Edward Snowden denies any connection to Russian gov't
24 June 2014, 18:54 -- Former NSA employee Edward Snowden denies ties to the Russian government and states that he would like to live a normal life. These are the statements he made on Tuesday during a live video broadcast of a meeting of the PACE's Committee on Legal Affairs and Human Rights.
'I have no relations with the Russian government,' he said. 'If they had a choice, they would prefer that I wasn't here,' said the former employee of the US special agencies.
'I would like to go on moving from country to country and live a normal life,' Snowden said, noting that he 'lost the opportunity to travel, because the State Department had revoked his passport.'
Answering the question of one of the MPs about whether Russia and China were able to exercise surveillance, Snowden said that these countries had 'the same capabilities of intelligence.' 'This is a technical and financial issue,' he said.
At the moment when Snowden was asked whether the actions against him were some act of deterrence, the connection with him was lost. Members of the PACE Committee tried to restore it for ten minutes, but failed.
Edward Snowden is a former NSA employee. Edward Snowden said Tuesday that he had not taken decisions which of his materials would be published, having entrusted it to the press.
'I decided not to publish these materials on the Internet; I asked representatives of the press to consult with the government what could be published. I myself did not make decisions on what should or should not be published - no one knows the full picture,' Snowden said, speaking via video link at the session of the PACE's Committee on Legal Affairs on Tuesday.
In June, 2013, he handed a series of secret materials about surveillance programs conducted on the Internet by the US and the UK intelligence services to the Washington Post and the Guardian.
In America, Snowden is accused in absentia of several crimes, in particular, of deliberate handing over of classified information to intelligence services of other states. He faces up to 10 years of imprisonment on each of the charges.
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