A lawyer for former NSA system analyst Edward Snowden said he will be working for a major private website in Russia where he's been granted political asylum, the Associated Press reported.
Anatoly Kucherena, Snowden's lawyer, told the Russian RIA Novosti news agency Thursday that Snowden starts his new job on Friday, but declined to name the company that hired Snowden, the AP reported.
Snowden, 30, was granted asylum in Russia in August after living in a Moscow airport for over a month. He faces espionage charges in the United States for leaking a mass surveillance scheme at the National Security Agency, the AP reported.
Earlier this year, Snowden was publicly offered a job by Pavel Durov, head of a popular social networking site seen as a rival to Facebook. Durov invited Snowden to work on the site's data protection at their St. Petersburg headquarters, BBC News reported.
In an interview, Kucherena said Snowden was learning Russian and had visited the Kremlin, among other Russian museums and cities, according to BBC News.
"He's already gone a pretty long way, in terms of Russian words, in terms of knowledge of our culture," Kucherena said in the interview. "For the time being, given his interest in Russia, given the attitude of Russians towards him ... given the love for him, he's receiving a fair amount of correspondence, and I don't think he has any desire to leave for another country at the moment."
Before working with the NSA, Snowden said he previously worked for the CIA in a technical position, adding that it was during this time, from 2007 to 2009, that he first became "disenchanted" with the way U.S. intelligence carries out its work, ABC News reported.
