EDWARD Snowden, the National Security Agency leaker, defended his disclosure of top-secret US spying programs in an online chat with the Guardian newspaper and attacking US officials for calling him a traitor.
"The US government is not going to be able to cover this up by jailing or murdering me," he said. He added the government "immediately and predictably destroyed any possibility of a fair trial at home," by labeling him a traitor, and indicated he would not return to the US voluntarily.
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 use 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.
"It would be foolish to volunteer yourself to" possible arrest and criminal charges "if you can do more good outside of prison than in it," he said.
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 US operations against what he called legitimate military targets, but instead showed the NSA is hacking civilian infrastructure like universities and private businesses.
"These nakedly, aggressively criminal acts are wrong no matter the target. Not only that, when NSA makes a technical mistake during an exploitation operation, critical systems crash," he said, though he gave no examples of what systems have crashed or in which countries.
"Congress hasn't declared war on the countries - the majority of them are our allies - but without asking for public permission, NSA is running network operations against them that affect millions of innocent people," he said. "And for what? So we can have secret access to a computer in a country we're not even fighting?"
Snowden was referring to PRISM, one of the programs he disclosed. The program sweeps up Internet data from all over the world that goes through nine major US-based Internet providers. The NSA can look at foreign usage without any warrants, and says the program doesn't target Americans.
US officials say the data-gathering programs are legal and operated under secret court supervision.
Snowden said that from his desk he could "wiretap" any phone call or e-mail - 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.
Director of National Intelligence James Clapper has said that the kind of data that can be accessed and who can access it is severely limited.
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