US whistleblower Edward Snowden, the one who stole secrets from the NSA that had worldwide implications, has been hiding in Russia ever since. However, instead of praising the place where he is staying, the whistleblower has done the proverbial, ‘shit on his bed.’ He has come out attacking the Russian government on its human rights record and also suggested that the Russian officials had been involved in numerous US security networks.
The accusations were made during an interview with Alan Rusbridger from the Financial Times. In the interview, Snowden noted that the Russian government had gone very far in their human rights ways, they were completely unnecessary, costly and they were corrosive to the individual and the collective rights. They used these methods in monitoring and tracking citizens online. He also suggested that the leak of top secrets at the National Security Agency and the espionage tools was an implicit threat which had been made towards the US government, and was potentially made by Russians.
Snowden who fled the US after stealing NSA documents, went to the Hong Kong since he fled the country back in 2013, and finally left for Russia where he has been staying at a secret location since. He carried thousands of classified documents and files from NSA and revealed their worldwide electronic surveillance program.
If he goes back to the US, he will face up to the 30 years in prison on charges of espionage and the theft of government property. His lawyers are keen, however, to get a presidential pardon from the current President, Barack Obama, before his tenure ends. Analysts claim that Snowden made the attacks against the Russians so that his bid for pardon could be made easier.
Snowden is also said to have posted some tweets on the social media network as he described the Russian legislation against the support for terrorism on the Internet to be intolerable. In his tweets reiterated that the use of mass surveillance would not be able to work. Russians in the country would have the liberties and money taken away from them, and they are also not having any safety improved.
One Duma member also said that most of the representatives had been against the law, which was dubbed the Big Brother law, but had only voted yes because they were afraid. Analysts have taken the comments to mean that Snowden is looking at improving his ways to come back to the US and be pardoned. In his interview he said he could not fix the human rights issue in Russia, but he had a priority to fix his own country, because according to him, that’s where his loyalties are.
Snowden has his own admirers back in the US, with Zachary Quinto, the Star Trek actor saying that Snowden should be allowed to return to the US without facing any charges. He also noted that Snowden is a person who had acted with great courage, and to brand him as a traitor is absurd. He, however, said that the issue of Snowden coming back to the US would probably be a complicated issue.The actor also said that what Snowden had done was an underrated act now, but in the future people will look at it with the magnitude it deserves.
