9.06am BST

Good morning and welcome to our continuing coverage of the fallout from the Guardian’s revelations – leaked by former CIA technical assistant Edward Snowden – about the unprecedented breadth and depth of US surveillance.

Here are this morning’s main headlines:

• Russia will consider a claim of political asylum from Snowden, according to the Russian business paper Kommersant, citing Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov. “If we receive such a request, we will consider it,” Peskov is quoted as saying. Snowden is currently in Hong Kong, but moved to a safer hotel yesterday. A landmark legal ruling in Hong Kong could yet buy him time if he decides to apply for asylum. Activists in Iceland are making preparations should the whistleblower try to head there.

• The Obama administration offered no indication on Monday about what it intended to do about Snowden. The White House did however say he had sparked an "appropriate debate" and hinted it might welcome revision of the Patriot Act, legislation introduced in 2001 which it claims gives legal authority for the programmes carried out by the National Security Agency. "If [congressional] debate were to build to a consensus around changes [to the Patriot Act] the president would look at that," said spokesman Jay Carney. "Although this is hardly the manner of discussion we hoped for, we would still like to have the debate."

• Barack Obama is facing a mounting domestic and international backlash against US surveillance operations as his administration struggled to contain one of the most explosive national security leaks in US history. In Europe, the German chancellor Angela Merkel indicated she would press Obama on the revelations at a Berlin summit next week, while deputy European Commission chief Viviane Reding said she would press US officials in Dublin on Friday, adding that "a clear legal framework for the protection of personal data is not a luxury or constraint but a fundamental right". Peter Schaar, Germany's federal data protection commissioner told the Guardian that it was unacceptable that US authorities have access to the data of European citizens "and the level of protection is lower than what is guaranteed for US citizens." His Italian counterpart, Antonello Soro, said that the data dragnet "would not be legal in Italy" and would be "contrary to the principles of our legislation and would represent a very serious violation". And the sweeping US surveillance law was denounced in Brussels as posing a "grave risk" to data protection and citizens' rights.

• In London, the British foreign secretary William Hague was forced to defend the UK's use of intelligence gathered by the US. In the House of Commons, Hague told MPs that British laws did not allow for "indiscriminate trawling" for information. "There is no danger of a deep state out of control in some way," he said. But Hague was reluctant to go into detail on how Britain handled information offered by US intelligence agencies, as opposed to information requested, or whether it was subject to the same ministerial oversight, including warrants. Former home secretary David Blunkett urged the government to review the law on the oversight of intelligence agencies. Meanwhile, Home Office ministers are to press ahead with their campaign to give the police and security services sweeping "snooper's charter" powers to monitor internet and phone use in Britain despite the outcry over the disclosure of the scale of US internet surveillance.

• Political opinion in the US was split with some members of Congress calling for Snowden's immediate extradition from Hong Kong. But other senior politicians in both main parties questioned whether US surveillance practices had gone too far. The first polls since the leak stories first broke indicated that the majority of Americans oppose the government scooping up their phone data. According to the Rasmussen poll just 26% of voters are in favour of the government's collection of data from Verizon while 59% are opposed. In total 46% of Americans think that their own data has been monitored. But a poll by the Pew Research Center found 56% said it was acceptable for the agency to get secret court orders to track the phone calls of millions of Americans.

• Daniel Ellsberg, the former military analyst who revealed secrets of the Vietnam war through the Pentagon Papers in 1971, described Snowden's leak as even more important and perhaps the most significant leak in American history.

• Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, PalTalk, AOL, Skype, YouTube, and Apple are facing a battle to maintain that trust after disclosures that the US government was given access to their customers' data online via the Prism programme operated by the NSA.

• Consumers worried about their internet privacy in the wake of the online snooping revelations have the option of using some alternatives to the likes of Google and can try to use more secure forms of communication, explains Jemima Kiss – if, that is, individuals believe maintaining their online security is worth it.

• Want to work for the sprawling US intelligence apparatus, asks Spencer Ackerman. It might make more sense to send your resumé not to a spy agency, but to one of the hundreds of for-profit contractors that provide the spies with everything from IT support to logistics to security. You will almost certainly make more money that way.

We'll have live coverage of all developments in the story throughout the day here.