Washington releases Snowden espionage indictment

 

Published time: June 21, 2013 22:20
Edited time: June 22, 2013 00:06

US federal prosecutors have charged whistleblower Edward Snowden with espionage, theft and conversion of government property in a criminal complaint, and asked Hong Kong to detain him ahead of a move to extradite him.
Though the criminal complaint is sealed, charges of espionage and theft are undoubtedly based on Snowden’s extraction of classified documents from NSA servers, which led to publication of several articles regarding the NSA’s surveillance programs, including PRISM, which is alleged to harvest private user data through cooperation with a slew of American corporations including Facebook, Yahoo, Google, Apple and Microsoft.
The implicated companies have denied granting US intelligence services “direct access” to their servers, though during an online chat on Monday Snowden alleged that they had been purposely deceptive in their responses.
When asked to "define in as much detail as you can what 'direct access’ means," Snowden went into greater technical detail:
"More detail on how direct NSA's accesses are is coming, but in general, the reality is this: if an NSA, FBI, CIA, DIA, etc analyst has access to query raw SIGINT databases, they can enter and get results for anything they want," he said.
The specific details of how Snowden transported the classified NSA documents are somewhat unclear, with The Guardian saying they were extracted using four laptops taken to Hong Kong, though subsequent reports suggested that Snowden simply copied secret files on USB drives. Even though the use of thumb drives is banned in SIPRNET, the Defense Department’s secret network, as a system administrator Snowden had much broader access to data.

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