NSA programs revealed by Edward Snowden will continue as they are “lawful, appropriate, and effective” and the US people’s representatives voted in favor of them, former NSA and CIA director Michael Hayden said on RT's SophieCo.

RT: In your opinion, is Snowden a hero or a traitor?

Michael Hayden: Well, he certainly is not a hero. I don’t think he meets the legal definition of being a ‘traitor’ according to our Constitution. But he certainly has done a very, very bad thing and I think he is also a very troubled young man. So perhaps the truth lies somewhere in between the two extremes you’ve pointed out.

RT: Do you think he could be a Chinese spy agent? Dick Cheney seems to think so?

MH: I don’t have evidence of it. It’s a curious thing. Why would he go to Hong Kong for his refuge while other places are available that he could have chosen, and given the state of the Sino-American relations, particularly when it comes to things about the cyber domain, it’s really was a curious choice. But again, no evidence to date. I tell you how I would handle it while still in government. I would make this one of my working hypotheses - one, not all of my working hypotheses - and then try to seek out evidence that proves or disproves the hypothesis.

RT: You were the head of NSA and CIA. What happens when a young colleague of yours, a talented good guy, walks into your office and tells you “Boss, I think we have the problem with PRISM.” What do you say to that?

MH: Actually, that is a great question. What makes all of this so troubling is that Mr. Snowden didn’t do that. If he wants to be a true whistleblower, you need to go to a supervisor, the supervisor’s boss or the General Counsel inside the organization or the Inspector General or even to members of Congress to express his complaints. There is a clear structure within the US Government to do that. Now look. I’ll be the first to admit that requires great courage and human beings being human beings - there might be some of them who would attempt to take retribution against an officer who attempted to do that. But that’s the right way to do these things. When somebody comes to you with a concern, certainly, it’s the truth for me. You’ve got to take those concerns very seriously. This is somebody acting out of conscience and you need to sit down and talk with that individual and if necessary follow up to see if the concerns actually have real merit.

RT: I remember back in 2007 there were also cases of whistleblowing when you were the head of NSA. Did these men address you with their concerns before they went public with their information?

MH: I had actually left NSA by 2005 and so those events of 2007 and 2008 came after I’d left. I’ve no knowledge of that other than complaining about some technological decisions that were made inside NSA, I’ve no knowledge that anything akin to an appropriate whistleblower process had begun at the agency.

RT: General Hayden, with a secrecy breach like this, a disaster basically, what’s going on inside the NSA and CIA right now? You should know as somebody who’s being responsible for this. What are you going to do when the major crisis exposes you?

MH: What you’re looking for is responsibility, not necessarily guilt. You want people to be open to you, you want a clear description with regard to what has happened until you’ve got the individuals to learn, to create lessons that allow you to prevent or at least reduce the possibilities that these kinds of things could happen in the future. And so you’re doing a lot of forensics to the system, you’re talking to people who knew this young man. What kind of things did his action suggest about him? You’re talking to a supervisor. What did you suspect about him? Did this surprise you? Did you see any kind of indicators? And then you are also doing a damage assessment. Let me list for you three different lanes in which damages almost certainly occurred. Number one - it tells our adversaries our capabilities. It tells them what we can do and also tells them what we won’t do - and that can be very damaging. Secondly, this will punish American firms who have cooperated with NSA. Punish them, even though all they have ever done is simply obey American law and help defend the United States. Then finally, if there is anyone else out there in the world, another government or potential source who might want to have cooperated with the United States, why would they trust us when we promise that we can keep a secret. So all those things are damaging.

RT: You brought up firms. From your own experience have social media companies any choice other than to obey NSA orders?

MH: Again, I’m not a part of NSA for a long time now. But my understanding of the program is that these companies, these private concerns were responding to specific court orders and under US law they can fight those orders in court, some have done that. I don’t know the results of any of these contentious cases, but my suspicion is they won some and they lose some.

RT: But if they’re doing everything that is legal, why are you saying they’ll be punished? 

MH: Because these are international firms. And although acting very consistently with the American law, there’ll be others in the world who’ll look at them with suspicion. And certainly, from my point of view, unwanted suspicion. That’s what’s going to happen.

RT: What’s happening to the programs like the ones Snowden made public, this PRISM data collecting tool? Are they being wrapped up right now or is the NSA going to go ahead with it, in your opinion?

MH: I would see no reason why either of the programs that he revealed, the metadata program or the PRISM program, why they would be stopped. They’re lawful, they’re appropriate, they’re effective. But the effectiveness may be the element that is most harmed by these revelations. Again, adversaries now know what we can do and also know what we won’t do - the boundaries of American law and policy. And that gives them a higher probability that they’ll be able to protect their communications from United States agencies trying to intercept them. 

RT: Though the PRISM is huge and it has turned America into a database platform for all its access to Facebook, Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, I mean it missed Tsarnaevs’ [the brothers who allegedly organized two explosions at the Boston Marathon] online activity prior to the Boston bombing. Are you maybe casting a net too wide?

MH: Actually the Tsarnaevs were not detected by any program like this because PRISM isn’t suitable for detecting the kind of communication that Tsarnaev brothers had prior to the Boston bombing. I mean PRISM is about foreigners. It requires a belief on the part of the National Security Agency that those people we want to monitor are foreigners and have foreign intelligence value. We’ve got to prove in broad terms to an American court before we can insist that one of these companies assist us in their effort. 

RT: President Obama has claimed surveillance programs have stopped 50 attacks. But since these programs began operating shortly after 9/11 how many terrorist attacks were prevented solely by information gathered from these PRISM-like programs that could not be gained through any other source? 

MH: Right. That’s a great question and I don’t want to be indirect with my answer, but I’m going to be indirect. I don’t know whether it is a correct answer to your question how many have been prevented only to the efforts of these two programs. In actuality, I cannot point to any program very often that is the sole reason that we have the intelligence success. One of the great achievements of the American intelligence in the past dozen years is that we’ve been able to blend multiple streams of information with a little bit sub-data here and a little bit sub-data there. That we’ve been able to combine into a meaningful picture. In other words we’ve been able to pick up shards of glass that individually have no meaning, but because we have a collectively large number of shards, we can actually combine them into a very meaningful mosaic. 

RT: I’ve got another quote from Snowden: “The consent of the governed is not consent if it’s not informed.” I think it’s frank to say that a lot of people feel uncomfortable after these leaks, because it’s seems like you break into my home, you listen to my phone calls, you intercept  my emails, my private SMSs without telling me you’re doing it. And you’re labeling all that as “war on terror”. I mean, can you really not fight war on terror and protect privacy, my privacy? 

MH: Well, I think the president was right when he said the responsible government has to make choices. You can’t have absolute privacy and absolute security, there always has to be a balance between the two. The balance, frankly, is based upon the totality of its circumstances: what is the nature of the threat? How real is that threat? How imminent is that threat? How effective is this tool in detecting that threat? I think I agree with the president. This is the suitable balance. Now I should point out that some of the things you’ve said Americans are saying, are simply errors of fact. We aren’t doing many of those things. Unfortunately, here in the US, when these kinds of stories get out into the public domain, I am fond of saying, they are rushed into the darkest corner of the room as rapidly as possible. So what is the important thing is to make sure that the American people exactly understand what we’re doing. Now to go back to Snowden’s quote about the concern of the governed - this is not ancient Athens. This isn’t a direct democracy where we allow the entire population to vote on every proposition. We are representative democracy. The people’s representatives were informed of these programs and they voted in favor of them. They’ve been approved by two presidents, they’ve been approved by the American court system. In the American system, at the executive branch, the legislative branch and the judicial branch lying out, it doesn’t get any better than that in terms of concern of the governed. 

RT: I mean, the security is not really state religion that cannot be questioned, and if you question it, than you’re not loyal. Now you’re saying that that the PRISM hasn’t spied on Americans? It hasn’t gone into private emails?

MH: No. The predicate for PRISM is that the target of the surveillance is a foreigner and what’s happened is that story has been confused with the metadata story, which is indeed about Americans, but it’s about American phone records, not American conversations or communications. 
RT: What exactly does it tell you about your system when your own people blow the whistle on you? Because it’s not the first time.

MH: No, it’s not. I mentioned before that I believe Mr. Snowden was not a hero, he had committed a crime. But he was also a troubled young man, let me phrase it for you this way: What kind of moral arrogance is required to believe your personal moral judgment trumps that of two presidents, two houses of our Congress, the American courts and over 30,000 of your coworkers. I would admit in American society, as in Russian society, we have a generation of young folks whose kind of absolute commitment to transparency which is well beyond anything of my generation and even my children’s generation. We’re now, like the Russian security services or any security service throughout the world, recruiting from populations whose views toward secrecy and openness are a bit different than those that have been traditionally held by the people we have recruited in a former age. So you’ve got Mr. Snowden, you’ve got Private Manning, both of whom have an almost romantic attachment to revealing secrets. But in both cases this commitment to absolute transparency has created great harm to the security of people around the world.

RT: If not whistleblowers, who else can stop you in case you push it too far? There must be checks and balances everywhere, right? 

MH: You’re right. There is a tactical point for you. A whistleblower has to point out unlawful activity. Even Snowden admits this wasn’t unlawful. He claims that it was unwise, it was inconsistent with his personal value system, but no one claims it was unlawful, it was consistent with law. It was done under the record order with the knowledge of the Congress. And it’s hard for me to imagine that anyone would afford him whistleblower status, at least in the technical, legal definition of the term. Now, where do you get debate? You get debate in our Representative Government. You get debate from a judge who pushes back saying he is uncomfortable with the outlines of the court order we want him to sign. You get debate in the American Congress, where members, particularly at the intelligence oversight committees, get a chance to look at these programs and to pass on their merits of the as to whether or not they would authorized them or appropriate funds for them. 

RT: Are you really saying that giving all the details of my private life to a government agency is the new normal, a new patriotic norm? 

MH: No, no, not at all. And again what you’re saying, that’s a reflection as to how badly-reported this story has been. The details of your private life are not being shared with the government. These two programs that the government gets is a macro database of phone calls that just fact of call, nothing more. With regard to the PRISM program, as I’ve already said, it focuses on foreign communications of intelligence value to the United States. That’s what the National Security Agency might add, what the FSB [Russia’s security agency] is all about. 

RT: The whole thing is that may be if the Security State was a little more transparent - like Obama promised before he was elected president, then maybe the American public and the foreigners would be more comfortable with programs like PRISM.

MH: You bring up a wonderful point. Somebody with my background, coming from the security services - we’re reluctant to say much about anything. We actually think we’re more operationally effective the less our adversaries know about what it is we’re doing. But we also realize we work in a democracy. I’m now fond of saying that in the American democracy the president probably gets to do anything one-off, one time based upon his presidential authority and a narrow definition that it’s simply lawful. But in our system the president doesn’t get to do anything over a long period of time without generalized popular support, and you’re right, you don’t get generalized popular support unless the American people, and especially their representatives, have some sense of broad knowledge, maybe not detailed, but broad knowledge about what their government is doing on their behalf. I now have to admit, even as a security professional, that we may have to make these things more public – things that actually might make us a little less effective, so that we can make the American population more comfortable about what it is we’re doing. Otherwise the American population, the American democracy, will tell us to stop doing all of what we’re doing. We’re going to have to have these tradeoffs – transparency, popular acceptance and operational effectiveness.

RT: General Hayden, you’ve brought up your security background, but you’ve also come from a long line of Republicans. What is the Republican point of view on all of this, I mean, how does the ‘less government’ idea sit in with all of this?

MH: I think your view is very interesting and dynamic here in the United States. I mean, let me first of all challenge the assessment that I was Republican and I was selected to be the head of the CIA by a Republican President, but I was selected to be the head of NSA by a Democratic President [Bill] Clinton. But your question is about the Republican Party. It’s quite interesting here in the American political system that the extreme right of the Republican Party and the extreme left of the Democrat Party seem to be coming together with regard to the coming concern about some of the things that the center is doing to keep Americans safe and free. So you do actually have some Republicans criticizing this program on civil liberties “less government is better government” grounds, rather than addressing the program on what is frankly more traditional Republican ground on the grounds of national security. 

RT: At the end of the day the fact is that the PRISM-gate has damaged Obama’s reputation personally. He has also undermined the reputation of his office, of the American presidency in the eyes of the world. We saw how he was in front of [German Chancellor Angela] Merkel in Germany and he had to justify himself, he had to justify PRISM for the whole world. Do you think this scandal, these leaks, will actually make him push to security state back even if he doesn’t want to do that? Do you think he can challenge the whole thing? 

MH: I think there is a bit of fear going on in this, with all due respect to the leading figures in Germany or the United States, alright? Let’s all admit very candidly that all nations conduct espionage. All of them do. We’ve focused on the US now because we actually are more transparent about espionage than any other country on Earth. That’s really what the issue is here. That’s why this is a publicly discussable item. But it’s not because what America’s doing is unique.

RT: How can ranking officials be an exception? Because leaks say foreign officials were bagged more than once, for example at the G20 summit in London. How does spying over then-Russian President Dmitry Medvedev’s calls help fight the War on Terror?

MH: I have no views on any actual operation activity of American intelligence services and I would also in view that all nations on this planet have legitimate foreign intelligence concerns beyond the War on Terror. This is just not about terrorism, it’s about foreign intelligence. I repeat, all nations conduct foreign intelligence.

RT: Just to wrap it up, given what we’ve discussed, do you for see a rollback on the surveillance state in general, a cut back on it, or is it going to go with the same pace?

MH: What I foresee is these two programs, the very light touch on the American privacy created by the metadata phone program and the PRISM program, my personal judgment – they both go forward. They’ve already had wide bipartisan support. They will continue. But what we’ve been talking about here today, what my country [and] many people around the world have been talking about for the past two weeks, that will generate a global discussion about what is the meaning of privacy in the internet era, what are the true rules, what are the legitimate expectations of privacy in the world in which everyone is connected. I had an advisory board at CIA and I would give them tough problems. One of the tough problems I gave them was this question of security and transparency. Here I frame the question, I said “will the US be able to conduct espionage in the future inside a broader political culture, but every day demand more transparency and more public accountability from every aspect of the national life?” They studied the problem and came back to me and their final answer was “We’re not sure.”

The US has gone from ‘model of human rights’ to manipulator of internet rights, the mouthpiece of the Chinese Communist Party wrote. China has struck back at the US over its allegations that Beijing allowed NSA leaker Edward Snowden to leave Hong Kong.

The damning article in the overseas edition of the People’s Daily, the party’s official newspaper, came in response to Washington’s accusations of the “deliberate choice by the government to release a fugitive despite a valid arrest warrant.”

Addressing Washington’s allegations, the People’s Daily wrote that China could not accept "this kind of dissatisfaction and opposition.”

"Not only did the US authorities not give us an explanation and apology, it instead expressed dissatisfaction at the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region for handling things in accordance with the law,” wrote Wang Xinjun, a researcher at the Academy of Military Science in the People's Daily commentary. 

Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying also denounced the US accusations as "groundless and unacceptable.”

The Hong Kong government released an official statement on Sunday, saying that US fugitive Edward Snowden had left the Chinese territory for Moscow legally and voluntarily. The statement also mentioned that the extradition documents submitted by the US on charges of espionage were not sufficient to warrant Snowden’s arrest under Chinese law. 

 The column praises the former CIA contractor for “his fearlessness that tore off Washington's sanctimonious mask."Snowden has been branded by the US as ‘traitor’ by US politicians for the leaking of classified documents to The Guardian newspaper that revealed the existence of the spy program PRISM.  

"In a sense, the United States has gone from a model of human rights to an eavesdropper on personal privacy, the manipulator of the centralized power over the international internet, and the mad invader of other countries' networks," the People's Daily said. 

The case of Edward Snowden has captivated world media since he fled from the US in May. Although the fugitive’s whereabouts are unknown, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange confirmed to RT that Snowden was en route to Ecuador via Moscow accompanied by WikiLeaks legal representative Sarah Harrison.  

 Snowden was checked in for a flight from Moscow to Havana, Cuba, yesterday, but there was no sign of him on the plane, according to RT’s correspondent Egor Piskunov. As a consequence, it is now thought that he is still in the transit zone of Moscow’s Sheremetyevo Airport. 

The whistleblower has applied for asylum in Ecuador and the country’s government confirmed that it is processing the application.

Amnesty urges US: ‘Refrain from manhunt’

The US has called on all countries in the northern hemisphere to surrender Snowden to US jurisdiction and has resolved to seek cooperation from his destination country. However human rights organization Amnesty International has launched an appeal, urging the US not to prosecute anyone who discloses data on US government human right violations.

"No one should be charged under any law for disclosing information of human rights violations by the US government. Such disclosures are protected under the rights to information and freedom of expression," said Widney Brown, Senior Director of International Law and Policy at Amnesty International.

In addition, the organization also stressed that an individual who has an asylum bid underway cannot legally be extradited.

A lawyer for the former spy agency contractor has pointed out that Edward Snowden was told to flee Hong Kong by a middleman claiming to represent the Chinese controlled territory – which evidently could mean the advice was Beijing-backed.

Lawyer Albert Ho, who is also a Hong Kong legislator critical of China, indicated that he was approached by Snowden several days ago, according to Reuters.

The American asked the Hong Kong government if he could leave the city freely if he chose to do so, and tried to find out the Hong Kong government’s position on his situation.

After that, Ho met a senior Hong Kong official, who did not offer any comment.
However, Ho claims Snowden later told him an individual supposedly representing the Hong Kong authorities had contacted him and indicated he should leave the city, and wouldn't be stopped by the authorities.

Ho said he believed the middleman was acting on Beijing's orders. However, he had no solid evidence to prove it.

"They (Beijing) used someone behind the scenes to get Snowden to leave. And the Hong Kong government didn't have much of a role. Its role was to receive instructions to not stop him at the airport," Ho told Reuters.  

Ho stressed that in his opinion the case was clearly monitored and controlled by Beijing. 
"From seeing the nervousness with which the Hong Kong government didn't even give me any details at all <...>I have grounds to believe that the Hong Kong government had no authority over this case. That's to say the whole case was decided by Beijing."

Hong Kong is a former British colony which reverted to Chinese rule in 1997 and although it retains an independent legal system and its own extradition laws, China is believed to have control over Hong Kong's foreign affairs. The Hong Kong government didn’t immediately comment on Ho's claims.

The Chinese government has expressed “grave concern” about the revelations of the US government's cyber attacks on Beijing.

“This once again proves that China is a victim of cyber attacks," Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying said in a statement.

On Sunday, the NSA leaker fled from Hong Kong to Russia, and was supposed to board a plane for Havana, Cuba.

However, he wasn’t seen during the boarding which took place at Moscow’s Sheremetyevo airport on Monday.

The White House expressed objections to authorities in Hong Kong and China that the countries let the whistleblower flee, and to Russia, urging Moscow to extradite Snowden to the US as soon as possible.

"We expect the Russian government to look at all options available to expel Mr. Snowden back to the US to face justice for the crimes with which he is charged."

Snowden has been charged by the US authorities with theft of federal government property, unauthorized communication of national defense information and wilful communication of classified communications intelligence to an unauthorized person. The last two charges fall under the US Espionage Act.

Though the US says that any flight carrying Snowden should not be allowed to pass, they are hardly able to do anything, aviation expert Chris Yates told RT, adding that it is unlikely that the whistleblower is now on the flight from Moscow to Havana.

RT: First, no one has seen Snowden on this plane. Is it possible to secretly get someone aboard and hide them on a passenger jet?

Chris Yates: Well, quite frankly probably not. We’ve got that plane stuffed with journalists and other people who obviously attempted to keep an eye out for Mr. Snowden. It’s unlikely that he will be on that plane, in fact nobody has actually seen him. The fact of the matter is that he still might be in that transit lounge, he may be held for some reason in that transit lounge because of the media scrum. Whatever the case might be it certainly appears that he is not actually on the flight at the moment. 

RT:  If he is on this plane, is there a legal way to intercept it?

CY: Yesterday the American government put out a warning to all nations in the Western hemisphere not to let Mr. Snowden pass through except en route to the US. It could mean that any plane he is travelling on other nations might prevent from entering their airspace, because they don’t want to be caught up in this particular spat.  It is unlikely that would happen.  The bottom line in the aviation world is that if the flight is operating legally, it filed all the proper flight forms and done the rest of appropriate measures then that plane should be given free access straight cross any bit of airspace it is flying through. Could the US intercept the aircraft if it were to enter US airspace? Possibly they could instruct it to land somewhere in the US, but I would think that would be unlikely. Of course the pilot himself has the possibility to divert so he does not actually need to enter US airspace to actually fly down to Havana. And that will be another possibility as well.

RT: Who makes the decision to divert? Who does the pilot respond to: a legal authority or his corporate superiors?

CY: Once the plane takes off it’s entirely down to the pilot to choose the best route depending upon all of the prevailing conditions at the time and that could be weather and a whole other variety of things as well. So if the pilot were to choose to fly the route just outside of US airspace close to it then he would be entitled to do that of his own volition provided that it didn’t have any impact upon the safety of the flight and everybody else on board it. 

RT: This is an Airbus 330 - does it have enough fuel to divert?

CY: Yes is the short answer to that question. All flights operating all over the world are required to carry enough fuel in case of diversion whatever that diversion might be. The bottom line is that – yes, the airplane will be carrying enough fuel. Now the US says that any flight carrying Mr. Snowden should not be allowed to pass, but on the other hand they are powerless to do anything provided that the airplane does not enter US airspace.  

RT: Reports say Snowden's passport was revoked by the US If so, how can he move around the world?

CY: I’ve had personal experience of losing a passport, for example, and there are methods and mechanisms in place for people to be able to travel back to their home country without a passport. That is a legal document which is usually produced by some official authority, the police for example, in my case it issued a document that let we travel across Europe to get back to the UK. The fact that the US government revoked his passport does not necessarily mean that he cannot get on a flight which is pre-booked, and particularly if he is the transit lounge of an airport because effectively he is in no man’s land. If he used a legal passport it would seem to me at his point of departure and while he is in transit then it would seem that it doesn’t really matter whether he has got that passport in his hand and it’s actually a legal document at that time. 

Russia is “a very safe place” for the NSA leaker Edward Snowden as it will not be pressured by the US, former MI5 agent Annie Machon told RT as the whistleblower arrived in Moscow reportedly en route to a third country.

Snowden – who is wanted in the US for revealing two highly-classified surveillance programs – left Hong Kong and landed in the Russian capital on Sunday afternoon. It is unclear, where the 29-year-old source behind the biggest leak in the NSA history will head next, but reports suggest he might go to Venezuela via Cuba.

Annie Machon says whatever country Snowden ends up in, it must be “strong enough to push back because there will be immense pressure from the US to hand him over.”

RT: Why do you think Snowden left Hong Kong? Didn't he feel protected enough there?

AM: I think he was very canny to flee there in the first place because Russia and China are probably the only two countries who can effectively stand up to the brute force of US diplomacy these days. Now it appears that the warrant for his arrest was sent to Hong Kong, there were problems with the paper work and that allowed Snowden to flee Hong Kong, while the Chinese reply to the problems.

It’s also interesting that in their press statement they said that they were complaining officially to the US for the US spying on them – which, of course, came from revelations leaked by Snowden. So, they are pushing back, they gave him the chance to flee. And again, I think it’s a very canny move to go to Russia because he can be safe there and then can plot to where else he wants to go.

An airport security guard walks past a sign at the departure hall of Hong Kong Airport June 23, 2013. Edward Snowden, a former contractor for the U.S. National Security Agency, charged by the United States with espionage, was allowed to leave Hong Kong on Sunday, his final destination as yet unknown, because a U.S. request to have him arrested did not comply with the law, the Hong Kong government said. (Reuters / Bobby Yip)

 RT:  Should Hong Kong have taken steps to prevent the wanted man from leaving its territory?

AM: I think they fulfilled the legal requirements. You know, there’s been so much in the western media for the last few years about the Chinese hacking our systems and everything. They must be very pleased to have evidence that the US in fact is doing the same to them, so they can push back. So, I think it was good place for Snowden to go.

The irony now is that it’s the US that the whistleblower has to flee from because at the moment the Obama administration is waging a war on whistleblowers: not just Snowden, but also people like Bradley Manning and a whole range of other whistleblowers from the CIA and the NSA. For example, John Kiriakou of the CIA - who exposed the US torture program - is the one currently languishing in prison for thirty months, not the torturers. So, I think the irony is the people have to fear the US when all they are trying to do is expose the crimes of the US. It must be bitter.

RT: The US had warned the Hong Kong authorities ahead of today's developments, so how do you think it will affect relations between the two?

AM: Well, Hong Kong was just going by the legal book. So, really the US does not have anything to complain about. There was a sort of slow warming of the diplomatic relationship between China and the US. And I think that has probably sent it backwards.

However, I would suggest that Snowden has done a public service not only to the US people but to the people of the world in exposing quite how badly we are being watched and surveyed by the US and some NATO states.

RT: We're getting reports that Snowden's been granted asylum, although it's still unknown which country's offered safe shelter. What's your guess?

AM: I know that it’s been a lot of speculation that WikiLeaks has been trying to help him in getting asylum in Iceland, but he needs to get there first. Iceland does have a very good reputation for protecting transparency and freedom of information on the internet. So that may well be a possibility.

But Snowden needs to ensure that he goes to a country which doesn’t have an extradition treaty [with the US] or does have an extradition treaty but it does not cover political offences. [A country] should also be strong enough to push back because there will be immense pressure from the US to hand him over.

RT: Is there a chance he could be intercepted by the US en route to a third state?

AM: Possibly, yes. So, in fact getting to Russia is a very safe place to be at the moment because they will not be pressured. The unfortunate choice though of Russia here is that it will make it very easy for the Western media to deem him to be a traitor now, which might mean he may face even more charges under the espionage act.

Strategically, if he was to remain in Russia and Russia was seen to protect him, and not try and use him it would send a very strong message to the whole world about who exactly is the totalitarian state these days – is it the US or is it other countries like Russia or China?  And I think that Edward Snowden’s choice of refuge demonstrates very much that the US is currently the bullyboy of the world.  

Snowden realized his choice of Hong Kong as a refuge would stir up anti-Chinese hysteria in the US media and be used as a tool to “distract away from the issue of US government misconduct.” He remained emphatic, however, that he had in no way shape or form acted on behalf of Beijing, saying that he “only works with journalists.”

“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.”
He was further dismissive of the perennial, dual-pronged approach from US officials to play the terror card in an effort to shut down discussion regarding their every increasing authority and the traitor angle to dismiss those who advocate government transparency.
Regarding the former tactic, Snowden argues the fourth estate can verify the veracity of government claims by analyzing how and if the government’s massively expanded powers have resulted in the actual prevention of terror plots.
“Journalists should ask a specific question: since these programs began operation shortly after September 11th, how many terrorist attacks were prevented SOLELY by information derived from this suspicionless surveillance that could not be gained via any other source? Then ask how many individual communications were ingested to achieve that, and ask yourself if it was worth it. Bathtub falls and police officers kill more Americans than terrorism, yet we've been asked to sacrifice our most sacred rights for fear of falling victim to it.”

'Being called a traitor by Dick Cheney is highest honor for an American'

Snowden further deployed his considerable wit to cast aspersion on members of the US political elite who had led leveled the traitor charge against him.
“It's important to bear in mind I'm being called a traitor by men like former Vice President Dick Cheney. This is a man who gave us the warrantless wiretapping scheme as a kind of atrocity warm-up on the way to deceitfully engineering a conflict that has killed over 4,400 and maimed nearly 32,000 Americans, as well as leaving over 100,000 Iraqis dead. Being called a traitor by Dick Cheney is the highest honor you can give an American, and the more panicked talk we hear from people like him, [Democratic Senator Dianne] Feinstein, and [Republican Senator Peter]King, the better off we all are. If they had taught a class on how to be the kind of citizen Dick Cheney worries about, I would have finished high school.”

Living a life on the run had previously led Snowden to say that none of the options ahead of him were good, but his ultimate goal would be realized no matter what fate awaited him.
"All I can say right now is the US Government is not going to be able to cover this up by jailing or murdering me. Truth is coming, and it cannot be stopped."
Despite the risks, his message to other potential whistleblowers was unequivocal: "This country is worth dying for."
Snowden, who had previously stated that he painstakingly evaluated every document he had disclosed to ensure that it was legitimately in the public interest, reiterated that had not in fact posed a national security threat.

“I did not reveal any US operations against legitimate military targets. I pointed out where the NSA has hacked civilian infrastructure such as universities, hospitals, and private businesses because it is dangerous. These nakedly, aggressively criminal acts are wrong no matter the target," he argued.

'Draconian responses simply build better whistelblowers'

When pressed over whether it was his intention to insinuate that Bradley Manning, the United States soldier currently on trial for passing classified material to WikiLeaks, indiscriminately dumped classified information with the intention of harming people, the former CIA employee defended both the Army Private and the online non-profit. 

“WikiLeaks is a legitimate journalistic outlet and they carefully redacted all of their releases in accordance with a judgment of public interest. The unredacted release of cables was due to the failure of a partner journalist to control a passphrase. However, I understand that many media outlets used the argument that 'documents were dumped' to smear Manning, and want to make it clear that it is not a valid assertion here.”
Snowden said the “draconian” campaigns against Manning, NSA whistleblower Thomas Drake, and CIA whistleblower John Kiriakou would result in even more anti-corruption and government transparency advocates aspiring to greater acts of boldness.
“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. Citizens with a conscience are not going to ignore wrong-doing simply because they'll be destroyed for it: the conscience forbids it. Instead, these draconian responses simply build better whistleblowers. If the Obama administration responds with an even harsher hand against me, they can be assured that they'll soon find themselves facing an equally harsh public response.”
Despite being deeply disillusioned with the Obama administration, which Snowden claims “closed the door on investigating systemic violations of law, deepened and expanded several abusive programs,” he believes the president has not yet reached the point of no return.
“He still has plenty of time to go down in history as the President who looked into the abyss and stepped back, rather than leaping forward into it.”

'IPS, content, attachments: Analysts get everything'

With the promise of further revelations, Snowden dispelled any disinformation intended to downplay the scope of US Intelligence surveillance capabilities, describing a murky legal framework with virtually no oversight which gives signals intelligence analysts carte blanche when it comes to the collection of American’s private communications.
“…if an NSA, FBI, CIA, DIA (Defense Intelligence Agency), etc. analyst has access to query raw SIGINT (signals intelligence) databases, they can enter and get results for anything they want. Phone number, email, user id, cell phone handset id (IMEI), and so on - it's all the same. The restrictions against this are policy based, not technically based, and can change at any time. Additionally, audits are cursory, incomplete, and easily fooled by fake justifications. For at least GCHQ, the number of audited queries is only 5% of those performed.” 
Snowden continues that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court essentially acts as a rubberstamp judicial body which, for all intents and purposes, operates on an ad hoc basis, as “Americans’ communications are collected and viewed on a daily basis on the certification of an analyst rather than a warrant.”

This so-called “incidental” collection has very real world implications, as the “content of your communications” which has been obtained without a warrant is still accessible to NSA workers for future use.  

When asked to clarify if by content, he means a record that the correspondence took place or the actual content itself, Snowden said the answer is “both.”

“If I target for example an email address, for example under FAA (FISA Amendments Avy) 702, and that email address sent something to you, Joe America, the analyst gets it. All of it. IPs, raw data, content, headers, attachments, everything. And it gets saved for a very long time - and can be extended further with waivers rather than warrants.”  

Thousands of US tech, finance, and manufacturing firms have secret agreements with national security agencies to trade sensitive information in return for classified intelligence, Bloomberg’s sources revealed.The firms involved are referred to as ‘trusted partners’ by US intelligence organizations such as the National Security Agency (NSA), Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and branches of US military. In fact, thousands of US companies voluntarily provide US agencies with data (i.e. equipment specifications), Bloomberg’s four sources, who either worked for the government or in companies that have these agreements, said. And the information received can be used to gain access to computers of America’s rivals. Cooperation between companies and intelligence agencies is legal, reported Bloomberg. And the fact that the companies provide information voluntarily means there is no need for US agencies to get court orders and no oversight is required under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, one out of four sources said. Also, some of the companies’ executives are guaranteed immunity from civil actions related to transfer of information. For example, Microsoft passes on information about bugs in its software before it publicly releases a fix to the problem, two sources confirmed. This kind of information can protect US government computers, as well as help to infiltrate those used by foreign governments by exploiting vulnerabilities in the Microsoft’s system. Microsoft is reportedly not told how the US government uses the information passed on down to it, according to one official. Spokesman for Microsoft Frank Shaw confirmed such releases and stated that they give the government a chance to get “an early start: on risk assessment and mitigation.”

McAfee, America’s global computer security software company, is another ‘trusted partner’ and is known for its cooperation with the NSA, CIA, and FBI. It can share valuable data including malicious internet traffic, one of the sources said.
The company’s worldwide chief technology officer, Michael Fey, rebuffed the claim that the company does not share any personal information with the government.
“McAfee’s function is to provide security technology, education, and threat intelligence to governments … [including] emerging new threats, cyber-attack patterns and hacker group activity,” he stated.
Due to the sensitivity of information being traded, these kinds of agreements are usually made strictly between companies’ chief executive officers and heads of the US agencies. At times the chief executives could clear a few trusted people to work directly with the agencies.

In return for their cooperation, companies are showered with attention and gratitude.
“If I were the director and had a relationship with a company who was doing things that were not just directed by law, but were also valuable to the defense of the Republic, I would go out of my way to thank them and give them a sense as to why this is necessary and useful”, Michael Hayden, former director of the NSA and the CIA said. One of the sources said that public would be surprised how much help the government is seeking in terms of collecting information. Reportedly, it is currently implementing a new expensive program called Einstein 3. The program was developed by the NSA to protect the government from hackers by analyzing billions of emails being sent to the government computers. Five of America’s major internet companies, including AT&T and Verizon, have agreed to install the program on their servers and have received immunity guarantees, which specify that they would not be held liable under US wiretap laws, one of the sources revealed.
In the past companies like AT&T, Verizon and BellSouth were already reportedly involved for eavesdropping on behalf of the NSA. In 2006 sources revealed that the companies collected call records of tens of millions of Americans and shared them with NSA. US companies are willing to participate in these kinds of agreement because they either believe they are helping to protect the nation and/or helping to advance their own interests by receiving classified information in return, sources said. Google’s co-founder Sergey Brin, for example, was given sensitive government information a year into its data sharing agreement with NSA. The info provided linked the 2010 attack on Google to a specific unit within the Chinese military – the People’s Liberation Army – one of the sources confirmed. Brin was even given a classified clearance to attend a secret briefing on the subject. Google was reportedly one of the participants in the secret NSA PRISM program that was revealed by ex-CIA staffer and whistleblower Edward Snowden. The program uses data mining surveillance to access emails, videos, chats, photos and search queries from nine worldwide tech giants. Snowden also disclosed a secret NSA program called Blarney, which gathers metadata on computers and devices that send emails or browse the Internet through principal data routes, known as a backbone. The whistleblower was last seen Monday, checking out of his hotel in Hong Kong, where he stayed for three weeks after leaving the US.

  Russian presidential aide Yury Ushakov characterized the evidence provided by the United States regarding the use of chemical weapons by Damascus as “unconvincing.”

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov also warned the US against sending rebel factions in Syria the “wrong signals” with promises of increased military aid, a move which would shift their focus on "escalating the fight instead of starting a dialogue.”

However, the US said the arms shipments would begin within a matter of weeks, with the CIA acting as the middleman between Washington and the opposition’s Supreme Military Council.

On Saturday, the Washington Post reported that clandestine bases in Jordan and Turkey would serve as conduits for arms being delivered to the rebel fighters amidst fears American armaments would fall into the hands of Syria’s many Islamist factions.

Despite concerns expressed by US intelligence officials last year, Benjamin Rhodes, Obama’s deputy national security adviser, said on Friday the US is capable of delivering arms “not only into the country,” Rhodes said, but “into the right hands.”

“The Syrian puzzle has come into sharper focus in the past year, especially the makeup of various anti-regime groups,” one US official familiar with CIA assessments of the conflict told the Post on condition of anonymity. “And while the opposition remains far from monolithic, its military structures and coordination processes have improved.”

Such reassurances have had little impact on the Obama administrations reticence towards providing antitank or antiaircraft weapons to rebel groups, as the initial deliveries will include light arms and other munitions.  

  US military leaders have previously stated that tracking heavy weaponry delivered to rebel groups such as MANPADs — man-portable air-defense systems – remained unreliable.

Obama’s decision to approve CIA weapons shipments could also signal green light to regional allies like Qatar and Saudi Arabia to provide such heavy weaponry despite concerns such armaments could be used against civilian aviation targets by terrorist groups.

US diplomats have also intonated that Washington might impose a no-fly zone “to help Assad's opponents.”

The Pentagon on Saturday confirmed suspicions that F-16 fighter jets and Patriot anti-missile systems which were deployed to Jordan as part of the joint 12-day Eager Lion exercise would remain in the country once the annual training event concluded.  

US Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel "has approved a request from the Kingdom of Jordan for a detachment of F-16s and Patriot Missiles to remain in Jordan following the conclusion of the Eager Lion Exercise next week," Reuters cites Pentagon spokesman George Little as saying in a statement.

"All other US personnel assigned to Jordan for Eager Lion will depart at the conclusion of the exercise,” the statement continued.