Tuesday 24 December 2013
NSA whistleblower said he had no relationship with the Russian government, likening his life in Moscow to that of a house cat.
The whistleblower Edward Snowden has declared “mission accomplished”, seven months after revelations were first published from his mass leak of National Security Agency documents.
Edwards Snowden,
AP Photo
The documents, which were passed to the Guardian, as well the Washington Post and other publications, revealed how technological developments were used by the US surveillance agency to spy on its own citizens and others abroad, and also to spy on allies, such as the US on Germany and Australia on Indonesia.
In 14 hours of interviews with Washington Post journalist Barton Gellman, Snowden said: “For me, in terms of personal satisfaction, the mission’s already accomplished.”
He continued: “I already won. As soon as the journalists were able to work, everything that I had been trying to do was validated. Because, remember, I didn’t want to change society. I wanted to give society a chance to determine if it should change itself.
“All I wanted was for the public to be able to have a say in how they are governed.”
Snowden said other colleagues at the NSA had been concerned the agency was spying on “more Americans in America than Russians in Russia” and were not entirely comfortable with the data collected on “ordinary” citizens.
He described using the “front-page test” on his colleagues when raising the issues, asking them how they thought the public would react if information was reported on the front page of a newspaper.