’s obviously allegations at the moment from our point of view, and it’s really for the British government to defend it,” he added. Howell grilled Harper on claims that MI6 sources were threatened by the alleged hacks, to which Harper responded that a statement “suggests that no one has come to any harm.”