WASHINGTON – Edward Snowden, the fugitive American intelligence leaker, has denied any possibility that Russia or China can gain access to the top secret files of the National Security Agency (NSA).
Snowden in a wide ranging interview with The New York Times said he didn’t take top-secret agency files with him when he fled to Moscow and that he was also able to protect the documents from Chinese spies.
“There’s a zero percent chance the Russians or Chinese have received any documents,” Snowden said in the interview with The New York Times’ James Risen, published Thursday.
Hailed by some as a heroic whistle-blower, Snowden, who is presently hiding in Russia, faces espionage charges in the US for exposing the NSA’s secret of monitoring vast quantities of email and telephone data of both Americans and foreigners.
He has also exposed a report that Washington spied on the European Union that caused outrage in European capitals.
In The New York Times interview, Snowden said he gave all of the classified documents he had obtained to journalists he met in Hong Kong, before flying to Moscow.
He stressed that he did not keep any copies for himself. He did not take the files to Russia “because it wouldn’t serve the public interest”, he said.
“What would be the unique value of personally carrying another copy of the materials onward?” he added.
He claimed that he was qualified to foil any attempts by China to access his cache of documents.
As an NSA contractor, he said, he was well-versed in Chinese cyberspying programmes and even taught a course on Chinese cybercounter intelligence.
He said that as an NSA contractor he had targeted Chinese operations.
Snowden said he gave the documents to journalists and excluded himself from the editorial process because he wanted his own bias “divorced from the decision-making of publication”.
He insisted he decided to become a whistleblower and flee America because he had no faith in the internal reporting mechanisms of the US government that he believed would have destroyed him and buried his message for ever.
One of the main criticisms leveled at Snowden by the US President Barack Obama’s administration has been that he should have taken up an official complaint within the NSA, rather than travelling to Hong Kong to share his concerns about the agency’s data dragnet with the Guardian and other news organisations.
But in the interview, Snowden dismissed that option as implausible.
“The system does not work,” he said, underlining the paradox that “you have to report wrongdoing to those most responsible for it”.
If he had tried to sound the alarm internally, he said, he would have “been discredited and ruined” and the substance of his warnings “would have been buried forever”.
Snowden, 30, conducted the interview over the past few days, communicating from Russia, where he has been granted a year’s asylum, with the New York Times via encrypted email.
The Times said that Snowden argued that he had helped American national security by prompting a badly needed public debate about the scope of the intelligence effort.
“The secret continuance of these programs represents a far greater danger than their disclosure,” he said.
“So long as there’s broad support amongst a people, it can be argued there’s a level of legitimacy even to the most invasive and morally wrong programme, as it was an informed and willing decision,” he said.
“However, programmes that are implemented in secret, out of public oversight, lack that legitimacy, and that’s a problem. It also represents a dangerous normalization of ‘governing in the dark’, where decisions with enormous public impact occur without any public input.”