WASHINGTON: WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange said yesterday that Edward Snowden made sure that the information he took about US surveillance programmes will continue to be published regardless of what happens to the former US spy agency contractor.
Assange criticised the United States for revoking Snowden’s passport and said it would not stop the classified information taken by the 30-year-old former contractor from getting out.
“Look, there is no stopping the publishing process at this stage,” Assange said in an interview with ABC’s “This Week” television show. “Great care has been taken to make sure that Mr Snowden can’t be pressured by any state to stop the publication process.”
He did not directly respond when asked if WikiLeaks was in possession of the files.
Last week, Glenn Greenwald, the Guardian journalist who first published the classified information released by Snowden, said Snowden had made encrypted copies of his files and distributed them in case anything happened to him.
Greenwald told The Daily Beast that the people in possession of these files “cannot access them yet because they are highly encrypted and they do not have the passwords.” But Greenwald said “if anything happens at all to Edward Snowden, he told me he has arranged for them to get access to the full archives.”
Snowden left his job as an NSA contractor in Hawaii last month and went to Hong Kong before Britain’s Guardian newspaper and the Washington Post published articles based on top-secret documents he took from the government that detailed US surveillance programmes.
After hiding in Hong Kong he fled to Moscow, where he remains in hiding at the Sheremetyevo airport. The US government has charged Snowden under the 1917 Espionage Act with theft and passing classified communications to an “unauthorised person.”
Snowden is currently stuck in legal limbo in a transit area of the Moscow airport. Assange has said Snowden, who has sought legal advice from WikiLeaks, has requested asylum in Ecuador.
REUTERS
