In his first interview since outing himself as the NSA whistleblower who leaked surveillance documents to the press, Edward Snowden said he believes the NSA has conducted more than 61,000 hacking operations around the world.
The 29-year-old, who has been in hiding in Hong Kong since May 20, told the South China Morning Post that according to documents he obtained, the NSA had been hacking computers in Hong Kong and mainland China since 2009.
Among the targets in Hong Kong he said were the Chinese University of Hong Kong, public officials, businesses and students in the city.
Snowden told the paper he believed there had been more than 61,000 NSA hacking operations globally, with at least hundreds of targets in Hong Kong and on the mainland. The paper, however, didn't say how he arrived at those numbers.
“We hack network backbones – like huge internet routers, basically – that give us access to the communications of hundreds of thousands of computers without having to hack every single one,” he said.
Snowden said he wanted to expose the government's hacking activity to show “the hypocrisy of the U.S. government when it claims that it does not target civilian infrastructure, unlike its adversaries....Not only does it do so, but it is so afraid of this being known that it is willing to use any means, such as diplomatic intimidation, to prevent this information from becoming public.”
The Guardian newspaper, which has published information from documents leaked by Snowden, has said that it has more than a thousand other documents from Snowden that it plans to disclose in coming weeks.
Though Snowden discussed possible plans to seek asylum in Iceland or elsewhere during an interview with the Guardian last Thursday, he told the Post that he's staying put in Hong Kong for now.
“People who think I made a mistake in picking HK as a location misunderstand my intentions. I am not here to hide from justice, I am here to reveal criminality,” he told the paper.
Asked if he had been offered asylum by the Russian government, he responded, “My only comment is that I am glad there are governments that refuse to be intimidated by great power.”
