Iceland has received an informal approach from an intermediary who
says Edward Snowden, the former National Security Agency contractor who
exposed the U.S. government's secret surveillance programs, wants to
seek asylum there.
Snowden, the former employee of contractor
Booz Allen Hamilton who worked in an NSA facility in Hawaii, made world
headlines after providing details of the program to the Guardian and
Washington Post and then fleeing to Hong Kong.
In a column in
Icelandic daily Frettabladid, WikiLeaks spokesman Kristinn Hrafnsson
wrote that a middleman had approached him on behalf of Snowden.
The Icelandic government, which has refused to say whether they would
grant asylum to Snowden, confirmed it had received the message from
Hrafnsson.
Iceland has a reputation for promoting Internet
freedoms, but Snowden has said did not travel there immediately from the
United States as he feared the country of only 320,000 could be
pressured by Washington.
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange,
holed up in the Ecuadorian embassy in London to avoid extradition to
Sweden for questioning over allegations of sex crimes, and visited
Iceland several times in the run-up to some of the website's major
releases. Assange denies any wrongdoing.
WikiLeaks won a
ruling this year in Iceland's Supreme Court against MasterCard's local
partner. The court upheld a lower court's ruling that the payment card
firm had illegally ended its contract with the website. Wikileaks'
funding had been squeezed without the ability to accept card payments.
On another note, Snowden defended his disclosure of top-secret U.S.
spying programs in an online chat Monday with The Guardian and attacked
U.S. officials for calling him a traitor.
Congressional
leaders have called Snowden a traitor for revealing once-secret
surveillance programs two weeks ago in the Guardian and The Washington
Post. The National Security Agency programs collect records of millions
of Americans' telephone calls and Internet usage as a counterterror
tool. The disclosures revealed the scope of the collections, which
surprised many Americans and have sparked debate about how much privacy
the government can take away in the name of national security.
Snowden dismissed the U.S. government's claims that the
NSA surveillance programs had helped thwart dozens of terrorist attacks in
more than 20 countries, including the 2009 al-Qaida plot by Afghan
American Najibullah Zazi to blow up New York subways.
Snowden
was working as a contractor for NSA at the time he had access to the
then-secret programs. He defended his actions and said he considered
what to reveal and what not to, saying he did not reveal any U.S.
operations against what he called legitimate military targets, but
instead showed that the NSA is hacking civilian infrastructure like
universities and private businesses.
Snowden explained his
claim that from his desk, he could "wiretap" any phone call or email a
claim top intelligence officials have denied. "If an NSA, FBI, CIA, DIA,
etc. analyst has access to query raw SIGINT (signals intelligence)
databases, they can enter and get results for anything they want," he
wrote in the answer posted on the Guardian site. "Phone number, email,
user id, cell phone handset id (IMEI), and so on; it's all the same."
REUTERS/AP