U.S. Talks Tough on Snowden While His Efforts to Find Haven Appear to Have Stalled
Photo Credit: AP
The case of Mr. Snowden, under federal indictment for stealing and leaking classified documents, has become a test of Washington’s ability to influence unsympathetic governments. Having failed after weeks of work through international legal channels, the U.S. turned to an aggressive diplomatic strategy.
President Barack Obama, Secretary of State John Kerry and officials at the White House and Justice Department took turns asking for Mr. Snowden’s return to the U.S. amid warnings that relations would be strained.
China was singled out for particular criticism after Mr. Snowden unexpectedly left Hong Kong on Sunday for Moscow in defiance of a U.S. demand for his extradition.
U.S. officials implied that Beijing scuttled what had been a steadily advancing process of establishing a case that would lead to extradition proceedings. Read more from this story HERE.
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NSA leaker’s global flight appears to have stalled, at least for now, as US steps up pressure
By Associated Press. Edward Snowden’s stop-and-start flight across the globe appeared to stall in Moscow as the United States ratcheted up pressure to hand over the National Security Agency leaker who had seemed on his way to Ecuador to seek asylum.
In Ecuador’s most extensive statement about the case, the foreign minister hailed Snowden on Monday as “a man attempting to bring light and transparency to facts that affect everyone’s fundamental liberties.”
The decision whether to grant Snowden the asylum he has requested is a choice between “betraying the citizens of the world or betraying certain powerful elites in a specific country,” Foreign Minister Ricardo Patino told reporters while visiting Vietnam.
But what had been expected to be a straightforward journey to this South America nation dissolved into uncertainty by day’s end. Snowden didn’t use a reservation for a Havana-bound Russian airline flight that could have served as the first leg of a trip to safety in Ecuador, and his allies would not say where he was or what changed. Patino said Tuesday that he didn’t know Snowden’s exact whereabouts.
In Washington, the White House demanded that Ecuador and other countries deny Snowden asylum. It also sharply criticized China for letting him leave Hong Kong, and urged Russia to “do the right thing” and send him to the U.S. to face espionage charges. Read more from this story HERE.
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U.S. Officials Don’t Know How Much Secret Material Snowden Took
By Thomson/Reuters. U.S. intelligence agencies are worried they do not yet know how much highly sensitive material is in the possession of former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden, whose whereabouts are unclear, several U.S. officials said.
The agencies fear that Snowden may have taken many more documents than officials initially estimated and that his alliance with WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange increases the likelihood that they will be made public without considering the security implications, they said.
Investigators believe Snowden, who was working in Hawaii for an NSA contractor, was partly successful at covering his tracks as he accessed a broad array of information about operations conducted by NSA and its British equivalent, Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), according to the sources, who declined to be identified.
In a weekend television appearance, the chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Senator Dianne Feinstein, said she had been informed by U.S. officials that Snowden possessed around 200 secret documents.
But one non-government source familiar with Snowden’s materials said that Feinstein grossly understated the size of Snowden’s document haul and that he left for Hong Kong with thousands of documents copied from the NSA files. Read more from this story HERE.
