WASHINGTON - Edward Snowden, the former National Security Agency contractor who has confessed to disclosing troves of highly classified documents detailing American surveillance at home and abroad, said Monday that he had not given any classified materials to the government of China.
“This is a predictable smear that I anticipated before going public,” Snowden said, adding that such speculation was “intended to distract from the issue of U.S. government misconduct.”
“Ask yourself: if I were a Chinese spy, why wouldn’t I have flown directly into Beijing? I could be living in a palace petting a phoenix by now.”
Snowden made his comments in an online question-and-answer session with readers and reporters that was hosted on the website of The Guardian, the British newspaper that has published most of the secret information to date. He implied that he was still in Hong Kong, where he has sought refuge from the U.S. government, but did not describe his location specifically.
Snowden’s choice to go to Hong Kong to decry government surveillance, and his decision to tell the South China Morning Post about National Security Agency hacking into computers in mainland China and Hong Kong last week, has fueled attacks on portraying him as a whistle-blower.
On Sunday, for example, former Vice President Dick Cheney defended the surveillance programs - including one that keeps a record of all domestic calls that he said was designed in his office - and called Snowden a “traitor,” hinting that he might be a spy.
“I’m deeply suspicious obviously because he went to China,” Cheney said. “That’s not a place where you ordinarily want to go if you’re interested in freedom and liberty and so forth. So, it raises questions whether or not he had that kind of connection before he did this.”
But Snowden, in his Web chat, flatly denied any such connection. “I have had no contact with the Chinese government,” he said. “Just like with The Guardian and The Washington Post, I only work with journalists.”
Asked by a Guardian reporter why he did not go directly to Iceland, where he has said he would like to obtain asylum, Snowden said his decision to leave the United States without providing advance notice of foreign travel to the National Security Agency was “an incredible risk,” and he needed a place where he was less likely to be immediately arrested.
“There was a distinct possibility I would be interdicted en route, so I had to travel with no advance booking to a country with the cultural and legal framework to allow me to work without being immediately detained,” he said. “Hong Kong provided that. Iceland could be pushed harder, quicker, before the public could have a chance to make their feelings known, and I would not put that past the current U.S. administration.”
In answering questions for about 90 minutes, Snowden said there was “no single moment” in which he decided to act, but decried “a continuing litany of lies” both from senior government officials to Congress and congressional leaders. In particular, he accused James Clapper, the director of national intelligence, of “baldly lying to the public without repercussion,” saying that such actions subverted democratic accountability.
Since the disclosure that the National Security Agency has been keeping records of nearly all domestic calls, Clapper has come under particular scrutiny. In March, asked at a Senate hearing whether the security agency collected “any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans,” Clapper replied: “No, sir. Not wittingly.” He later explained that that was the “least untruthful” answer he could give in a public setting about a classified program.
Snowden also suggested that his decision to leak the information about U.S. government surveillance was influenced in part by President Barack Obama’s administration’s harsh crackdown on leakers. The administration has filed charges in six cases, so far, compared with three under all previous presidents combined, and several of those charged have been portrayed as heroes and martyrs by supporters.
Obama defended top secret National Security Agency spying programs as legal in a lengthy interview Monday.
“It is transparent,” Obama told PBS’ Charlie Rose in an interview broadcast Monday. “That’s why we set up the FISA court,” he added, referring to the secret court set up by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act that authorizes two recently disclosed programs.
“We’re going to have to find ways where the public has an assurance that there are checks and balances in place … that their phone calls aren’t being listened into; their text messages aren’t being monitored; their e-mails are not being read by some Big Brother somewhere,” Obama said.
Obama, who repeated earlier assertions that the programs were a legitimate counter terrorism tool and that they were completely noninvasive to people with no terror ties, said he has created a privacy and civil-liberties oversight board.
“I’ll be meeting with them. And what I want to do is to set up and structure a national conversation, not only about these two programs, but also the general problem of data, big data sets, because this is not going to be restricted to government entities,” he said.
In his chat, Snowden mentioned by name two former National Security Agency officials - Thomas Drake and William Binney - who were investigated for leaking; Binney was not prosecuted, and the prosecution of Drake, in connection with disclosing information about huge waste, collapsed.
He also mentioned John Kiriakou, a former Central Intelligence Agency operative who spoke openly about waterboarding and later pleaded guilty to disclosing classified information about a fellow CIA officer; and Pfc. Bradley Manning, the Army private who confessed to being the source for archives of materials published by WikiLeaks.
“Binney, Drake, Kiriakou and Manning are all examples of how overly harsh responses to public-interest whistle-blowing only escalate the scale, scope and skill involved in future disclosures,” he wrote. “Citizens with a conscience are not going to ignore wrongdoing simply because they’ll be destroyed for it: the conscience forbids it. Instead, these draconian responses simply build better whistle-blowers.” Information for this article was contributed by Charlie Savage and Scott Shane of The New York Times; and by Kimberly Dozier of The Associated Press.
Front Section, Pages 3 on 06/18/2013