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US whistleblower Edward Snowden has accepted an offer of political asylum from Venezuela, a top Russian lawmaker confirms.\n<\/p>\n
\u00c5\u201cAs was expected, Snowden agreed to (Venezuelan President Nicolas) Maduro’s offer of political asylum,\u201d Alexei Pushkov, the head of the Russian parliament’s foreign affairs committee, said on his Twitter account Tuesday.\n<\/p>\n
Venezuela, Nicaragua and Bolivia had all offered political asylum to Snowden over the weekend.\n<\/p>\n
The former CIA employee has revealed to the news media details of secret surveillance programs under which US spy agencies collect massive amounts of data on people\u00e2\u201e\u00a2s communications via telephone and the Internet.\n<\/p>\n
The fugitive leaker added that the NSA has a department called the Foreign Affairs Directorate which coordinates work with other Western spying agencies.\n<\/p>\n
The former NSA contractor has also revealed that the American agency spies on European Union offices in New York, Washington and Brussels, drawing ire from European leaders, especially Germany.\n<\/p>\n
Snowden, 30, has reportedly holed up in the transit area of Moscow\u00e2\u201e\u00a2s Sheremetyevo International Airport since arriving on a flight from Hong Kong on June 23. He is wanted in the US on espionage charges.\n<\/p>\n
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Republished with permission from: Press TV<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden. US whistleblower Edward Snowden has accepted an offer of political asylum from Venezuela, a top Russian lawmaker confirms. \u00c5\u201cAs was expected, Snowden agreed to (Venezuelan President Nicolas) Maduro’s offer of political asylum,\u201d Alexei Pushkov, the head of the Russian parliament’s foreign affairs committee, said on his Twitter account Tuesday. Venezuela, Nicaragua […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[487],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-49043","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-breaking-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49043","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=49043"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49043\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=49043"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=49043"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=49043"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}