US whistleblower Edward Snowden has appealed to common sense when explaining his irreconcilable stance on interviews with Russian news outlets.
When asked by Elena Chernenko from the Russian daily Kommersant if it’s true that he doesn’t want to talk to the Russian press, the Former National Security Agency (NSA) contractor tweeted that “someone facing serious threats may not want their face all over newspapers and TV every day in the place they live”.
Someone facing serious threats may not want their face all over newspapers and TV every day in the place they live. It is not "Russian press," it is common-sense: I prefer privacy and liberty to celebrity and daily metro encounters. Please respect that and leave me be. Thank you.
— Edward Snowden (@Snowden) November 1, 2019
“I prefer privacy and liberty to celebrity and daily metro encounters”, Snowden emphasised, asking journalists to respect his stance and leave him alone.
The remarks echoed those made by the whistleblower during his interview with the host of the “Joe Rogan Experience" podcast last month when Snowden admitted that he had “never had a negative interaction from being recognised”.
“But for me, because I’m a privacy advocate, I would much rather go unrecognised; I don’t want to be a celebrity. But the other thing is, I’ll get recognised in computer stores and I think there’s just a mental association where people are like their brain when it’s cycling through faces that it recognises, it’s going through the subset of nerdier people or something like that when you’re in a computer store because for whatever reason, I’m recognised much more frequently when there’s some technological locusts,” he said.
Snowden went even further by claiming that “people don’t remember” him being “actually en route to Latin America when the US government cancelled my passport, which trapped me in Russia”.
He added that those interested in the matter should take note of the fact that he wrote “an entire book that has a lot of detail on this”, in a nod to “Permanent Record”, his memoir, which was published earlier that month. According to him, the book contains “details of the CIA and NSA's classified crimes”.
Publisher of Snowden's New Book Vows Not to Pay Him Any Profits Until April
In a separate development, the US District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia said in an order that the publisher of Snowden’s new book had promised not to pay him any profits from the sales of the memoir until 1 April 2020,
In September, the US Department of Justice filed a lawsuit against Snowden, accusing him of violating non-disclosure agreements that he signed with the NSA before working as a subcontractor.
In June 2013, Snowden handed a series of classified material over to The Washington Post and The Guardian about the NSA’s global surveillance programs that collected telephone, email, and internet browsing data on nearly everyone in the US despite a law prohibiting spying on citizens without a court order.
Since then, Snowden has been in self-imposed exile in Russia; he recently revealed that he would like to return home, but only if Washington guarantees him a fair trial.
