On Friday, Edward Snowden published an op-ed in The Guardian, providing an explanation of why he chose to question Russian President Vladimir Putin on live TV on Thursday about his country’s spying policies.

Snowden wrote that he intended to spark another national debate about state surveillance, this time in the country that hosts him.

Just one day earlier, at Russian President Vladimir Putin’s annual televised call-in session, the whistleblower directly asked Putin about the current state of surveillance in Russia: “Does [your country] intercept, analyze, or store millions of individuals’ communications?”

Snowden then continued to prod the Russian leader, challenging whether, even if such a program were technically legal, a mass surveillance program could be morally justified.

The Russian leader gave a surprising and suspect law-and-order response that does not seem to correspond with the Russian government’s approach to various domestic and foreign affairs. Putin clearly and unambiguously denied any Russian involvement with dragnet surveillance, explaining: “We don't have a mass system of such interception. And according to our law, it cannot exist."

In the op-ed, Snowden described an immediate backlash to what he believed were his own efforts to highlight the problems with any state-run mass surveillance systems.

"I blew the whistle on the NSA's surveillance practices not because I believed the United States was uniquely at fault, but because I believe that mass surveillance of innocents…is a threat to all people, everywhere, no matter who runs them," he wrote.

Snowden further defended his actions by arguing that Putin’s explicit and direct denial of dragnet surveillance conducted by the Russian government is remarkably similar to US President Barack Obama’s own initial sweeping denial of the scope of NSA surveillance, “before that position was later shown to be untrue and indefensible.”

Snowden continued:

The question was intended to mirror the now infamous exchange in US Senate intelligence committee hearings between senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) and the director of national intelligence, James Clapper, about whether the NSA collected records on millions of Americans, and to invite either an important concession or a clear evasion.

The NSA contractor turned whistleblower went on to explain how Clapper’s lie was a large factor in his own decision to go public with his leaked information on American surveillance. As a result, he structured his questioning of Putin to mirror Wyden’s questioning of Clapper.

Despite Putin's claims, a number of folks, including an Ars commenter, have since pointed out that Russia's mass communications surveillance programs, called the "Systems for Operative Investigative Activities" (SORM-1, SORM-2, and SORM-3), give Russia's Federal Security Service (FSB) the authority to conduct mass surveillance operations.

As the Center for Strategic & International Studies explained on Friday, Russia's FSB uses SORM "to collect, analyze and store all data that is transmitted or received on Russian networks, including calls, e-mail, website visits and credit card transactions." But, while such collection requires a court order, these orders are secret and are ordinarily not shown to the service providers.

On Twitter, Russian journalist Andrei Soldatov, who has been reporting on the FSB (and its online surveillance tactics) for years, applauded Snowden's efforts: