Back in December, 60 Minutes broadcast a now-notorious segment of pure access journalism in which they gullibly disseminated one false NSA claim after the next. The program claimed that Snowden is believed to still have access to 1.5 million classified documents he has not leaked". Ever since then, that Snowden "stole" 1.7 or 1.8 million documents from the NSA has been repeated over and over again by US media outlets as verified fact. The Washington Post's Walter Pincus, citing an anonymous official source, purported to tell readers that "among the roughly 1.7 million documents he walked away with - the vast majority of which have not been made public - are highly sensitive, specific intelligence reports". Reuters frequently includes in its reports the unchallenged assertion that "Snowden was believed to have taken 1.7 million computerized documents." In fact, that number is and always has been a pure fabrication, as even Keith Alexander admits. The claimed number has changed more times than one can count: always magically morphing into randomly chosen higher and scarier numbers. The reality, in the words of the General, is that the US Government "really [doesn't know] what he actually took with him" and they "don't have an accurate way of counting". All they know is how many documents he accessed in his entire career at NSA, which is a radically different question from how many documents he took. But that hasn't stopped American media outlets from repeatedly affirming the inflammatory evidence-free claim that Snowden took 1.7 million documents.