Glenn Greenwald of The Guardian tells the Associated Press the paper is currently deciding when to release the next story based on information in documents reportedly given him by 29-year-old Edward Snowden, who claims to have worked as a contractor at the National Security Agency and the CIA.
"We are going to have a lot more significant revelations that have not yet been heard over the next several weeks and months," Greenwald said.
Greenwald claims "dozens" of stories can be generated from the documents, and that the Guardian plans to pursue all of them.
Snowden faces decades in jail for the disclosures if the U.S. can extradite him from Hong Kong, where he says he has taken refuge after saying his sole motive was to “inform the public.”
Snowden allowed The Guardian and The Washington Post to reveal his identity Sunday. In a video that appeared on the Guardian’s website, he said two NSA surveillance programs are wide open to abuse.
"Any analyst at any time can target anyone. Any selector. Anywhere," Snowden said. "I, sitting at my desk, had the authority to wiretap anyone, from you or your accountant to a federal judge to even the president if I had a personal e-mail."
Snowden said he was a former technical assistant for the CIA and a current employee of defense contractor Booz Allen Hamilton, which released a statement Sunday confirming he had been a contractor with them in Hawaii for less than three months. Company officials have promised to work with investigators.
Snowden told the Guardian he believes the government could try to charge him with treason under the Espionage Act, but Mark Zaid, a national security attorney who represents whistle-blowers, told The Associated Press that that would require the government to prove he had intent to betray the United States. Snowden has said his “sole motive” was to inform the public and spur debate.
"My sole motive is to inform the public as to that which is done in their name and that which is done against them," Snowden told the Guardian.
In a note accompanying the first set of documents he provided to the newspaper, Snowden wrote: "I understand that I will be made to suffer for my actions," but "I will be satisfied if the federation of secret law, unequal pardon and irresistible executive powers that rule the world that I love are revealed even for an instant."
Snowden told the Post he was not going to hide.
"Allowing the U.S. government to intimidate its people with threats of retaliation for revealing wrongdoing is contrary to the public interest," he said in the interview published Sunday. Snowden said he would "ask for asylum from any countries that believe in free speech and oppose the victimization of global privacy."
Snowden is now staying in Hong Kong and seeking asylum outside the United States, possibly in Iceland, The Guardian reports.
If the reports are accurate, Snowden could face many years in prison for releasing classified information if he is successfully extradited from Hong Kong or elsewhere.
The Office of the Director of National Intelligence declined to comment on Snowden's disclosure, saying the issue has been referred to the Justice Department.
However, the agency said: "Any person who has a security clearance knows that he or she has an obligation to protect classified information and abide by the law."
"The Department of Justice is in the initial stages of an investigation into the unauthorized disclosure of classified information by an individual with authorized access," Justice Department spokeswoman Nanda Chitre said in a statement late Sunday.
New York Republican Rep. Peter King, chairman of the Homeland Security Subcommittee on Counterintelligence and Terrorism and a member of the Select Committee on Intelligence, said: "If Edward Snowden did in fact leak the NSA data as he claims, the United States government must prosecute him to the fullest extent of the law and begin extradition proceedings at the earliest date. The United States must make it clear that no country should be granting this individual asylum. This is a matter of extraordinary consequence to American intelligence."
In a nearly 13-minute video that accompanied The Guardian story Sunday, Snowden says he has no intentions of hiding because he has done nothing wrong.
“When you’re in positions of privileged access … . You recognize some of these things are actual abuses,” Snowden said about his decision to be a whistle-blower. “Over time, you feel compelled to talk about it.”
The Guardian broke the story late Wednesday that the federal government was collecting phone call records from Verizon customers.
The Guardian and the Post followed with a series of reports about the calls being taken from other telecommunications companies and that the NSA and FBI have a Internet scouring program, code-named PRISM, that records Internet activities, all part of a post-9/11 effort to thwart terrorism.
White House spokesman Josh Earnest said the Oval Office would not comment on Snowden before Monday.
Washington officials have acknowledged all branches of the federal government — Congress, the White House and federal courts — knew about the collection of data under the Patriot Act.
Still, the leaks have reopened the debate about privacy concerns versus heightened measure to protect against terrorist attacks. They also led the NSA to ask the Justice Department to conduct a criminal investigation.
Fox News confirmed the Obama administration took the first steps Saturday in a criminal investigation when officials filed a “crimes report.”
National Intelligence Director James Clapper has decried the leaks as reckless. And in the past days he has taken the rare step of declassifying some details about them to respond to media reports about counterterrorism techniques employed by the government.
“Disclosing information about the specific methods the government uses to collect communications can obviously give our enemies a ‘playbook’ of how to avoid detection,” Clapper said Saturday.
PRISM allows the federal government to tap directly into the servers of major U.S. Internet companies such as Google, Apple, Microsoft, Facebook and AOL, scooping out emails, video chats, instant messages and more to track foreign nationals who are suspected of terrorism or espionage.
The chief executives of Facebook and Google have said their companies were not aware of the data grab.
Officials say the government is not listening to any of the billions of phone calls, only logging the numbers.
President Obama, Clapper and others also have said the programs are subject to strict supervision of a secret court.
Obama said Friday that the programs have made a difference in tracking terrorists and are not tantamount to "Big Brother."
The president acknowledged the U.S. government is collecting reams of phone records, including phone numbers and the duration of calls, but said this does not include listening to calls or gathering the names of callers.
"You can't have 100 percent security and also then have 100 percent privacy and zero inconvenience,” he said. “We're going to have to make some choices as a society."
However, the president said he welcomes a debate on that issue.
The Guardian reported that Snowden was working in an NSA office in Hawaii when he copied the last of the documents he planned to disclose and told supervisors that he needed to be away for a few weeks to receive treatment for epilepsy.
Snowden is quoted as saying he chose Hong Kong because it has a "spirited commitment to free speech and the right of political dissent" and because he believed it was among the spots on the globes that could and would resist the dictates of the U.S. government.
Hong Kong has an extradition treaty with the United States that took force in 1998, according to the U.S. State Department website.
"The government could subject him to a 10- or 20-year penalty for each count," with each document leaked considered a separate charge, Mark Zaid, a national security lawyer who represents whistle-blowers told the Associated Press.
Snowden is quoted as saying he hopes the publicity of the leaks will provide him some protection.
"I feel satisfied that this was all worth it. I have no regrets," Snowden told the Guardian.
Snowden was said to have worked on IT security for the CIA and by 2007 was stationed with diplomatic cover in Geneva, responsible for maintaining computer network security. That gave him clearance to a range of classified documents, according to the Guardian report.
"Much of what I saw in Geneva really disillusioned me about how my government functions and what its impact is in the world," he says. "I realized that I was part of something that was doing far more harm than good."
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
Edward Snowden profile: The secretive life of America’s most wanted man
What made the whistleblower give up his Hawaiian idyll?
Edward Snowden was an unlikely member of America’s vast intelligence corps. The 29-year-old first encountered the NSA not as a recruit from an elite college but as a security guard working at one of the organisation’s secret facilities at the University of Maryland.
That was almost a decade ago. In the intervening years, as the US expanded its already sprawling security apparatus in response to the attacks on 11 September 2001, Snowden rose up the ranks before leaving to work for outside contractors. By the time he decided to blow the whistle he was living with his girlfriend in Hawaii and earning around $200,000 a year. A local estate agent in the town of Waipahu said the pair left their rented home on 1 May when their landlord decided he wanted to sell up. Fittingly they were a private couple who kept their blinds closed and “didn’t really talk to anyone”, a neighbour confirmed.
Snowden’s introduction to The Washington Post, which along with The Guardian published details of the NSA’s Prism programme that taps into data from firms such as Google and Facebook, reads like a spy novel. Reporter Barton Gellman described how Snowden went by the codename “Verax”, Latin for someone who speaks the truth.
He had a come long way, defying the odds at every step, before giving it all up, risking, as he put it to the Post, “my life and family” to expose the “omniscient state powers kept in check by nothing more than policy documents”.
Born on 21 June, 1983, Snowden, whose identity was revealed at his own request, grew up first in North Carolina and then in shadow of the NSA headquarters in Maryland. He left high school without a diploma, although he later earned his GED, a lesser qualification. His mother reportedly still lives in Maryland, working as a deputy clerk in a district court.
After school, Snowden did not appear to have had any ambitions to work as a spy. His aim was to join the elite special forces, and he took a first step in that direction when he signed up with the army reserves. He claims that he enlisted in 2003; the military has since said he signed up in May 2004, leaving four months later when he broke both his legs in an accident. It was then that he began working as a security guard. Soon, however, he was with the CIA in IT security, a job that a couple of years later led to a foreign posting under the cloak of a diplomatic assignment. His time with the CIA led him to question the power vested in America’s covert agencies.
Snowden switched to an outside contractor in 2009 and worked for a while in Japan. Barack Obama swept to power in 2008, riding a wave of liberal support motivated in no small part by his opposition to the Bush administration and its security policies. But, as an insider, Snowden could see that nothing was changing – quite the opposite, in fact. Snowden’s opposition to Obama is borne out by two public records from last year showing an Edward Snowden working for Dell in Maryland and another in Hawaii making donations to the libertarian Republican politician Ron Paul.
Snowden, whose most recent job was with the NSA contractor Booz Allen Hamilton, decided to take matters in his own hands and began speaking to the press earlier this year. Guardian columnist Glenn Greenwald has said he and Laura Poitras, a filmmaker, have been working with him since February, months before he told his NSA supervisor that he was leaving for a couple of weeks to seek treatment for epilepsy. Instead he boarded a jet bound for Hong Kong and disclosed the secret files to journalists.
According to Gellman, who had his first direct exchange with Snowden on 16 May, the former CIA worker demanded that his Prism leak be published within 72 hours before he went elsewhere. The reason? “I told him we would not make any guarantee what we published or when.” Snowden appears not to have deserted the reporter completely – as he unmasked himself on Sunday night, beside him sat Gellman’s book on Dick Cheney, Angler.
That was almost a decade ago. In the intervening years, as the US expanded its already sprawling security apparatus in response to the attacks on 11 September 2001, Snowden rose up the ranks before leaving to work for outside contractors. By the time he decided to blow the whistle he was living with his girlfriend in Hawaii and earning around $200,000 a year. A local estate agent in the town of Waipahu said the pair left their rented home on 1 May when their landlord decided he wanted to sell up. Fittingly they were a private couple who kept their blinds closed and “didn’t really talk to anyone”, a neighbour confirmed.
Snowden’s introduction to The Washington Post, which along with The Guardian published details of the NSA’s Prism programme that taps into data from firms such as Google and Facebook, reads like a spy novel. Reporter Barton Gellman described how Snowden went by the codename “Verax”, Latin for someone who speaks the truth.
He had a come long way, defying the odds at every step, before giving it all up, risking, as he put it to the Post, “my life and family” to expose the “omniscient state powers kept in check by nothing more than policy documents”.
Born on 21 June, 1983, Snowden, whose identity was revealed at his own request, grew up first in North Carolina and then in shadow of the NSA headquarters in Maryland. He left high school without a diploma, although he later earned his GED, a lesser qualification. His mother reportedly still lives in Maryland, working as a deputy clerk in a district court.
After school, Snowden did not appear to have had any ambitions to work as a spy. His aim was to join the elite special forces, and he took a first step in that direction when he signed up with the army reserves. He claims that he enlisted in 2003; the military has since said he signed up in May 2004, leaving four months later when he broke both his legs in an accident. It was then that he began working as a security guard. Soon, however, he was with the CIA in IT security, a job that a couple of years later led to a foreign posting under the cloak of a diplomatic assignment. His time with the CIA led him to question the power vested in America’s covert agencies.
Snowden switched to an outside contractor in 2009 and worked for a while in Japan. Barack Obama swept to power in 2008, riding a wave of liberal support motivated in no small part by his opposition to the Bush administration and its security policies. But, as an insider, Snowden could see that nothing was changing – quite the opposite, in fact. Snowden’s opposition to Obama is borne out by two public records from last year showing an Edward Snowden working for Dell in Maryland and another in Hawaii making donations to the libertarian Republican politician Ron Paul.
Snowden, whose most recent job was with the NSA contractor Booz Allen Hamilton, decided to take matters in his own hands and began speaking to the press earlier this year. Guardian columnist Glenn Greenwald has said he and Laura Poitras, a filmmaker, have been working with him since February, months before he told his NSA supervisor that he was leaving for a couple of weeks to seek treatment for epilepsy. Instead he boarded a jet bound for Hong Kong and disclosed the secret files to journalists.
According to Gellman, who had his first direct exchange with Snowden on 16 May, the former CIA worker demanded that his Prism leak be published within 72 hours before he went elsewhere. The reason? “I told him we would not make any guarantee what we published or when.” Snowden appears not to have deserted the reporter completely – as he unmasked himself on Sunday night, beside him sat Gellman’s book on Dick Cheney, Angler.
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