Speaking via satellite at a privacy conference at Bard College in New York, Snowden disputed Clinton’s claim that he bypassed whistleblower protections

Edward Snowden has accused Hillary Clinton of “a lack of political courage” for her assertion during the Democratic presidential debate this week that the whistleblower had bypassed options for disclosing illegal government spying programs that would have protected him and not violated the law.

Speaking via satellite at a privacy conference at New York’s Bard College on Friday, Snowden said: “Hillary Clinton’s claims are false here.”

“This is important, right?” Snowden told an audience at the Hannah Arendt Center at Bard College. “Truth should matter in politics, and courage should matter in politics, because we need change. Everyone knows we need change. And we have been aggrieved and in many ways misled by political leaders in the past.”

Before Snowden spoke, Clinton repeated the claim on Friday, at a campaign appearance in New Hampshire. After a voter said Snowden was “close to a patriot,” BuzzFeed reported, Clinton disagreed and said he could have received whistleblower protections but instead chose to break the law.

“He broke the laws of the United States,” Clinton said at the debate on Tuesday. “He could have been a whistleblower. He could have gotten all of the protections of being a whistleblower. He could have raised all the issues that he has raised. And I think there would have been a positive response to that.”

Multiple passes at fact-checking Clinton’s claim this week have concluded that “the protections of being a whistleblower” do not exist in the real world and did not apply to Snowden. A 1989 whistleblower law, for example, does not apply to intelligence community employees. A separate law for would-be intelligence whistleblowers has been deemed a trap because it has led not to protections but to prosecutions.

“There is, I think, in many ways a lack of political courage in the established class that we expect to champion [our rights],” Snowden said at Bard, to enthusiastic applause.

The second US Circuit Court of Appeals in Manhattan ruled in May that the dragnet phone metadata collection program exposed by Snowden was indeed illegal.

In a wide-ranging question-and-answer session that lasted the better part of two hours, Snowden also rejected the premise of a question at the debate as to whether he was a hero or traitor. He discussed his Twitter habits, criticized Facebook for taking the side of the government over the side of users, and he praised the unidentified whistleblower who provided documents relating to drone warfare published on Thursday in an exposé by The Intercept.

“Thanks to some extraordinary whistleblower who provided this information to the Intercept, we now know that these drone attacks that claimed the lives of innocents, 90% of the time, nine out of 10 of those killed are not the intended targets,” Snowden said.

He dismissed the hero-or-traitor question, which CNN host Anderson Cooper posed at the presidential debate.

“I reject both [labels],” Snowden said. “Because even though people say being a hero would be a good thing, it’s other-izing, it’s distancing, it’s, ‘This person did something I could never do in that situation’ – that’s absolutely not true.”

Asked about being a privacy advocate who has nonetheless become active on Twitter, Snowden said he uses Tor and other “privacy-enhancing technologies” to protect his personal information when he uses social media.

He did not appear to be a Facebook user. “They’re really unwilling to make a commitment to the user,” Snowden said of the site. “They really need to decide who they work for – the government, or the people who use their services.”

Asked whether he was willing to face charges for leaking classified material, Snowden said that the law under which he has been charged, the Espionage Act of 1917, would not allow him to make the case that he had acted in the public good.

Snowden said he had been in contact with the government – apparently not recently – about how some kind of plea deal would work.

“They said ‘Well, we won’t torture you’,” Snowden said. “‘But we haven’t got beyond that.’”