Russia is willing to consider granting political asylum for NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, who blew the lid on the US PRISM program, Russian media reported. Snowden dropped out of sight Monday after he was last seen checking out of a Hong Kong hotel.
“If we receive such a request, we will consider it,” Kommersant
daily quoted President Vladimir Putin’s press secretary Dmitry
Peskov as saying.
Snowden, a 29-year-old former technical assistant for the CIA and
current employee of the defense contractor Booz Allen Hamilton,
revealed the existence of PRISM, the National Security Agency’s
(NSA) massive data-mining surveillance program which gave the
agency backdoor access to emails, videos, chats, photos and
search queries from nine worldwide tech giants.
The whistleblower disappeared after checking out of a Hong Kong
hotel, Reuters quoted witnesses as saying. A day earlier Snowden
revealed his identity to The Guardian newspaper.
This article originally appeared on: RT