Edward Snowden Wants Asylum In Russia

 

Intelligence services whistleblower Edward Snowden has told activists he wants to request asylum in Russia, after accusing the US of trying to stop other countries giving him safe haven.

Snowden has held closed-door talks with rights groups and lawyers at the Moscow airport where he has been holed up for weeks.

Human Rights Watch representative Tanya Lokshina told the Interfax news agency that Snowden revealed he "wants to stay" in Russia.

Russian parliament member Vyacheslav Nikonov, who was also in the meeting, also reported Snowden's intentions to seek asylum.

Politician Vyacheslav Nikonov said Snowden wants to stay put

Meanwhile, a spokesman for President Vladimir Putin said Snowden might be allowed to stay in Russia if he stops releasing leaks that would damage the US or Russia-US relations, repeating conditions Mr Putin had set out earlier.

But he said he was not aware of any formal request. Snowden has previously made a bid for asylum in Russia but he later withdrew it.

A picture of Snowden at the meeting, taken by Ms Lokshina, shows him with WikiLeaks representative Sarah Harrison on his right. 

Entrances were guarded during the meeting at the airport

In a letter to Human Rights Watch earlier, he said the US government was waging a campaign to stop him getting asylum in any other country.

He said: "I have been extremely fortunate to enjoy and accept many offers of support and asylum from brave countries around the world. These nations have my gratitude.

"Unfortunately, in recent weeks we have witnessed an unlawful campaign by officials in the US government to deny my right to seek and enjoy this asylum under Article 14 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.Protesters have shown their support for Snowden

"The scale of threatening behaviour is without precedent: never before in history have states conspired to force to the ground a sovereign president's plane to effect a search for a political refugee."

That remark appears to refer to how Austrian authorities last week searched the Bolivian president's plane when it was diverted to Vienna because the US suspected Snowden was on board.

Snowden is wanted by the US on espionage charges over a series of leaks about spying programmes, with his most recent claims involving collaboration between Microsoft and American intelligence services.

He fled to Moscow from Hong Kong on June 23 and has been in limbo in Sheremetyevo airport's transit area despite three countries - Venezuela, Nicaragua and Bolivia - saying they would be willing to grant him asylum.

Doubts had been raised about whether Snowden could fly from Moscow to any of those countries without passing through the airspace of the US or its allies.

He is seeking to avoid extradition after divulging embarrassing evidence about the activities of US spies, as well as the British eavesdropping agency GCHQ, to newspapers including The Guardian.

The latest files said Microsoft helped America's National Security Agency (NSA) to circumvent encryption so it could view web chats on the Outlook.com portal, which is replacing Hotmail.

Snowden's latest evidence concerns the NSA spying on Skype video calls

Evidence seen by the paper said Microsoft also worked to give the NSA easier access to its cloud storage service SkyDrive, which has more than 250 million users. And by July 2012, nine months after Microsoft bought Skype, the Prism intelligence programme was collecting triple the amount of Skype video calls.

Microsoft told the paper it only provides information about users when demanded to do so by the government.

Snowden's files have also revealed the NSA claimed to have access to the servers of web firms including Apple, Google, Facebook and Yahoo, while GCHQ scans vast amounts of internet traffic through a system of fibre-optic cables.