Exiled whistle-blower Edward Snowden told the European Parliament in testimony published Friday there are many more surprises in the classified cache of documents he downloaded and distributed last year.

But, Snowden said, he will allow the journalists with whom he’s shared the material to decide what to report.

“There are many other undisclosed programs that would impact EU citizens' rights, but I will leave the public interest determinations as to which of these may be safely disclosed to responsible journalists in coordination with government stakeholders,” he said.

The documents that have already been reported on reveal massive efforts by the National Security Agency and its British partner, the Government Communications Headquarters, to scoop up electronic data.

“I don't want to outpace the efforts of journalists, here, but I can confirm that all documents reported thus far are authentic and unmodified, meaning the alleged operations against Belgacom, SWIFT, the EU as an institution, the United Nations, UNICEF, and others based on documents I provided have actually occurred,” he said. “I expect similar operations will be revealed in the future that affect many more ordinary citizens.”

Snowden was granted asylum by Russia in August 2013, two months after the first press reports on his leaks, which exposed the NSA's dragnet phone and Internet surveillance programs.

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The European Union’s parliament voted July 4 to authorize an investigation into mass surveillance by its Committee on Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs, before explosive revelations that the NSA tapped the personal cellphone of German Chancellor Angela Merkel and spied on other U.S. allies. The committee voted Jan. 9 to invite Snowden to provide testimony.

Snowden is wanted on felony charges of espionage and theft in the U.S. He told the committee “I love my country” and said his revelations reveal the U.S. government likely missed terror plots because it was busy collecting large volumes of useless information.

“Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the ‘Underwear Bomber,’ was allowed to board an airplane traveling from Europe to the United States in 2009. The 290 persons on board were not saved by mass surveillance, but by his own incompetence, when he failed to detonate the device,” Snowden testified. “While even Mutallab's own father warned the U.S. government he was dangerous in November 2009, our resources were tied up monitoring online games and tapping German ministers. That extraordinary tip-off didn't get Mutallab a dedicated U.S. investigator. All we gave him was a U.S. visa.”



He continued: “Nor did the U.S. government's comprehensive monitoring of Americans at home stop the Boston Bombers. Despite the Russians specifically warning us about Tamerlan Tsarnaev, the FBI couldn't do more than a cursory investigation – although they did plenty of worthless computer-based searching – and failed to discover the plot [in which] 264 people were injured, and 3 died. The resources that could have paid for a real investigation had been spent on monitoring the call records of everyone in America.”

Snowden’s testimony also focused on alleged collaboration from European countries. He said Dutch, German, Swedish and other officials “received instruction from the NSA, sometimes under the guise of the U.S. Department of Defense and other bodies, on how to degrade the legal protections of their countries' communications” to allow bulk data-gathering.

NSA lawyers, Snowden said, “work very hard to search for loopholes in laws and constitutional protections that they can use to justify indiscriminate, dragnet surveillance operations that were at best unwittingly authorized by lawmakers.”

The spy agency’s Foreign Affairs Division is specifically charged with making other countries’ laws amenable to U.S. surveillance, he said, after which the NSA assists with the setup of surveillance capabilities, sometimes providing the necessary hardware.

“The result is a European bazaar, where an EU member state like Denmark may give the NSA access to a tapping center on the (unenforceable) condition that NSA doesn't search it for Danes, and Germany may give the NSA access to another on the condition that it doesn't search for Germans,” he said. “Ultimately, each EU national government's spy services are independently hawking domestic accesses to the NSA, GCHQ, FRA, and the like without having any awareness of how their individual contribution is enabling the greater patchwork of mass surveillance against ordinary citizens as a whole.”

Snowden told the lawmakers “I do seek EU asylum,” but added, “I have yet to receive a positive response to the requests I sent to various EU member states.”

The parliamentary committee scuttled an effort last month to demand that member states offer asylum to Snowden, which he suggested “ran into such mysterious opposition” because of U.S. influence.