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A 29-year-old former CIA computer technician went public on Sunday as the source behind the daily drumbeat of disclosures about the nation's surveillance programs, saying he took the extraordinary step because "the public needs to decide whether these programs and policies are right or wrong".
During a 12-minute video interview that went online Sunday, Edward Joseph Snowden calmly answered questions about his journey from being a well-compensated government contractor with nearly unlimited access to America's intelligence secrets to being holed up in a Hong Kong hotel room, the subject of a US investigation, with the understanding that he could spend the rest of his life in jail.
The revelation came after days of speculation that the source behind a series of leaks that have transfixed Washington must have been a high-level official at one of America's spy agencies. Instead, the leaker is a relatively low-level employee of a giant government contractor, Booz Allen Hamilton, that has won billions of dollars in secret government contracts over the past decade, partly by aggressively marketing itself as the premier protector of America's classified computer infrastructure.
The episode presents both international and domestic political difficulties for the Obama administration. If Snowden remained in China, the White House would have to navigate getting him out of a country that has been America's greatest adversary on many issues of computer security. (India fifth on US spy network)
Then the US must set up a strategy for prosecuting a man whom many will see as a hero for provoking a debate that US President Barack Obama himself has said he welcomes - amid already fierce criticism of the administration's crackdown on leaks. The court-martial of Pfc Bradley Manning, who released a vast archive of military and diplomatic materials to WikiLeaks, resumes Monday.
Snowden, who said he was seeking asylum abroad, perhaps in Iceland, gave the interview to The Guardian, the UK newspaper and global web site that during the past week published a string of articles about classified National Security Agency programmes. Both The Guardian and The Washington Post, which also published articles disclosing the surveillance programmes, identified Snowden on Sunday as the source for their articles.
In his interview with The Guardian, Snowden said his job had given him access to myriad secrets that the US government guards most jealously, including the locations of Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) stations overseas and the identities of undercover agents working for the US.
But he said he had been selective in what he disclosed, releasing only what he found to be the greatest abuses of a surveillance state that he came to view as reckless and having grown beyond reasonable boundaries. He was alternately defiant and resigned, saying at one point that the CIA might try to spirit him out of China, and speculating that it might even hire Asian gangs to go after him.
"If you realise that that's the world you helped create and it is going to get worse with the next generation and the next generation and extend the capabilities of this architecture of oppression, you realise that you might be willing to accept any risks and it doesn't matter what the outcome is," Snowden said.
Some outside experts said the push in recent years to break down barriers between spy agencies and share information across the government had greatly expanded the universe of government employees and outside contractors with access to highly classified intelligence.
"In past years, someone like Snowden may not have had access to briefings detailing these collection programmes," said Cedric Leighton, a former deputy director of the National Security Agency, "but now with the push from a 'need to know' to a 'need to share' philosophy, it's far more likely for an IT contractor like him to gain access to such documents."
Snowden's disclosures prompted some calls from Congress on Sunday to hold hearings about the surveillance programmes or reopen debate on portions of the Patriot Act.
The disclosures also were published just as the Obama administration was grappling with the fallout from its many investigations into leaks to the news media. After it was revealed in May that the US Justice Department had secretly obtained phone logs for reporters at The Associated Press and Fox News, criticism of the administration's leak investigation was heightened. Obama said he was "troubled" by those developments, and ordered Attorney General Eric H Holder Jr to review the Justice Department's procedures for investigating reporters.
As part of that review, Holder and senior department officials have met with editors and media lawyers to try to assuage their fears that the administration is trying to silence the press. A day before The Guardian published its first article on how the government was collecting Americans phone data, Holder met with lawyers for several media outlets about legislation and other measures that may help protect reporters.
©2013 The New York Times News Service
