Russia may grant asylum for CIA whistleblower

06:23, 12 June 2013

MOSCOW. June 11. KAZINFORM - Russia may grant political asylum to a former CIA whistleblower who has revealed Washington's highly classified global surveillance programs, the Kremlin said Tuesday. "If we receive such a request, we'll consider it," local business daily Kommersant quoted Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov as saying.

Edward Snowden, 29, an employee of defense contractor Booz Allen Hamilton, leaked to the Guardian last week details of how the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) "traced" millions of netizens worldwide, saying his goal was to inform U.S. citizens on how the government gathers private information under the so-called Patriot Act of 2001.

Offering asylum to a former technical assistant for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), who revealed his identity in China's Hong Kong on May 20 and checked out a local hotel on Monday, would benefit the entire international community, local expert said.

"Russia, as a sovereign state, can offer asylum to anyone it considers to be right," Chief Editor of the Moscow's National Defense magazine Igor Korotchenko told Xinhua.

"In that particular case, Moscow offers protection to a person who has acted in the interests of the entire mankind," Korotchenko added.

He noted that Snowden was by no means a spy or a renegade, as he has not sold his country's secrets but acted completely as a concerned citizen. "The information he has revealed is of high importance for any person in the world regardless of his or her nationality," he said.

The possible decision by the Russian authorities, as he saw it, was "well-analysed and sound."

Even if the whistleblower eventually appears in Russia, Korotchenko said, it would probably not harm the Russia-U.S. relations on the eve of a meeting between presidents Vladimir Putin and Barack Obama in Northern Ireland on the sidelines of the G8 summit due next week.

Meanwhile, Alexei Pushkov, head of the International Committee in the Russian State Duma, lower house of the parliament, believed Washington would be angered if Moscow grants asylum to the U.S. citizen.

"The U.S. will be hysterical, as they recognize such a right for themselves only," Pushkov wrote in his Twitter Tuesday.

Snowden previously served a number of roles in the intelligence community, including as a former technical assistant with the CIA and with several outside contractors.

Obama defends phone, internet surveillance programs

WASHINGTON, June 7 (Xinhua) -- U.S. President Barack Obama on Friday defended the government's phone and internet surveillance program, stressing that the tracking of internet activity has not applied to U.S. citizens or people living in the country.

Obama played defense before media after delivering a televised speech on healthcare in the U.S. state of California, following days of reports on the government's secret surveillance programs.Full story

U.S. intelligence chief defends intelligence collection program

WASHINGTON, June 6 (Xinhua) -- The U.S. Director of National Intelligence James Clapper on Thursday defended the code-named PRISM program that tapped into internet companies for intelligence, saying the related reports published by the British Guardian newspaper and the Washington Post contained "numerous inaccuracies."

Clapper said in a statement that the articles omitted key information regarding how a classified intelligence collection program is used to prevent terrorist attacks and the numerous safeguards that protect privacy and civil liberties. Full story

U.S. mines data from internet companies in secret program: report

WASHINGTON, June 6 (Xinhua) -- U.S. National Security Agency ( NSA) and the FBI are secretly tapping directly into the central servers of nine U.S. internet companies, extracting audio, video, photographs, e-mails, documents and connection logs that enable analysts to track a person's movements and contacts over time, according to a report posted on the Washington Post's website Thursday night.

The highly classified program, code-named PRISM, has not been disclosed publicly before. According to the report, it is established in 2007 and saw exponential growth in the past 6 years. The report quoted an internal document as saying the new tool was the most prolific contributor to the President's Daily Brief, which cited PRISM data in 1,477 articles last year. "NSA reporting increasingly relies on PRISM" as its leading source of raw material, accounting for nearly 1 in 7 intelligence reports.

Source: XINHUA

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