海角大神

Edward Snowden, the young National Security Agency contractor with the Electronic Frontier Foundation sticker on his laptop, said he leaked details of the government's domestic surveillance operations out of a sense of patriotism and concern over intrusive government overreach into private citizens lives.

But his odd choice of flight to Hong Kong, which may have an independent judiciary but is nevertheless tied to US rival China, has now been matched with revelations about the NSA's spying programs against the People's Republic.聽

That the NSA collects signals intelligence against China is hardly surprising, since gathering that kind of information against US rivals and potential rivals is explicitly the NSA's job. The famously secretive intelligence agency is up front about its mission, right on its web page:

In that third paragraph you'll find the reason Mr. Snowden has given for violating the terms of the top secret clearance he was given to work on NSA's computers. In his estimations, the US government was not limiting itself to foreign powers and persons, but was collecting vast amounts of data on US nationals as well. While that is hotly contested by the Obama Administration, the NSA, and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, a number of politicians and others agree with Snowden (the ACLU for instance).

But talking about the NSA's targeting of China is unlikely to win much support for Snowden, and it's hard to see how the "whistle-blower" sobriquet could possibly apply. Spying on China is practically the whole point of having an agency like the NSA. And while China spies vigorously on the US government, in turn, having specific information put out in public by a rogue NSA employee at a time when the US government has been complaining about Chinese hacking designed to steal details of US weapons systems is inconvenient to say the least.

China's state controlled press has been having a field day with the latest revelations. The LA Times rounds up Chinese media reaction this morning:聽

Snowden, who is seeking asylum in Hong Kong against an inevitable US government extradition request, told the Hong Kong-based South China Morning Post that the US has run extensive SIGINT operations against targets in China, and revealed some details. The paper reports that Snowden believes "there had been 61,000 NSA hacking operations globally, with hundreds of targets in Hong Kong and on the mainland" since 2009. The paper says Snowden claims NSA targets included "Chinese University and public officials, businesses and students in the city" of Hong Kong.

The US has an extradition treaty with Hong Kong, though legal experts there say any effort to extradite him, particularly if it includes him seeking asylum on human rights grounds, could take years to wind through the courts. Snowden called the US government "hypocritical" for spying on what he deems civilian targets in foreign countries and painted the US government in thuggish terms.

鈥淎ll I can do is rely on my training and hope that world governments will refuse to be bullied by the United States into persecuting people seeking political refuge,鈥� he told the paper.