WASHINGTON — The former National Security Agency contractor Edward J. Snowden said in a wide-ranging interview published on Sunday that the oversight of surveillance programs was so weak that members of the United States military working at the spy agency sometimes shared sexually explicit photos they intercepted.

He also said the British government often pioneered the most invasive surveillance programs because its intelligence services operate with fewer restrictions intended to protect individual privacy than its counterparts in the United States and other allies.

The interview, which was published by The Guardian, was conducted in Moscow, where Mr. Snowden has been marooned for a little more than a year. He fled there from Hong Kong after he gave journalists hundreds of thousands of classified documents he downloaded from the N.S.A., which specializes in electronic surveillance. He had most recently worked for the agency in Hawaii.

In the interview, Mr. Snowden said that some of the American military personnel working on agency programs were between the ages of 18 and 22 and did not always respect the privacy of those whose communications were intercepted.