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WASHINGTON — The man who leaked secret documents that exposed the scope of the National Security Agency’s snooping on Americans’ phone and e-mail data voluntarily revealed his identity yesterday.
He is 29-year-old former CIA employee Edward Snowden, according to a report posted on the Web site of the UK’s Guardian newspaper.
The revelation occurred within hours of the Obama administration’s acknowledgment that it was going after the leaker.
Director of National Intelligence James Clapper filed a “crimes report” about the leak with the Justice Department, which likely would trigger a federal probe, officials confirmed to The Post.
In a statement released last night, a spokesman for Clapper said that anyone with a security clearance has an “obligation to protect classified information.”
It was unclear what action, if any, the government would take against Snowden.
Snowden, who now works for the defense consultant Booz Allen Hamilton and has been a contract employee for the NSA as well as a computer technician for the CIA, told The Guardian, “I have no intention of hiding who I am because I know I have done nothing wrong.”
He quit his contract post at the NSA’s Hawaii office three weeks ago and took the documents he leaked. He is now hunkered down in a Hong Kong hotel, and is seeking asylum from other nations.
“My sole motive is to inform the public as to that which is done in their name and that which is done against them,” said Snowden, who also was the source for Washington Post reports about the data-mining program called “PRISM.”
He said he was willing to give up a “very comfortable life,” including his career, a $200,000-a-year salary and a girlfriend with whom he lived in Hawaii.
“I’m willing to sacrifice all of that because I can’t, in good conscience, allow the US government to destroy privacy, Internet freedom and basic liberties for people around the world with this massive surveillance machine they’re secretly building,” said Snowden.
President Obama and top lawmakers from both parties insist that the program is legal — and that the leaks have damaged national security.
Clapper called the leak “literally gut-wrenching.”
“This [leaker] is someone who, for whatever reason, has chosen to violate a sacred trust for this country,” he told NBC.
Guardian reporter Glenn Greenwald accused the government of hiding behind bogus claims that journalists are jeopardizing national security.
“The only thing we’ve endangered is the reputation of the people in power who are building this massive spying apparatus [and] who are trying to hide from the American people what it is that they are doing,” he told ABC’s “This Week” yesterday.
He taunted Clapper in a tweet: “Clapper: leaks ‘literally gut-wrenching’ — ‘huge, grave damage’ — save some melodrama and rhetoric for coming stories. You’ll need it.”