Edward Snowden sought to bolster his credentials during an
interview with NBC "Nightly News" anchor Brian Williams.
The one-hour interview, Snowden's first with a U.S. television network, is scheduled to air at 10 p.m. ET on Wednesday.
An excerpt aired Tuesday night.
"I was trained as a spy
in sort of the traditional sense of the word -- in that I lived and
worked undercover, overseas, pretending to work in a job that I'm not --
and even being assigned a name that was not mine," Snowden said.
"Now, the government
might deny these things. They might frame it in certain ways, and say,
oh, well, you know, he's a low-level analyst.
"But what they're trying
to do is they're trying to use one position that I've had in a career,
here or there, to distract from the totality of my experience, which is
that I've worked for the Central Intelligence Agency, undercover,
overseas.
"I've worked for the
National Security Agency, undercover, overseas. And I've worked for the
Defense Intelligence Agency as a lecturer at the Joint
Counterintelligence Training Academy, where I developed sources and
methods for keeping our information and people secure in the most
hostile and dangerous environments around the world."
Snowden continued: "So
when they say I'm a low-level systems administrator, that I don't know
what I'm talking about, I'd say it's somewhat misleading."
A spokeswoman for the NSA declined to comment Tuesday on the NBC report.
Williams traveled to
Moscow, where Snowden fled to escape prosecution for leaking classified
documents that detailed U.S. surveillance programs.
Snowden hasn't been able to leave Russia since U.S. officials charged him with espionage and revoked his passport.
What he leaked sparked a national debate about privacy and security.
President Barack Obama
and military officials remain in support of mass, warrantless
surveillance. But civil libertarians, technology companies and others
oppose it, noting the lack of transparency.
Source:CNN
No comments:
Post a Comment