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.”