Snowden vows to expose more ‘aggressively criminal’ NSA secrets

Former US National Security Agency (NSA) Edward Snowden has reacted to threats of prosecution by Washington, defiantly vowing to expose more secrets about American electronic spying bids, describing them as “aggressively criminal.”

“All I can say right now is the U.S. government is not going to be able to cover this up by jailing or murdering me,” Snowden stated Monday in a written chat on the website of British Guardian newspaper.

“Truth is coming, and it cannot be stopped,” he added.

Snowden, who is reportedly seeking asylum in Hong Kong, further stated that NSA analysts regularly access emails and other Internet communications of Americans as part of the cyber-spying agency’s surveillance of global telecommunications and Web traffic.

The NSA whistleblower reiterated that US communications were “collected and viewed on a daily basis” by NSA analysts operating without a specific warrant. “They excuse this as ‘incidental’ collection, but at the end of the day, someone at NSA still has the content of your communications,” he said.

Internal audits that show the NSA is not spying on Americans, said Snowden, “are cursory, incomplete and easily fooled by fake justifications.”

Unbowed by repeated threats of prosecution by US officials, Snowden promised to reveal more NSA secrets, regardless of his fate.

US intelligence officials, meanwhile, did not respond to Snowden’s latest statements, but former NSA officials have been cited in press reports as claiming that the huge spy agency follows “strict procedures” to keep confidential any names of Americans caught up in monitoring efforts “aimed at foreign terrorists.”

Snowden identified himself on June 9 as the source for news reports that disclosed top-secret NSA operations to collect and store millions of telephone calling records, work with US Internet companies to obtain data on what they describe as “foreign terrorism suspects operating overseas.”