Edward Snowden, the man who unveiled the US National Security Agency (NSA)’s complex spying programme PRISM, has revealed that he took his contracting job with security contractor Booz Allen to get his hands on the information he leaked.
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In an interview with the South China Morning Post, Snowden said that he envisioned himself finding and leaking documents around the NSA’s spying efforts to the international press before he even started the job.
“My position with Booz Allen Hamilton granted me access to lists of machines all over the world the NSA hacked,” he told the paper in the interview, conducted on 12 June. “That is why I accepted that position about three months ago.” Since then Snowden has continued to leak sensitive documents, including ones which revealed that British agency GHCQ had been tapping into fibre-optic cables for access to the world’s communications.
The whistleblower, currently attempting to make his way to Ecuador, also claims that he still has “a cache of classified documents” that he’s sifting through before revealing them to the press.
Among those are documents which he says prove that the NSA hacked computers in Hong Kong and on the Chinese mainland.
“I did not release them earlier because I don’t want to simply dump huge amounts of documents without regard to their content,” he said.
“I have to screen everything before releasing it to journalists.”
There are other countries involved too, Snowden said in the interview.
“If I have time to go through this information, I would like to make it available to journalists in each country to make their own assessment, independent of my bias, as to whether or not the knowledge of US network operations against their people should be published.”
The US has reached out diplomatically to all the countries through which it thinks Snowden might travel in his bid to get to Ecuador. So far though, Hong Kong and Russia have defied the superpower’s requests that Snowden be detained long enough for extradition processes to begin.
