reuters:

Edward Snowden, a former CIA employee working as a contractor at the U.S. National Security Agency, leaked details of a top secret U.S. surveillance program, acting out of conscience to protect “liberties for people around the world.”

Both the Washington Post and Britain’s Guardian newspaper - to whom he gave the documents he had purloined - published Snowden’s identity on Sunday after he sought to be identified.

“I don’t want to live in a society that does these sort of things … I do not want to live in a world where everything I do and say is recorded. That is not something I am willing to support or live under,” he told the Guardian, which published a video interview with him on its website. 

“The NSA has built an infrastructure that allows it to intercept almost everything. With this capability, the vast majority of human communications are automatically ingested without targeting. If I wanted to see your emails or your wife’s phone, all I have to do is use intercepts. I can get your emails, passwords, phone records, credit cards,” Snowdown said.

The Guardian published revelations last week that U.S. security services had monitored data about phone calls from Verizon and Internet data from large companies such as Google and Facebook.

Photo of Edward Snowden courtesy of the Guardian

(via infinity-imagined)