Snowden leaked no documents while in Russia – lawyer
Fugitive US intelligence leaker Edward Snowden observes the terms of his asylum and has handed no secret information to Western media since his arrival to Russia, his Russian lawyer said, according to RIA Novosti.
Russian President Vladimir Putin said Snowden “must stop his work aimed at harming our US partners” if he wants to stay in Russia. The presidential spokesman later said that Snowden had pledged to stop the leaks when applying for asylum in the country.
“As far as I know, Snowden hasn’t leaked anything from here,” lawyer Anatoly Kucherena said in an interview published by Russia’s Kommersant daily on Saturday, adding that it were media outlets who had made the decision on what information previously leaked by Snowden should be made public.
Kucherena, a prominent Russian lawyer, started assisting Snowden in his bid for a temporary asylum in Russia on July 12, and has since remained his representative and the only connection with the outside world.
He said the recent publications by The Guardian, The Washington Post and The New York Times were based on files provided by Snowden before his arrival to Russia. “Even if anything is published, it is all based on the information that he had handed over to the media while in Hong Kong,” Kucherena said.
The Washington Post reported Friday that secret “black budget” data leaked by Snowden shows the United States has built a global “espionage empire” employing over 100,000 people in 16 spy agencies and costing tens of billions of dollars annually.
On Saturday the paper said U.S. intelligence services carried out 231 offensive cyber-operations in 2011. Nearly three-quarters of them were against top-priority targets, which former officials say included Iran, Russia, China and North Korea.
The stories are latest in a string of revelations in newspapers based on Snowden’s documents. Earlier this month, British security forces seized some 58,000 classified documents from David Miranda, a Brazilian national who has been working with Guardian journalist Glenn Greenwald on Snowden’s intelligence leaks.