A 29-year- old former CIA worker, Edward Snowden, declared that he was the whistleblower of the NSA surveillance revelations.
The man who fled U.S. on May 20 and is presently holed up in a hotel room in Hong Kong said that he had thought long and hard before leaking details of the NSA program. He said his conscience drove him to protect "basic liberties for people around the world."
The former technical assistant at the CIA who had been working at the super-secret NSA as an employee of defense contractor Booz Allen, said that he decided to leak the information after he become disenchanted with the U.S. President Barack Obama. He believed Obama had continued the policies of his predecessor George W. Bush.
"I don't want to live in a society that does these sort of things ... I do not want to live in a world where everything I do and say is recorded. That is not something I am willing to support or live under," said Edward Snowden in a video interview with the Guardian, which was later published on its website.
The newspaper reported Sunday that the whistleblower had been working at the NSA for four years as a contractor for outside companies and around three weeks ago, he copied the secret documents at the NSA office in Hawaii and told his supervisor that he was going on leave for "a couple of weeks."
The man said that he had no intention of hiding, saying he had done nothing wrong.
"I have no intention of hiding who I am because I know I have done nothing wrong," said Snowden.
The leaks, initially published by the Guardian and the Washington Post, revealed that the U.S. security services had monitored data about phone calls and internet activities of millions of its people in the country.
