Edward Snowden is ready to return to the United States, but on one condition

A former employee of the National Security Agency, Edward Snowden, who leaked secret information about the agency’s work and monitoring people, wrote memoirs and an interview in which he announced his readiness to return to the United States from Russia, where he currently lives.

Фото: Depositphotos

Permanent Record is partly an espionage story and, as critics may say, an attempt to justify the actions of US treason.

Snowden lived in Russia for six years, at first he received asylum there, and now he has a residence permit. In the United States, he was accused of violating the Espionage Act after he provided secret documents to journalists about the government’s PRISM surveillance program in June of 2013.

Photo: ria.ru video frame

Many US national security officials consider him a traitor for revealing important spyware, while many human rights groups say he shed light on the government’s massive surveillance of the whole country.

Snowden told NPR in a telephone interview from Moscow on Thursday: “I didn’t want to be here, and that’s what people forget. It was not my choice to live in Russia. ” He noted that he sought asylum in 27 countries after the US government canceled his passport due to treason.

Snowden admitted that Russian intelligence offered him cooperation, but he rejected this offer: “If I were in the game, I would leave on the first day in a limousine, I would live in the palace, and you would see how they arrange parades for me on the Red Square".

Snowden stressed that he has nothing to give the Russian government: “The reality is that I no longer have access to the classified material that I provided to journalists before leaving Hong Kong precisely because I did not know what would happen next.”

Snowden worked at the US National Security Agency in Hawaii; in 2013, he arrived in Hong Kong, where he shared the agency's secrets with several reporters. He tried to go to Ecuador for refuge, but in the end was forced to stay in Moscow.

According to him, Russia's motivation to protect him is that for the country it is an easy way to look like it is doing something good without fear of any retaliatory measures from Washington. Other European countries contacted him about possible asylum - Germany, Poland - but at the same time they were all afraid of retaliatory actions from the United States.

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He says he is not afraid to criticize the human rights situation in Russia.

“You have to look at the basic facts. If you look at my public statements... I constantly criticize the policies of the Russian government, the record of the Russian government in the field of human rights, I criticize even the Russian president,” he said.

Snowden says he is willing to return to the US for trial, but only if he can tell a jury why he leaked classified information to journalists. He also wants assurances that jurors will be able to see the information given to them, which he believes will help ensure a fair trial.

“A trial regarding disclosure of information cannot be fair if the jury cannot evaluate whether it was right or wrong to disclose this information,” he said. If he returns only to “pronounce a sentence,” then, in his opinion, he will not become a suitable example for those who may find themselves in a similar situation.

“Nobody becomes an informant because they want to,” he said. “No one becomes an informant because they expect a happy ending,” Snowden emphasized.

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