NSA Leaker Snowden Says He Once Believed in US ‘Nobility’
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The Guardian via Getty Images(LONDON) — Edward Snowden spells out more of his frustration with the U.S. government in newly-released excerpts of an interview conducted by The Guardian.
The British newspaper spoke with the former National Security Agency contractor last month when the 30-year-old American was in Hong Kong. Snowden has since gone to Moscow, where he awaits a country willing to grant him asylum so he can avoid extradition to the U.S. to face charges of espionage for leaking secret surveillance programs targeting U.S. citizens and foreigners.
Snowden reveals in the interview that at one point in his life, he believed in the “nobility” of the U.S. government.
However, Snowden says he was increasingly “exposed to true information that had not been propagandized in the media, that we were actually involved in misleading the public … in order to create a certain mindset in the global consciousness. And I was actually a victim of that.”
While Snowden said he still thinks the U.S. is a “good” country, he qualifies it by saying, “the structures of power that exist are working to their own ends to extend their capabilities at the expense of the freedom of all publics.”
Snowden also goes on to claim that various Internet companies — including Google, Facebook, Apple and Microsoft — were complicit with the NSA in obtaining intelligence about people overseas, including Americans.
Additionally, he claims the U.S. spy community lied to Congress about the existence of another program, “Boundless Informant,” which Snowden says measures the amount of information intercepted by the federal government.
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