NSA Leaker Edward Snowden: "The U.S. Government is not going to be able to cover this up by jailing or murdering me."
NSA leaker Edward Snowden is participating in a live chat with The Guardian right now. So far he hasn't revealed anything on the same order of magnitude as the Verizon story or the spying-on-foreign-leaders-during-G20 story, but he has said that more secrets are coming.
Here are some particularly interesting exchanges between Snowden and staffers/readers of The Guardian:
Q: How many sets of the documents you disclosed did you make, and how many different people have them? If anything happens to you, do they still exist?
Snowden: All I can say right now is the US Government is not going to be able to cover this up by jailing or murdering me. Truth is coming, and it cannot be stopped.
Q: Why did you just not fly direct to Iceland if that is your preferred country for asylum?
Snowden: Leaving the US was an incredible risk, as NSA employees must declare their foreign travel 30 days in advance and are monitored. There was a distinct possibility I would be interdicted en route, so I had to travel with no advance booking to a country with the cultural and legal framework to allow me to work without being immediately detained. Hong Kong provided that. Iceland could be pushed harder, quicker, before the public could have a chance to make their feelings known, and I would not put that past the current US administration.
Q: When you say "someone at NSA still has the content of your communications"—what do you mean? Do you mean they have a record of it, or the actual content?
Snowden: Both. If I target for example an email address, for example under FAA 702, and that email address sent something to you, Joe America, the analyst gets it. All of it. IPs, raw data, content, headers, attachments, everything. And it gets saved for a very long time—and can be extended further with waivers rather than warrants.