The leak source behind the most recent revelations about the US government's internet and telephone snooping stepped out of the shadows Sunday, describing his actions as patriotic after fleeing to Hong Kong, dpa reported.
The British newspaper Guardian reported online that the 29-year-old US technician, Edward Snowden, who currently works for the defence contractor Booz Allen Hamilton, had provided the information to the newspaper.
The Guardian revealed Snowden's identity "at his request" and posted a 12 minute interview with Snowden that was filmed in Hong Kong, where Snowden said he has taken refuge.
The revelations through the Guardian - that the US government has for years been seizing complete telephone records of Americans and tapping directly into the servers of at least nine leading internet companies including Google, Facebook, Skype and YouTube - have sent the US intelligence community reeling.
The White House and Congress have defended the practices, saying they were necessary to protect the American public from terrorist attacks.
US President Barack Obama took the unusual step on Friday of trying to reassure the American public. "Nobody is listening to your telephone calls. That's not what this programme's about," Obama said in answer to a reporter's question.
In a film interview posted on the Guardian website, Snowden said he had been working in Hawaii for the government contractor Booz Allen Hamilton as an infrastructure analyst for the National Security Agency.
He said he decided to leak the information out of a growing sense of frustration over his supervisors' indifference to questions he raised about what he saw as "wrongdoing" and "abuses" by the NSA system in hoovering up massive amounts of private information about the US public.
Snowden revealed his identity because he thought the public was "owed an explanation" of his motivations. "When you are subverting the power of government, that is a fundamentally dangerous thing to democracy," he said. He wanted to avoid being painted as anti-government.
"I'm just another guy who sits there day to day and watches what happens ... and believes this is not our place to decide ... the public needs to decide whether these things are right are wrong," he said.
Hong Kong, where he is reportedly ensconced in a luxury hotel, seemed to be the best place to flee to because of its strong tradition of "free speech," he said. He denied that he was seeking to aid an enemy of the US, describing China as an important trading partner and not an enemy.
Snowden warned that the US government was collecting so much information, using storage capabilities that were increasing by orders of magnitude every year, that it would soon have the capability of casting suspicion on even the most "innocent life" by trolling through the assembled data.
"If you realize that that's the world you helped create, and it's going to get worse .. with the next generation and next generation, to extend the capabilities of this sort of architecture of oppression, you realize that you might be willing to accept any risk ... as long as the public gets to make their own decision about how that is applied," he said.
Snowden said he believed his life might be at risk for his actions, and that he could be "rendered by the CIA" or even killed by an Asian triad. He said that was the "fear I'll live under for the rest of my life".