‘No asylum bid’ from Snowden yet, says Russia
Glenn Greenwald
US whistleblower Edward Snowden has very sensitive “blueprints” detailing how the National Security Agency (NSA) operates that would allow someone who read them to evade or even duplicate NSA surveillance, Glenn Greenwald, a journalist with The Guardian said on Sunday.
Greenwald told The Associated Press that the former systems analyst has “literally thousands of documents” that constitute “basically the instruction manual for how the NSA is built.”
“In order to take documents with him that proved that what he was saying was true he had to take ones that included very sensitive, detailed blueprints of how the NSA does what they do,” Greenwald said.
Meanwhile, Snowden has still not applied for temporary asylum in Russia despite vowing to do so last week, Russian officials said yesterday, reported AFP.
Germany’s foreign intelligence agency (BND) has known about US surveillance and storage of German data for years and used it in cases of Germans kidnapped abroad, the mass-circulation daily Bild reported yesterday.
Greenwald told The Associated Press that Snowden has insisted the information from those documents not be made public.
“I think it would be harmful to the US government, as they perceive their own interests, if the details of those programs were revealed,” he said.
Greenwald said he deliberately avoids talking to Snowden about issues related to where the former analyst might seek asylum to avoid possible legal problems himself.
Snowden had offers of asylum from Venezuela, Nicaragua and Bolivia, but because his US passport has been revoked, the logistics of reaching whichever country he chooses are complicated.
Still, Greenwald said that Snowden remains “calm and tranquil,” despite his predicament.
“I haven’t sensed an iota of remorse or regret or anxiety over the situation that he’s in,” said Greenwald. “He’s of course tense and focused on his security and his short-term wellbeing to the best extent that he can, but he’s very resigned to the fact that things might go terribly wrong and he’s at peace with that.”
Source: The Daily Star