Edward Snowden has described Britain's strengthening of its surveillance laws as part of an "authoritarian trend".

In a wide-ranging interview that covered Russia's "corrosive" rights record and its alleged hacking of the US, the whistle-blower listed the UK alongside Russia and China in saying how some countries had given intelligence services greater powers since he engineered the biggest leak of classified documents in history.

"The laws have gotten worse in some countries," the former National Security Agency (NSA) contractor told the Financial Times. "France has gone very far, so too, of course, countries like Russia, China. In Britain there’s an authoritarian trend.

"There’s no real question that police in a police state would be more effective than those in a free and liberal society where the police operate under tighter constraints. But which one would you rather live in?"

The British government approved new powers to intercept and store communications data in March. Concerns were raised, however, that the Investigatory Powers Bill, dubbed the Snoopers' Charter, was ill-defined and allowed too many organisations too much access to sensitive data.