Whistleblower Edward Snowden says the United States routinely handed over unvetted intelligence on Arab-Americans to Israel while he worked for the National Security Agency.

In an magazineinterview with Wired magazine, he is quoted as saying he was shocked to learn that emails and details of phone calls of Americans with Arab and Palestinian backgrounds were passed over to Israeli intelligence.

“I think that’s amazing,” he says in the September edition of the magazine, which features Snowden on the cover, clutching an American flag. “It’s one of the biggest abuses we’ve seen.”

The rogue technology specialist, who worked for the CIA and NSA, also talks of software that allows blame to be shifted to innocent third parties in cyber warfare.

“You could have someone sitting in China, for example, making it appear that one of these attacks is originating in Russia. And then we end up shooting back at a Russian hospital. What happens next?”

In the interview, conducted in a Moscow hotel, Snowden, 31, tells of how he wanted to join the special forces after the 9/11 attacks, only to break both legs in training.

“I wanted to do my part,” he says.

He had patriotic hopes when he began work with the NSA, he says, adding he would one day like to return to the U.S. from his Russian exile. He sought asylum in Russia in June, 2013 after releasing NSA documents to journalists the month before.

In the interviews, he paints himself as a disillusioned patriot, who had high hopes that American President Barack Obama would bring ethics to Snowden’s spying.

“Not only did they not fulfil their promises, but they entirely repudiated them,” he says. “They went in the other direction.”

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