Snowden said he misses a lot of things about his life in the United States. Snowden: It was worth it

NEW YORK — NSA leaker Edward Snowden on Saturday defended his disclosure of reams of classified information and said his actions were worth fleeing his seemingly idyllic life in Hawaii and ending up in hiding in Russia, where he was joined by his girlfriend in July.

“It was about getting the information back to people so they could decide if they cared about it, and on that account … I could not have been more wrong in thinking that people wouldn’t care,” he told a New Yorker Festival audience Saturday afternoon via webcast from an undisclosed location in Moscow.


But he also suggested that if he had been a journalist handling the leaked documents, he would have been more conservative than some of the reporters who wrote about the surveillance programs.

( The POLITICO 50: Edward Snowden and Glen Greenwald)

Snowden said he was just “one small guy,” an “ordinary” man who saw the inner belly of the U.S. intelligence apparatus and had to act.

He has been criticized by many inside and outside government who have charged that he’s a traitor who jeopardized critical national security programs and made it easier for terrorists to plot and evade U.S. government surveillance. But Snowden has been hailed as a hero by civil liberties groups and libertarians for revealing the extent of government surveillance into the communications of ordinary Americans.

Snowden implied he had been vindicated by President Barack Obama, who said in January that a debate on surveillance “will make us stronger” as a country.

Obama’s statement was “very important for everybody who believes that our rights matter, our constitution matters and intelligence agencies, even if they have good intentions, can go too far, when they violate the constitution on a massive scale, that matters, and they need to be held to account for it,” he said to questions by New Yorker staff writer Jane Mayer.

( From POLITICO Magazine: Stopping the next Snowden)

Snowden, who worked with the journalists Glenn Greenwald, Laura Poitras, and Bart Gellman to bring highly classified materials about NSA surveillance programs to the public eye, also responded to a Mayer question that he summarized by saying, “Do I agree with all of the stories that the journalists have presented?”

“I don’t,” he went on. “I would draw those lines a little differently, and I think much more conservatively than some of the journalists have,” without naming which reporters’ stories he disagreed with.

Snowden also said that “in fact we’ve seen serial violations of the law … NSA employees have used this surveillance power to spy on exes, to spy on lovers, and that’s a felony; however, none of them were prosecuted because it was considered that the value of the programs was greater than the interests of justice.”

Mayer, the event’s moderator, also delved into more personal questions and asked Snowden what he missed about the U.S., a country he may never return to.

( Also on POLITICO: Edward Snowden honored with ‘alternative Nobel’)

“The question is, what don’t I miss, whether it’s my family, whether it’s my home, whether it’s my friends, whether it’s my work at the agency, I was fulfilled and happy,” he responded. “Things as simple as having my old beat-up car, there’s a lot to miss. It’s a great country.”

Now, he’s ensconced in Moscow, where he has reunited with his girlfriend Lindsay Mills, as revealed in a new documentary, “Citizenfour,” and a New Yorker piece published on Friday.

“She was not entirely pleased [with what happened], but at the same time, it was an incredible reunion because she understood me, and that meant a lot to me,” he said.