Snowden Still Has Bombshell NSA Secrets

The US government should pray nothing happens to Edward Snowden because his death would expose yet more of its secrets in a leak that would be its "worst nightmare," according to the Guardian's Glenn Greenwald. He told an Argentinan newspaper that Snowden doesn't want the information—including "blueprints" of the National Security Agency's workings—to become public, but he has distributed thousands of documents to several people as an "insurance policy," NBC reports. They "would allow somebody who read them to know exactly how the NSA does what it does, which would in turn allow them to evade that surveillance or replicate it."

Snowden's decision to distribute them to confidants is "really just a way to protect himself against extremely rogue behavior on the part of the United States, by which I mean violent actions toward him, designed to end his life, and it's just a way to ensure that nobody feels incentivized to do that," Greenwald tells the AP. Snowden—who is still in a Moscow airport and plans to seek asylum in Russia—is "calm and tranquil" despite the pressure he is under, Greenwald says. "I haven't sensed an iota of remorse or regret or anxiety over the situation that he's in." Snowden isn't out to get the US, adds Greenwald, who sums up the NSA leaker's main objective as trying "to expose the software that people around the world use without knowing to what they are exposing themselves and without having consciously agreed to surrender their rights to privacy." (More Edward Snowden stories.)