The US whistleblower Edward Snowdenhas attacked his Russian protectors by criticising the Kremlin’s human rights record and suggesting that its officials have been involved in hacks on US security networks.
His outburst came in an interview in the Financial Times with Alan Rusbridger, the former editor of the Guardian, which published the initial Snowden revelations. Snowden said Moscow had “gone very far, in ways that are completely unnecessary, costly and corrosive to individual and collective rights” in monitoring citizens online.
He described last month’s leak of top-secret National Security Agency espionage tools as an implicit threat to the US government, potentially by Russia.
Snowden, 33, a former CIA contractor, has been living in a secret location in Russia since he fled the US via Hong Kong in 2013, carrying thousands of classified documents that revealed the widespread nature of the NSA’s electronic surveillance programme. He faces up to 30 years in prison in the US on charges of espionage and theft of government property.
However, his lawyers hope to secure a presidential pardon before Barack Obama leaves office in January, and commentators have noted that Snowden has made several attacks on his hosts in the build-up to his bid for a pardon.
In July, it was reported that Snowden had posted a string of messages to his 2 million Twitter followers, in which he described recent Russian legislation criminalising support for terrorism on the internet as unworkable.
“Mass surveillance doesn’t work. This bill will take money and liberty from every Russian without improving safety. It should not be signed,” he tweeted. “Duma member says most representatives were against Big Brother law, but voted ‘yes’ out of fear.”
Some critics have claimed that this is a bid by Snowden to keep himself in some favour with the White House. In the FTinterview, he said: “I can’t fix the human rights situation in Russia, and realistically my priority is to fix my own country first, because that’s the one to which I owe the greatest loyalty.
“But though the chances are it will make no difference, maybe it’ll help. We are living through a crisis in computer security, the like of which we have never seen. But until we solve the fundamental problem, which is that our policy incentivises offence to a greater degree than defence, hacks will continue unpredictably and they will have increasingly larger effects and impacts.”
His comments came as the actor Zachary Quinto has called for Snowden to be allowed to return to the US without facing espionage charges. The Star Trek actor, who plays the journalist Glenn Greenwald in the Stone biopic, said Snowden had acted with “great courage” and it was “absurd” to brand him a “treasonist” while he remained in exile in Russia.
Speaking at the film’s premiere in Toronto, Quinto – known for his role as Spock in the rebooted Star Trek films – told the Press Association: “I do think [Snowden] should be able to come back [to the US]. I think it’s a very complicated issue in terms of how that would happen.
“The idea of him being charged under the Espionage Act or branded as a treasonist is absurd. I think he is someone of great integrity and great courage. “I think what he did is underestimated now, in a lot of ways, but I think will be looked back on with the magnitude it deserves.
“Hopefully he can enjoy some freedoms again in his life. He deserves that in my opinion.”
Oliver Stone’s film Snowden opened to poor reviews, with Hollywood Reporter’s Stephen Farber labelling it “a lacklustre opus”. After its premiere in Toronto, Stone, 69, said Snowden had brought to the world’s attention “not only eavesdropping… [but] cyber-warfare and drone attacks, too”. He added: “Mr Obama could pardon him and we hope so. We hope Mr Obama has a stroke of lightning and he sees the way.”
Stone said the NSA operated as a secret underworld. “The government lies about it all the time, and what they’re doing is illegal, and they keep doing it. And they get better and better at it,” he said. “As Ed Snowden said the other day – it’s out of control. The world is really out of control. We don’t know who is doing what.”
NSA whistleblower says Moscow’s online monitoring of citizens is unnecessary,costly and corrosive of rights. 
