Edward Snowden is not booked to fly out of Moscow over the next three days, and with no valid passport, the NSA whistleblower might be stuck in airport limbo indefinitely.

The hot pursuit of Snowden has ground to a halt three days after the former CIA technician, wanted in the US on espionage charges, flew into Moscow’s Sheremetyevo Airport from Hong Kong.

Washington, which wants Snowden for leaking details of the National Security Agency’s (NSA) dragnet telephone and Internet surveillance programs, charges that there is a clear legal basis for Moscow to hand him over.

Russian President Vladimir Putin, who confirmed that Snowden had arrived in Moscow as a transit passenger despite speculation to the contrary, rebuffed US demands on Tuesday.

“We can only extradite any foreign citizens to such countries with which we have signed the appropriate international agreements on criminal extradition,” Putin said, adding that as Snowden had committed no crime on Russian soil, he is free to travel at will.

"Snowden is a free person. The sooner he chooses his final destination, the better it is for him and Russia," Putin continued.

However, the former NSA contractor appears to be staying put, as neither him nor his WikiLeaks-affiliated legal adviser Sarah Harrison have made travel plans over the coming days.

"They are not flying today and not over the next three days," an Aeroflot representative at the transfer desk at Sheremetyevo told Reuters.

"They are not in the system."

Snowden’s stopover in the transit zone at Sheremetyevo could be prolonged indefinitely, as his passport, which was annulled by the US on Saturday, leaves him without the necessary documentation with which to travel, a source reportedly connected with Snowden told Interfax.

“Snowden’s American passport is void and he is not in possession of any other document with which he can prove his identity. For this reason, he has to stay in Sheremetyevo’s transit zone and cannot leave Russia nor buy a ticket,” the source said.

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange told RT that Snowden had been given special refugee documents by the Ecuadorian government which facilitated his travel to Russia. Still, the country's top Foreign Ministry official, Galo Galarza said on Wednesday that Ecuador has not granted Edward Snowden any refugee documents.

"He [Snowden] does not have a document issued by Ecuador, such as a passport or a refugee card, as speculated," said Galarza, as quoted by Ecuadorian television channel CT. So now it is unclear whether the whistleblower can continue traveling at all.

WikiLeals warned via Twitter on Wednesday that "cancelling Snowden's passport and bullying intermediary countries may keep Snowden permanently in Russia.”

#Snowden still in #Moscow airport, free to go anywhere... http://t.co/tdZ4vzmBXt #Navorski via http://t.co/Sc5lY73vVi pic.twitter.com/d87DGewJ32
— Egor Sheremet (@Sheremet_RT) June 25, 2013

Snowden, who has applied for asylum in Ecuador, was expected to make the next leg of his journey on Monday, as he had booked two tickets to Havana, Cuba. Snowden never showed for the flight, and according to RIA-Novosti, two tickets which he later booked for a Tuesday flight to the Cuban capital were returned just hours before departure. The next flight to Havana leaves on Wednesday.

If he ever makes it to Cuba, the next stop in his journey would be Caracas, Venezuela. President Nicolas Maduro, who coincidentally is expected in Moscow next week for an energy summit, has said Caracas would also consider an asylum request from the whistleblower.

Although dozens of Moscow-based journalists have been staked out at the airport since Sunday, not a single image of Snowden has surfaced.

A receptionist at the Air Express Capsule Hotel in Terminal E of Sheremetyevo Airport told RIA-Novosti that Snowden had in fact spent several hours in one of the suites, “but left a long time ago.”

Several journalists attempted to make contact with Snowden during his stay at the hotel, but were unsuccessful, the hotel employee continued.

It has been speculated that Snowden, who remains at an undisclosed location within the transit zone, is purposely being held up by Russian security services for interrogation.

WikiLeaks has refuted the accusation, saying Harrison "is escorting him at all times."

Fox News analyst Ralph Peters called for subjecting Snowden and other treasonous figures to the death penalty, while prominent media figures have called for The Guardian's journalist Glenn Greenwald to be charged with “aiding and abetting” the fugitive Snowden. It’s not easy keeping a straight face when watching Dick Cheney being interviewed on television railing against the “crimes” of Edward Snowden, and its practically impossible to fight the urgent need to face palm when hearing US Secretary of State John Kerry play on scare tactics that the US would be “attacked because terrorists may now know how to protect themselves” from the sweeping NSA surveillance apparatus brought to light by the now infamous whistleblower on the lam. PRISM is about fighting terrorism, but little stands in the way of the White House putting ‘activists’ or dissidents’ into the same basket as ‘terrorists’; in other words, the purpose of this mass surveillance is primarily for gathering intelligence on individuals that are troublesome to the establishment. The US intelligence establishment, being as hyperactive as it is, wants a file on everybody – and with zero public accountability, nothing stops them from monitoring Occupiers, Libertarians, and other dissidents under the guise of thwarting terrorism. As the situation develops and the US postures itself as a freer nation than those which Snowden has made his stopovers in, the hypocrisy of that narrative has become all the more glaring.

When the US isn’t waging a war on drugs, or waging cyber war, or waging drone wars, or waging actual war, it’s recently taken to waging war on leakers and hard-hitting reporters. Let’s be clear – even during the early days of the Patriot Act, which drastically lowered the bar on the legal requirements for suspicious individuals to be spied on, nobody thought that the NSA and the authorities concerned could ever enact such a sweeping program like PRISM, which gives the government unprecedented and intimate access into private email exchanges, phone calls, video chats, and numerous other areas. Regardless of whether or not this program has been abused by authorities isn’t the question – the very existence of such a program represents the administration’s grave misinterpretation of its own mandate, and an enormous betrayal of public trust. Whether dealing with revelations of mass surveillance, the leaking of US diplomatic cables, or bringing video evidence of US war crimes to the forefront, there is a growing tendency in the US establishment to portray sources of controversial information as being treasonous and anti-patriotic in nature.

Political personalities and pundits often fan the flames of these reactionary opinions when journalists publish information that may blur the line between activism and journalism. Obama has charged more whistleblowers than any other previous presidential administration, invoking the WWI-era Espionage Act to criminalize figures like Snowden and others with aiding the enemy. If Snowden really intended to do harm to the United States, he could have compromised the safety of intelligence officials by revealing the identities of undercover CIA agents embedded in various parts of the world, and other things that could harm more than just Washington’s diplomatic standing in the world. Snowden claims to have released only the information that would benefit the public good, and if he comes forward to release more information that suggests that Washington has acted outside of national and international law in its cyber security programs or foreign adventures, many countries would sympathize with Snowden and view his actions as morally justifiable.

The China Equation

Behind the handshakes and smiles of Obama’s meet up with Chinese President Xi Jinping in California, the Snowden saga had broken and began making international headlines. Snowden’s revelations lent strong credibility to Chinese assertions that they are victims of hacking, not the main perpetrators of it, as Washington maintains. Recent leaks detail how the US government has been hacking Chinese mobile phone networks to intercept millions of text messages, hacking the operator of the region’s fibre optic cable network, as well as hacking the servers at Tsinghua University, one of country’s biggest research institutions. If the US was on the receiving end of such far-reaching hacks, it would certainly not be quiet – nor would it honor requests by the aggressor nation to ‘extradite the messenger,’ as it were. Beijing has no illusions, and commentary in China’s official news agencies suggest that.

China’s Xinhua news agency says that US government owes the world an explanation, and called Washington “the biggest villain” of cyber attacks, while claiming to be innocent. In the Globaltimes, a Chinese daily that reflects the views of the establishment in Beijing, an op-ed was published that suggested that the Chinese government attempt to extract useful information from Snowden, noting that “Snowden is a political offender against the US, but what he is doing benefits the world” and that “public opinion will turn against China's central government and the Hong Kong SAR government if they choose to send him back.” White House spokesman Jay Carney called Snowden’s escape from Hong Kong a “deliberate choice by the [Beijing] government to release a fugitive, despite a valid arrest warrant,” prior to claiming that the move would hurt US-China relations. The forecast here is pretty clear, expect a great deal of chill and enhanced mutual distrust. (And probably a lot more hacking.)

Let the Putin-bashing begin…

These days, when Kerry isn’t preoccupied trying to arm militants and non-state actors in Syria (a strong case can be made that these figures fit the definition of ‘terrorists’), he’s warning Americans of the dangers posed by terrorists, who now have the upper hand to attack America thanks to the criminality of pesky whistleblowers – or so the US mythology goes. At the time as this article was being written, President Putin confirmed that Snowden is staying in the transit area of Moscow’s Sheremetyevo airport, where he is presumably arranging his political asylum and onward travel to Quito with Ecuadorian diplomats, and that he is free to go. This move will undoubtedly result in increasingly sour relations with the US, which will be coming at the Kremlin with huge diplomatic pressure to hand Snowden over. The Russian administration’s choice not to honor the extradition request, as the US has done in numerous cases, will see the White House and their cheerleaders in the US media come down hard on the Putin administration.

The recent photograph of Obama and Putin awkwardly sitting side-by-side with hands folded and eyes to the ground perfectly captures the mood of US-Russian relations, and it looks as if that kind of chill is the new normal. It is also unwise of the White House to contentiously downplay Russia’s commitment to transparency, democracy, and freedom of the press while asking the Kremlin to hand Snowden over. There is little that the US can do if Russia or Ecuador continues to allow Snowden to pursue political asylum, though it may make it harder for citizens of those countries to get US visas, or it could even drag the diplomatic tussle into the economic sphere by delaying investment deals or making it difficult to import goods into US markets. Two things are certain at this point: the Snowden saga won’t end quietly, and 'BigBama’s' gonna keep watching you… for your own safety from evil terrorists, of course.

The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RT.

Reuters / Tatyana Makeyeva

A trove of classified documents supplied to The Guardian newspaper by NSA leaker Edward Snowden has been copied and shared with several people around the globe, journalist Glenn Greenwald told The Daily Beast on Tuesday.

Greenwald, the Guardian reporter who first began publishing National Security Agency documents earlier this month after meeting with the former intelligence contractor, told journalist Eli Lake that Snowden made arrangements to ensure others around the world have encrypted copies of that information should any circumstances allow the data or its source to be compromised.

Snowden “has taken extreme precautions to make sure many different people around the world have these archives to insure the stories will inevitably be published,” Greenwald said. He added that the files are “highly encrypted” and corresponding passwords to render them readable have not yet been distributed.

According to Lake, Greenwald said, “if anything happens at all to Edward Snowden, he told me he has arranged for them to get access to the full archives.” Greenwald previously claimed that Snowden provided him with the archives of "thousands" of documents, dozens of which he considered to be newsworthy. Revelations published thus far by The Guardian and attributed to Snowden have generated international headlines and responses from presidential administrations worldwide.

The latest news from Greenwald comes in the midst of an international manhunt for Snowden that has made awkward the relations between the United States and other nations around the globe. The US unsealed an indictment against Snowden on Friday, but has been unable to extradite him to the country where he faces charges of espionage.

Snowden was reportedly in Hong Kong at the time his indictment went public and was alleged to be in Moscow hours later. Representatives for US President Barack Obama and Russian President Vladimir Putin both say Snowden is in Moscow, and the anti-secrecy website WikiLeaks says the leaker has sought asylum from Ecuador, Iceland and perhaps elsewhere.

“We are aware of where Mr. Snowden is,” WikiLeaks editor Julian Assange said in a conference call on Monday. “He is in a safe place and his spirits are high. Due to the bellicose threats coming from the US administration we cannot go into further detail at this time.”

The US has lambasted Hong Kong with failing to comply with what America considers a lawful arrest, and Russia will not cooperate with attempts for extradition. White House press secretary Jay Carney said earlier this week that Hong Kong’s failure to act has already strained the relationship between the US and China.

Another relationship — the one between Snowden and Greenwald — has begun to emerge as a contested topic within the conversation as well in recent days. The possibility of charging Greenwald with publishing the classified documents has been discussed by politicians, pundits and the press, and the he told The Daily Beast that he’s likely having his every move watched by Washington.

“I would be shocked if the US government were not trying to access the information on my computer,” Greenwald said. “I carry my computers and data with me everywhere I go.”

Elsewhere in his interview with Lake, Greenwald explained that one potential lapse almost led to the loss of the intelligence.

“When I was in Hong Kong, I spoke to my partner in Rio via Skype and told him I would send an electronic encrypted copy of the documents,” Greenwald said. “I did not end up doing it. Two days later his laptop was stolen from our house and nothing else was taken. Nothing like that has happened before. I am not saying it’s connected to this, but obviously the possibility exists.”

U.S. Senator Ron Wyden (Reuters / Joshua Roberts)

 Two Democrats on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence say the National Security Agency provided “inaccurate” and “misleading” information to the American public about the government’s vast surveillance operations.

Senators Ron Wyden and Mark Udall sent a letter to NSA Director Gen. Keith Alexander on Monday asking him to make revisions to a set of fact sheets that were released by his agency to quell concerns about domestic surveillance in the wake of leaked documents attributed to former intelligence contractor Edward Snowden earlier this month.

The Guardian newspaper has been publishing top-secret documents provided by Snowden that he says proves the NSA operates secretive spying programs that retain information on United States citizens under Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) and Section 215 of the PATRIOT Act. Snowden claims those two statutes are abused in order to surveil American citizens, an argument Gen. Alexander’s office recently attempted to counter by releasing a four-page set of bullet points outlining what the US government can and can’t do under federal law.

According to Sens. Wyden and Udall, the NSA’s response isn’t in-tune with what they’ve been told of the programs. "We were disappointed to see that this fact sheet contains an inaccurate statement about how the Section 702 authority has been interpreted by the US government," they write Gen. Alexander. "In our judgment this inaccuracy is significant, as it portrays protections for Americans' privacy as being significantly stronger than they actually are."

But while the fact sheets have been made available online, Wyden and Udall can’t explain in their public letter what their allegations are in reference to since the lawmakers’ own knowledge of the clandestine operations are not allowed to be discussed, even among the constituents who elected them to the Senate. Instead, they wrote that they’ve “identified this inaccurate statement in the classified attachment” sent to Alexander.

Elsewhere, the lawmakers rejected the NSA’s claim that, "Any inadvertently acquired communication of or concerning a US person must be promptly destroyed if it is neither relevant to the authorized purpose nor evidence of a crime."

"We believe that this statement is somewhat misleading,” replied the senators, “in that it implies that the NSA has the ability to determine how many American communications it has collected under Section 702, or that the law does not allow the NSA to deliberately search for the records of particular Americans. In fact, the intelligence community has told us repeatedly that it is ‘not reasonably possible to identify the number of people located in the United States whose communications may have been reviewed under the authority’ of the FISA Amendments Act.”

In a tweet sent out Monday evening, Sen. Wyden again said the FISA fact sheet included a “significant inaccuracy.”

Significant inaccuracy in NSA's FISA fact sheet. It portrays privacy protections as being stronger than they are. http://t.co/MbPcJUF4oc
— Ron Wyden (@RonWyden) June 24, 2013

  Nowhere does the senators’ response include allegations of any discrepancies in the Section 215 fact sheet, but both Wyden and Udall have raised questions about how the government interprets that provision previously. “We believe most Americans would be stunned to learn the details of how these secret court opinions have interpreted Section 215,” they wrote in a joint letter to Attorney General Eric Holder last year. “As we see it, there is now a significant gap between what most Americans think the law allows and what the government secretly claims the law allows. This is a problem, because it is impossible to have an informed public debate about what the law should say when they public doesn’t know what its government thinks the law says.”

In their letter to Gen. Alexander this week, both Udall and Wyden wrote that they believe the US government should have “broad authorities to investigate terrorism and espionage,” and that it’s possible to “aggressively pursue terrorists without compromising the constitutional rights of ordinary Americans.”

“Achieving this goal depends not just on secret courts and secret congressional hearings, but on informed public debate as well,” they wrote.

But while Sens. Udall and Wyden have been long critical of surveillance powers provided through FISA and the PATRIOT Act, their take on the revelations exposed by Mr. Snowden differs drastically with that of President Barack Obama and many leading figures of his administration. Mr. Obama, Gen. Alexander and Mr. Holder have all defended the practices used by the NSA and say that no constitutional violations occur due to privacy safeguards in place, as have Senate Intelligence Chair Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.).

“I think it’s important to recognize that you can’t have 100 percent security and also then have 100 percent privacy and zero inconvenience,” President Obama said earlier this month.

With respect to Section 702 and Section 215, Obama said, “These are programs that have been authorized by broad bipartisan majorities repeatedly since 2006. And so I think at the onset it is important to understand that your duly elected representatives have been consistently informed on exactly what we’re doing.”

Edward Snowden revealed himself as the contractor responsible for the leaks published by The Guardian less than one week after the paper first began releasing information on the programs. He gave several interviews in Hong Kong before flying to Moscow where he remains today, according to both the US and Russian presidents. The anti-secrecy website WikiLeaks announced Monday that Snowden has asked for asylum from several countries, including Iceland and Ecuador.

U.S. Senator Ron Wyden (Reuters / Joshua Roberts)

 Two Democrats on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence say the National Security Agency provided “inaccurate” and “misleading” information to the American public about the government’s vast surveillance operations.

Senators Ron Wyden and Mark Udall sent a letter to NSA Director Gen. Keith Alexander on Monday asking him to make revisions to a set of fact sheets that were released by his agency to quell concerns about domestic surveillance in the wake of leaked documents attributed to former intelligence contractor Edward Snowden earlier this month.

The Guardian newspaper has been publishing top-secret documents provided by Snowden that he says proves the NSA operates secretive spying programs that retain information on United States citizens under Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) and Section 215 of the PATRIOT Act. Snowden claims those two statutes are abused in order to surveil American citizens, an argument Gen. Alexander’s office recently attempted to counter by releasing a four-page set of bullet points outlining what the US government can and can’t do under federal law.

According to Sens. Wyden and Udall, the NSA’s response isn’t in-tune with what they’ve been told of the programs. "We were disappointed to see that this fact sheet contains an inaccurate statement about how the Section 702 authority has been interpreted by the US government," they write Gen. Alexander. "In our judgment this inaccuracy is significant, as it portrays protections for Americans' privacy as being significantly stronger than they actually are."

But while the fact sheets have been made available online, Wyden and Udall can’t explain in their public letter what their allegations are in reference to since the lawmakers’ own knowledge of the clandestine operations are not allowed to be discussed, even among the constituents who elected them to the Senate. Instead, they wrote that they’ve “identified this inaccurate statement in the classified attachment” sent to Alexander.

Elsewhere, the lawmakers rejected the NSA’s claim that, "Any inadvertently acquired communication of or concerning a US person must be promptly destroyed if it is neither relevant to the authorized purpose nor evidence of a crime."

"We believe that this statement is somewhat misleading,” replied the senators, “in that it implies that the NSA has the ability to determine how many American communications it has collected under Section 702, or that the law does not allow the NSA to deliberately search for the records of particular Americans. In fact, the intelligence community has told us repeatedly that it is ‘not reasonably possible to identify the number of people located in the United States whose communications may have been reviewed under the authority’ of the FISA Amendments Act.”

In a tweet sent out Monday evening, Sen. Wyden again said the FISA fact sheet included a “significant inaccuracy.”

Significant inaccuracy in NSA's FISA fact sheet. It portrays privacy protections as being stronger than they are. http://t.co/MbPcJUF4oc
— Ron Wyden (@RonWyden) June 24, 2013

 Nowhere does the senators’ response include allegations of any discrepancies in the Section 215 fact sheet, but both Wyden and Udall have raised questions about how the government interprets that provision previously. “We believe most Americans would be stunned to learn the details of how these secret court opinions have interpreted Section 215,” they wrote in a joint letter to Attorney General Eric Holder last year. “As we see it, there is now a significant gap between what most Americans think the law allows and what the government secretly claims the law allows. This is a problem, because it is impossible to have an informed public debate about what the law should say when they public doesn’t know what its government thinks the law says.”

In their letter to Gen. Alexander this week, both Udall and Wyden wrote that they believe the US government should have “broad authorities to investigate terrorism and espionage,” and that it’s possible to “aggressively pursue terrorists without compromising the constitutional rights of ordinary Americans.”

“Achieving this goal depends not just on secret courts and secret congressional hearings, but on informed public debate as well,” they wrote.

But while Sens. Udall and Wyden have been long critical of surveillance powers provided through FISA and the PATRIOT Act, their take on the revelations exposed by Mr. Snowden differs drastically with that of President Barack Obama and many leading figures of his administration. Mr. Obama, Gen. Alexander and Mr. Holder have all defended the practices used by the NSA and say that no constitutional violations occur due to privacy safeguards in place, as have Senate Intelligence Chair Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.).

“I think it’s important to recognize that you can’t have 100 percent security and also then have 100 percent privacy and zero inconvenience,” President Obama said earlier this month.

With respect to Section 702 and Section 215, Obama said, “These are programs that have been authorized by broad bipartisan majorities repeatedly since 2006. And so I think at the onset it is important to understand that your duly elected representatives have been consistently informed on exactly what we’re doing.”

Edward Snowden revealed himself as the contractor responsible for the leaks published by The Guardian less than one week after the paper first began releasing information on the programs. He gave several interviews in Hong Kong before flying to Moscow where he remains today, according to both the US and Russian presidents. The anti-secrecy website WikiLeaks announced Monday that Snowden has asked for asylum from several countries, including Iceland and Ecuador. 

 Washington’s allegations over US fugitive Edward Snowden are ‘unacceptable’ as he never crossed the Russian border, Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has said. As a consequence, any attempt to accuse or threaten Moscow by the US is unfounded.

 “Russia has nothing to do with Snowden's movements, he chose route himself and didn't cross the Russian border,” said Lavrov during a press conference with the Algerian foreign minister.

 DETAILS TO FOLLOW

When it comes to the whereabouts of Edward Snowden, there has been far more conjecture than concrete fact. While Washington would do anything to get its hands on the whistleblower, tracking down Snowden has turned into a full on cloak and dagger affair.

On Sunday Edward Snowden left Chinese territory two days after espionage charges were leveled against him, setting off an international game of cat and mouse which has the United States’ massive global intelligence apparatus trying to cut the former National Security Agency (NSA) contractor off at the pass.

The White House for its part seemed to be certain that Snowden did in fact reach Moscow after taking off from Hong Kong on Sunday.“We have known where he is and believe we know where he is now,” White House press secretary Jay Carney said during a Monday afternoon briefing. “It is our assumption that he is in Russia.”

“I’m not going to get into specifics, but it is our understanding that he is still in Russia,” Carney continued. "We have asked the Russians to look at all the options and expel Snowden to the US,” he said.

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has said on Monday that Snowden was in a “safe place.” Assange, who was unable to give further information as to Snowden’s whereabouts, claimed that Snowden had left Hong Kong on June 23 “bound for Ecuador via a safe pass through Russia and other states."

Shortly after Snowden allegedly arrived in Moscow, the government of Ecuador announced it had received an asylum request from the fugitive whistleblower. Assange claimed Snowden, whose passport was reportedly revoked one day prior to his departure from Hong Kong, was further granted a refugee document of passage.

It has been reported that Snowden was snaking his way around the globe to avoid capture, with a complicated route which would have seen him fly from Moscow to Caracas via Havana, with the expectation that he would later travel on to the Ecuadorian capital Quito.

While the state-controlled Russian airline Aeroflot said that he had checked in for flight SU150 to Havana with two seats (17A and 17C) in his name on Monday, seemingly half the world’s press corps was on board, but Snowden was conspicuously absent.  

The fact that hefailed to board a Moscow-to-Havana flight on Monday following his hasty escape from Hong Kong one day prior begs the question: did the world’s most infamous whistleblower step foot on Russian soil at all? 

 Wikileaks and unnamed sources

The government of Hong Kong never specified Snowden’s destination, only stating that he had in fact left Chinese territory for “a third country” on Sunday. The Russian government has made no official comment regarding the whistleblower either.

Although reporters noted the heavy presence of Russian security services at Moscow’s Sheremetyevo airport, Vladimir Putin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov disavowed any knowledge of Snowden’s arrival in the Russian capital.

“I don’t [know if he's planning to stay in Moscow]. I heard about his potential arrival from the press. I know nothing,” Peskov told the Guardian on Sunday.

When RT contacted Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) regarding the matter, the agency declined to comment.

With no corroborating video footage, the only actual proof that Snowden arrived in Moscow on Sunday evening stem from three primary sources: WikiLeaks, the government of Ecuador and anonymous sources working within the airport.

Wikileaks, whose representative Sarah Harrison reportedly accompanied Snowden on the flight, regularly sent out tweets up until flight SU213 touched down in the Russian capital around 5:00 p.m. local time. 

The anti-secrecy group said in a statement that the former CIA technician is on his way to Ecuador "via a safe route for the purposes of asylum, and is being escorted by diplomats and legal advisors from WikiLeaks."

A source from within WikiLeaks, speaking on condition of anonymity, confirmed to RT that the rogue NSA leaker was indeed on the flight, passing on the names of Ecuadorian officials who were slated to meet Snowden at the airport.

An unnamed Aeroflot official also told Russia’s ITAR-Tass news agency that the former CIA technician was indeed on board Flight SU213 which landed in Moscow.

Shortly after flight 213 landed, Ecuadorian Foreign Minister Ricardo Patino tweeted that “The Government of Ecuador had received an asylum request from Edward J. #Snowden.” Cars baring license plates for the Ecuadorian diplomatic mission were spotted at Moscow International Airport Sheremetyevo. 

Ecuador's ambassador to Russia, Chavez Zavala, was also seen at the airport. Just moments before stepping into a hotel on the airport’s premises, he reportedly told journalists: "We're waiting for [Sarah] Harrison. We're going to talk to them."

Although Snowden had reportedly taken a suite at the «V-Express» Capsule Hotel in Terminal E of the airport’s transit area, no visual confirmation of the former contractor has surfaced despite the myriad passengers and swarm of journalists staking out quite possibly the world’s most wanted man.
A source at Aeroflot told Interfax news agency that Snowden had checked into the hotel, noting that “he cannot leave the terminal as he has no Russian visa." Harrison, he added, did have a Russian visa.

Another source told the agency of the unprecedented security measures which had been taken “to maintain Snowden's security and to guarantee his safe departure.” “Everything has been done to allow Snowden to spend the night peacefully at the airport's capsule hotel and to fly quietly to Cuba," the source continued.

However, on Monday evening a source at the hotel later told RT that Snowden had in fact never checked in or out of the facility.

It bears recalling that WikiLeaks, which did everything possible to draw attention to Snowden’s location between takeoff and landing, has a vested nterest in concealing the fugitive whistleblower's actual movements.

Ecuador has already shown its willingness to take big political risks by granting Assange diplomatic asylum at its London embassy, where the Wikileaks founder has remained holed up for over a year. With round the clock police surveillance and a diplomatic standoff with the UK government set to last for years, Quito might have decided on avoiding another diplomatic showdown by facilitating Snowden’s safe passage before he arrives in Ecuador.

Destination unknown

Once Snowden failed to show for his Havana-bound flight, RT’s Irina Galushko noted there were at least four flights leaving on Monday that could put Snowden on route to Ecuador. A source familiar with the situation earlier told Interfax that Snowden might take the next flight to Latin America via Cuba.

“He’s probably got another ticket also via Cuba, as there are no direct flights [from Moscow] to Caracas or Quito.”

Like so much other information that has leaked out of Moscow’s international hub, nothing ever materialized. The same source later told Interfax that Snowden was probably already outside of the Russian Federation.

Speaking at a joint press conferred with his Indian counterpart in New Delhi, Secretary of State John Kerry said he had no knowledge of Snowden’s final destination, adding he would be deeply troubled if Moscow or China had prior notice of Snowden’s travel plans, Reuters reports.   

More baffling to Washington is how Snowden ever left Hong Kong as his passport had been revoked one day prior. On the same day, the US asked Hong Kong to hand over Snowden under the terms of a 1998 extradition treaty with the Chinese territory.

However, The Hong Kong special administrative region [HKSAR] government said their decision not to block Snowden’s departure stemmed from the fact that “the documents provided by the US government did not fully comply with the legal requirements under Hong Kong law.” “As the HKSAR government has yet to have sufficient information to process the request for provisional warrant of arrest, there is no legal basis to restrict Mr Snowden from leaving Hong Kong. The HKSAR government has already informed the US government of Mr Snowden's departure,” the statement continued.

On Friday, federal prosecutors filed a criminal complaint against Snowden for leaking a trove of documents regarding the NSA’s clandestine surveillance programs.

Snowden was charged with theft, “unauthorized communication of national defense information” and “willful communication of classified communications intelligence information to an unauthorized person.” The last two charges were brought under the 1917 Espionage Act, which allow for the issuance of an international arrest warrant against him.Russia, which has no extradition treaty with the US, said it would be under no obligation to hand over a US citizen. Foreign Minister. Sergey Lavrov has previously said Russia would be willing to consider an asylum request from Snowden. However, an unnamed security official told RIA-Novosti news agency on Monday that no orders for Snowden's arrest have been dispatched through Interpol to Russian law enforcement agencies. Speaking from Hanoi on Monday, Patino said he did not know Snowden’s current whereabouts, or where the whistleblower planned to travel next.

The Ecuadorian FM, who read a letter in which Snowden likened himself to Bradley Manning, the US army private who is currently on trial for leaking classified information to Wikileaks, intimated that the former NSA contractor’s asylum request would be considered on human rights grounds.
Following news that Snowden’s passport had been revoked, State Department spokeswoman Jennifer Psaki said he "should not be allowed to proceed in any further international travel, other than is necessary to return him to the United States."

That Snowden could leave Hong Kong on an invalidated passport despite the charges leveled against him speaks volumes about the fallout from the United States sweeping surveillance activities.
And despite the massive troves of information the US government continues to cull both at home and abroad through PRISM and related surveillance programs, one critical fact remains elusive: where in the world is Edward Snowden?

Has Edward Snowden betrayed people of the world or certain elites in a particular country, asked Ecuador Foreign Minister Ricardo Patino as he confirmed that the whistleblower was in Russia following the asylum bid the South American country.

Patino said on Monday that human rights principles were the most important consideration in the case of former CIA contractor.

Ecuador has been in contact with the Russian government over Edward Snowden and has informed Russia that it is considering him asylum appeal, Ecuador’s Foreign Minister said at a press conference in Hanoi on Monday.

He stressed that the Ecuadorian government puts human rights above any other party’s interests. Patino also said it is “paradoxical” the person who revealed alleged rights violations is being “persecuted.”

“It should be asked, who betrayed whom,” Patino stressed as he questioned the correctness of calling Snowden’s leak a “treason.”

“Is this betraying the citizens of the world, or betraying some elites that are in power in a certain country?” the Minister asked.

The alleged US espionage plan would be violating the rights of “every citizen in the world,” Patino said, referring to Snowden’s claim that the US agencies are “intercepting the majority world’s communications.”

Patino also read out Snowden’s formal asylum request. In it, the whistleblower has compared himself to the US Army intelligence analyst Bradley Manning, who has been accused of sending a trove of classified documents to WikiLeaks and is now on trial for “aiding the enemy.”

“It is unlikely that I will have a fair trial or humane treatment before trial, and also I have the risk of life imprisonment or death,” Snowden said in his asylum bid, citing Manning’s case and his “inhumane” treatment.

The Ecuadorian Constitution guarantees the safety of people who publish opinions through the media and work in any form of communication, Patino stressed.

Meanwhile, Ecuador is also considering a US request related to Snowden, which it received from the US envoy in Quito. Patino said the decision would come in due time.

“The relationship between the US and Ecuador should be based on respect for the sovereignty of both countries and our actions are founded on our principles. We consider the consequences of our decisions, but we act in the name of our principles,” said the Minister, stressing that the US had denied the extradition of several Ecuadorian bankers charged in Ecuador.

Snowden, a former contractor for the US National Security Agency (NSA) who exposed a top-secret PRISM surveillance program to the media, was expected to fly to Cuba on Monday and then change planes to Ecuador. However, he has not been seen aboard the plane flying from Moscow’s Sheremetyevo airport to Havana, RT's Egor Piskunov reported.

US government has been hacking Chinese mobile operator networks to intercept millions of text messages, as well as the operator of region’s fibre optic cable network, South China Morning Post writes citing Edward Snowden.

More information on National Security Agency activity in China and Hong Kong has been revealed by SCMP on Sunday, shedding light on statements Snowden made in an interview on June 12.

“The NSA does all kinds of things like hack Chinese cell phone companies to steal all of your SMS data,” Snowden was quoted as saying on the SCMP's website.

In a series of reports the paper claims Snowden has provided proof of extensive US hacking activity in the region.

View of the National Security Agency (NSA) in the Washington suburb of Fort Meade, Maryland (AFP Photo)

  The former CIA technician and NSA contractor reportedly provided to the paper the documents detailing specific attacks on computers over a four-year period, including internet protocol (IP) addresses, dates of attacks and whether a computer was still being monitored remotely. SCMP however did not reveal any supporting documents.

The US government has been accused of a security breach at the Hong Kong headquarters of the operator of the largest regional fibre optic cable network operator, Pacnet. Back in 2009, the company’s computers were hacked by the NSA but since then the operation has been shut down, according to the documents the paper claims to have seen.

Pacnet’s network spans across Hong Kong, China, Korea, Japan, Taiwan, the Philippines and Singapore and provides connections to 16 data centers for telecom companies, corporations and governments across the region.

The whistleblower has also allegedly revealed the US had viewed millions of text messages by hacking Chinese mobile phone companies. That is a significant claim since the Chinese sent almost billion text messages in 2012 and China Mobile is the world’s largest mobile network carrier. 

Experts man their stations at the Threat Operations Center inside the National Security Agency (NSA) in suburban Fort Mead, Maryland (AFP Photo)

In his very first leak to the media, Snowden had already exposed the scale of the American government spying operation on its domestic mobile network operators. He later revealed that the US and the UK possessed technology to access the Blackberry phones of delegates at two G20 summit meetings in London in 2009.

In a third article, SCMP claims that the US on a regular basis has been attacking the servers at Tsinghua University, one of country’s biggest research institutions. The whistleblower said that information obtained pointed to hacking activities, because it contained such details as external and internal IP addresses in the University’s network, which could only have been retrieved by a security breach.

Tsinghua University is host to one of Chinas’ six major backbone networks, the China Education and Research Network (CERNET) containing data about millions of Chinese citizens. 

Edward Snowden (AFP Photo)

The Obama administration has admitted to spying on two Icelandic citizens with ties to WikiLeaks in the latest revelation pertaining to both the US government’s widespread surveillance practices and its war against the whistleblower website. Documents surfaced on Friday showing that the United States Department of Justice demanded that Internet giant Google provide federal investigators with the personal emails sent and received by two Icelanders once involved in WikiLeaks, an anti-secrecy website under investigation for publishing hundreds of thousands of classified US documents.
Herbert Snorrason and Smári McCarthy, both known publically as one-time associates of the website, released Justice Department-issued search warrants and court orders for their Gmail accounts on Friday that had up until recently been kept under seal. The documents compelled Google, the owner of the Gmail service, to provide metadata and content pertaining to emails that have passed through the accounts of both men. The documents are redacted in part and are absent of information confirming that the intelligence is sought pursuant to the investigation of WikiLeaks, but Snorrason wrote on his website “it’s not a tricky guess” to figure out why they were targeted.
“All this is pretty much par for the course; I had assumed that I was caught in the dragnet cast around Julian Assange,” Snorrason wrote.

A team of volunteers, including McCarthy, readied the footage for an April 2010 release just weeks before Manning was arrested and charged with disclosing classified intelligence. “It was chaotic and hectic and also sort of very varyingly frayed nerves,” McCarthy said of working on the film in a scene from the just-released movie We Steal Secrets. “It wasn't really cloak and dagger stuff, it was just, you know, yes, another cool project.” In a July 2010 interview with journalist Sam Knight, McCarthy discredited the notion that WikiLeaks volunteers were being surveilled to a significant extent. “I know that it is nonzero. Beyond that it’s hard to estimate,” he said. “I am aware of one person being approached by an undercover US official requesting information about Julian Assange’s whereabouts, but that had absolutely no effect. Honestly, I think the US federal government has a lot of better things to do than trying to monitor WikiLeaks. One suggestion would be that they open up their document repositories and datasets before WikiLeaks does.” Publication of the DoJ documents come amid an escalating scandal involving the US government’s questionable surveillance practices that have pitted President Barack Obama and his administration against the American public and press. Documents leaked by The Guardian newspaper throughout the month of June have exposed evidence that the Nation Security Agency and other authoritative bodies have continuously accumulated information about the telephone habits of millions of Americans daily while also shining light on the little-known FISA court’s secret and undeniable requests for email and other intelligence, similar to what's seen in the court orders sent to Google. President Obama and officials from the NSA and DoJ have applauded the surveillance programs and contest to their constitutional legality, despite a myriad of complaints from privacy-concerned citizens and civil liberties groups.

Ok, technically it isn't a leak Google is allowed to send it but I'm guessing @smarimc's publication is considered a leak by the government.
— Jacob Appelbaum (@ioerror) June 21, 2013