Whistleblower Edward Snowden has been leaking information about mass surveillance in the United States and the rest of the world conducted by the NSA since 2013.
"I think that the NSA needs to be more transparent about what it is doing… People felt betrayed. People felt like 'wait you didn't tell us that you were doing this – and all of a sudden we are reading about it on the front page,'" Clinton said in an interview with Re/code news website at a female executives conference in Silicon Valley on Tuesday.
Clinton, former Secretary of State, stressed that the NSA has to act within the law, adding that the United States has to define rules to "make it absolutely clear we will hold them [the NSA] accountable."
Asked if she considered former NSA contractor Snowden a traitor, Clinton said she could never condone what he did. "He stole millions of documents and the great irony is that the vast majority of those documents had nothing to do with American civil liberties."
Snowden is currently residing in Russia. The activist is wanted in the United States on espionage and government property theft charges.
Hillary Clinton has not yet officially confirmed her presidential ambitions. According to a poll conducted by Wall Street Journal and NBC News late last year, 48 percent of Americans would vote for Clinton at the 2016 presidential election.
