Washington Post reporter Barton Gellman: “The source believes that exposure is inevitable and was prepared to face that consequence –”

“The source believes that he or she will be exposed?”

“Yes. The source does not believe that it’s possible to stay masked forever, and I don’t even think wants to stay masked forever. I think the source believes himself to be a — because I said in the story it’s “he” — he believes himself to be a whistleblower, that he’s operating out of conscience. He thinks that what the NSA is doing exceeds all reasonable boundaries of privacy or necessity. And I think he wants to stand up and say that. But in order to even be in a position to get word out, he had to be stealthy for a while or he simply would have been preempted. He would have been arrested and preempted and that would have been the end of that.”

Reuters reports: A U.S. intelligence agency requested a criminal probe on Saturday into the leak of highly classified information about secret surveillance programs run by the National Security Agency, a spokesman for the intelligence chief’s office said.

Confirmation that the NSA filed a “crimes report” came a few hours after the nation’s spy chief, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper launched an aggressive defense of a secret government data collection program.