NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, an analyst with a US defence contractor, is pictured during an interview with the Guardian in his hotel room in Hong Kong
LONDON: An ex-CIA employee working as a contractor at the US National Security Agency said he was the man who had leaked details of a top secret US surveillance programme, acting out of conscience to protect “basic liberties for people around the world”.
Holed up in a hotel room in Hong Kong, Edward Snowden, 29, said he had thought long and hard before publicising details of an NSA programme codenamed PRISM, saying he had done so because he felt his country was building an unaccountable and secret espionage machine that spied on every American.
Both the Washington Post and Britain’s Guardian newspaper — to whom he gave the documents he had purloined — published his identity yesterday. “I don’t want to live in a society that does these sort of things ... I do not want to live in a world where everything I do and say is recorded. That is not something I am willing to support or live under,” he told the Guardian, which published a video interview with him on its website.
The Guardian published revelations this week that U.S. security services monitored data about phone calls from Verizon and Internet data from large companies such as Google and Facebook.
