EDWARD SNOWDEN: Mission Accomplished
Snowden, now enjoying temporary asylum in Moscow, supplied thousands of pages of classified documents stolen from agency servers to just three journalists: Glenn Greenwald, Laura Poitras, and Barton Gellman.
Those disclosures have lead to a number of disclosures, and it seems that his hope for a conversation about the role of surveillance and freedom in American society is coming to fruition. In a new interview with Snowden, the first since he arrived in Moscow back in August, he is defiant, confident, and proud of his accomplishments thus far.
"For me, in terms of personal satisfaction, the mission's already accomplished," Snowden told Gellman in The Washington Post. "I already won. As soon as the journalists were able to work, everything that I had been trying to do was validated. Because, remember, I didn't want to change society. I wanted to give society a chance to determine if it should change itself."
The disclosures - which included revelations the NSA collected records of every U.S. phone call, the intelligence "black budget," and spying on high-level foreign leaders - have brought condemnation from government officials, and much more outrage from ordinary Americans worried their government is spying on them.
"I am not trying to bring down the NSA, I am working to improve the NSA. I am still working for the NSA right now. They are the only ones who don't realize it," he told Gellman.
There's no doubt there's much more to come from Snowden, as he stole as many as 200,000 classified documents when he left Hawaii, according to NSA Director Gen. Keith Alexander.
Read the full report at The Washington Post >
This is a developing story and will be updated as we learn more.