Analyst admits to cyber-spying leaks

Calling America’s spying capabilities “horrifying,” a 29-year-old former CIA employee revealed himself Sunday as the primary source of unauthorized disclosures of highly classified U.S. telephone and Internet surveillance systems that were among the intelligence community’s most closely held secrets.

Both the Washington Post and the British newspaper the Guardian said Edward J. Snowden gave them his consent to reveal his identity as an analyst for the National Security Agency, which is America’s largest spy organization and conducts cyber-spying. Both papers have published a startling series of top-secret documents in recent days.

The Guardian said Snowden was staying in a luxury hotel in Hong Kong and had lined his hotel room door with pillows to prevent eavesdropping.

“I have no intention of hiding who I am because I know I have done nothing wrong,” he was quoted as saying. He said he expected U.S. authorities to “demonize” him and said he planned to “ask for asylum from any countries that believe in free speech and oppose the victimization of global privacy.”

In a 12-minute video interview posted on the Guardian website, Snowden wears rimless glasses, short-cropped brown hair and a thin beard.

Snowden identifies himself in the video as an infrastructure analyst at an NSA facility in Hawaii for Booz Allen Hamilton, a major defense contractor. He said he previously worked for the CIA as a systems administrator and telecommunications systems officer.

“I, sitting at my desk, certainly had the authorities to wiretap anyone, from you, or your accountant, to a federal judge, to even the president if I had a personal email,” he said.

Snowden said he decided to expose the NSA secrets because “I do not want to live in a society that does these sort of things.” He said the agency “collects more digital communications from America than we do from the Russians.”

He said he fears authorities “will come after my family, my friends, my partner” because of his actions. The Guardian said he was born in Elizabeth City, N.C., and later he and his family moved to Maryland, near Ft. Meade.

In a statement, Booz Allen confirmed Snowden’s employment, saying he had worked for the company less than three months and was assigned to Hawaii. It called the alleged leaks “shocking” and “a grave violation of the code of conduct and core values of our firm.”

The development was the latest in a dizzying week that saw unauthorized publication of a “Top Secret” order from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to authorize collection of domestic telephone records; internal documents and detailed descriptions of an NSA program code-named PRISM that can obtain data on foreigners from U.S. Internet companies; a directive from President Obama ordering preparation of a secret target list for cyber-warfare; and a digital map of the world that shows where the NSA spies the most.

The Guardian said Snowden decided to leak the classified material three weeks ago while working at his desk in Hawaii. It said he copied the documents and then told a supervisor that he needed to go away for several weeks for medical treatment. He left for Hong Kong on May 20.

The Obama administration has prosecuted six people for illegal disclosures of classified information, more than all other administrations combined, and a military court-martial is underway at Ft. Meade of Bradley Manning, a former Army intelligence officer who is accused of violating the espionage act by giving hundreds of thousands of classified U.S. military and diplomatic documents to the anti-secrecy website WikiLeaks.

Snowden praised Manning as “a classic whistle-blower ... [who] was inspired by the public good.”

Asked what would happen to him, he replied, “Nothing good.”

Given the political furor over the leaks of the NSA programs and other national security secrets last week, U.S. authorities are likely to swiftly seek Snowden’s arrest and extradition from Hong Kong, which is part of China. Snowden said he hopes the Hong Kong government does not deport him.

James R. Clapper, the director of national intelligence, said Saturday that the Justice Department had launched an investigation of what he called “reckless disclosures of intelligence community measures used to keep Americans safe.”

“For me, it is literally -- not figuratively -- literally gut-wrenching to see this happen because of the huge, grave danger it does to our intelligence capabilities,” Clapper said in an interview with NBC.

His spokesman, Shawn Turner, said Sunday that he could not comment on Snowden because the case is under investigation.

“The intelligence community is currently reviewing the damage that has been done by these recent disclosures,” he said in a statement. “Any person who has a security clearance knows that he or she has an obligation to protect classified information and abide by the law.”

White House spokesman Josh Earnest declined to comment on Snowden’s claims. A Justice Department spokeswoman said an investigation was “in the initial stages” and declined to comment further.

Before Snowden was identified, the heads of both congressional intelligence committees called for prosecution of whoever leaked the material to the media. Rep. Mike Rogers (R-Mich), chairman of the House panel, said the unauthorized disclosures aid America’s enemies by revealing secret surveillance methods.

“If you tell our adversaries and enemies in the counter-terrorism fight exactly how we conduct business, they are not going to do business the same ever again,” he said.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said the government needs to plug the leaks immediately. Both lawmakers appeared on ABC’s “This Week.”

Feinstein said the surveillance programs have proved their value in terrorism investigations, but most cases remain classified, so officials can’t “give the public an actual idea of people that have been saved, attacks that have been prevented, that kind of thing.”

Sen. Mark Udall (D-Colo.), a member of the Senate intelligence panel, called for lawmakers to reconsider the Patriot Act, the law that authorizes expanded surveillance of Americans by the NSA, and for a public hearing on whether the government should be allowed to collect so much data on them.

“It’s the scale of this [that] really concerns me and the fact that the American public doesn’t know about it,” he said on CNN’s “State of the Union.” “The fact that every call I make to my friends, to my family, is noted, [and] where I am, the length of it, the date, that concerns me.”

Udall also said he was not convinced that the operation had led to the detection or disruption of any terrorism plots. “It hasn’t been proven that it works,” he said.

But Michael Hayden, the retired Air Force general who formerly led the CIA and the National Security Agency, defended the programs and said the idea of “trolling through millions of records” was “simply not true.”

He said the database of telephone records can be accessed only with a court order and in terrorism investigations.

“So you roll up something in [the Pakistani region of] Waziristan,” Hayden said. “You get a cellphone number. It’s the first time you’ve ever had that cellphone number.... Here’s how it works: You simply ask that database, ‘Hey, any of your phone numbers in there ever talked to this phone number in Waziristan?’ ”

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bob.drogin@latimes.com

kskiba@tribune.com