BEIJING, June 13 (Xinhuanet) -- In his first interview since disappearing from his hotel in Hong Kong, whistleblower Edward Snowden has said that he is neither a traitor nor a hero.
Speaking to Chinese media, he said that he was not hiding from justice but exposing criminality. He vowed to fight any attempt to extradite him and asked the court and people in Hong Kong to decide his fate.
Snowden, a former CIA employee leaked information to British and US media about the US's secret external surveillance program called Prism. On May the 20th, the 29 year old flew to Hong Kong from Hawaii, where he had been working for defense contractor Booz Allen Hamilton at the National Security Agency.
White House Spokesman said, "As was the case yesterday, I am not going to discuss the subject of a recently opened investigation. So the whereabout of this individule, any details about the investigation, I would refer to the justice and FBI."
Many politicians accused Snowden of harming the national security of the U.S. The leader of the House of Representatives John Boehner said he is a traitor and the programs had been passed by the congress and the court. So they are legal and do not violate privacy rights. But Snowden’s supporters are calling the White House for a public debate and they are asking the government to release more details and to absolve him.
The U.S. judiciary has started to investigate the case. If formal charges are filed against him, extradition will be considered.
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WASHINGTON, June 6 (Xinhua) -- The U.S. Director of National Intelligence James Clapper on Thursday defended the code-named PRISM program that tapped into internet companies for intelligence, saying the related reports published by the British Guardian newspaper and the Washington Post contained "numerous inaccuracies."
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WASHINGTON, June 6 (Xinhua) -- U.S. National Security Agency ( NSA) and the FBI are secretly tapping directly into the central servers of nine U.S. internet companies, extracting audio, video, photographs, e-mails, documents and connection logs that enable analysts to track a person's movements and contacts over time, according to a report posted on the Washington Post's website Thursday night.
The highly classified program, code-named PRISM, has not been disclosed publicly before. According to the report, it is established in 2007 and saw exponential growth in the past 6 years. The report quoted an internal document as saying the new tool was the most prolific contributor to the President's Daily Brief, which cited PRISM data in 1,477 articles last year. "NSA reporting increasingly relies on PRISM" as its leading source of raw material, accounting for nearly 1 in 7 intelligence reports. Full story
(Source: CNTV.cn)
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