A criminal investigation is likely to be opened up in order to find out who is responsible for leaking documents that revealed the NSA's secret surveillance of phones and emails, according to Reuters.
An anonymous senior law enforcement official spoke with ABC News and said that the leak to The Washington Post and The Guardian could have been done by one person.
"This guy's trying to be some kind of martyr," the source said of the person who leaked the information. "It's completely reckless and illegal...It's more than just unauthorized. He's no hero."
The Obama administration and the Department of Justice have been under scrutiny lately for their handling of previous leaks including the search of phone records of reporters from Fox News and the Associated Press. A source told Reuters that even if the administration wanted to avoid an investigation that would bring more public scrutiny that the extent and sensitivity of the leak may compel an investigation.
The Guardian printed a document from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) court revealing that the NSA had obtained millions of numbers through Verizon on Thursday. The Washington Post published slides from a presentation for a program known as PRISM explaining how the government had mined information, including emails and chat records, from the world's biggest web services.
A source who has been inside the FISA court multiple times told ABC News that a link like this was very unusual, in the 35 years the court has existed the source had never known of a single leak.
Julian Assange, founder of WikiLeaks, defended the leaker of the NSA information and compared him to Bradley Manning. Manning is currently on trial for leaking documents related to the Iraq war to WikiLeaks.
"Let's ask ourselves whether the whistle-blower who has revealed those, and there's more to come, is going , in three years time, to be in exactly the position that Bradley Manning is," Assange told CBS News.
