Greenwald: Snowden Holds Information That Could Cause More Damage to U.S. Than Anyone Ever Has

The U.S. should be careful in its pursuit of whistle-blower Edward Snowden because he controls information that could become the United States’ “worst nightmare,” according to Glenn Greenwald.

“Snowden has enough information to cause more harm to the U.S. government in a single minute than any other person has ever had in the history of the United States,” Greenwald said in an interview Saturday with Argentina’s La Nacion newspaper. “But that is not his objective.”

The Guardian columnist who first broke the National Security Agency surveillance story explained Snowden’s objective, telling the publication that it was 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.”

For bringing the top-secret information to light, Snowden has been charged under America’s Espionage Act. He remains stranded in Moscow, as he has since last month, seeking asylum from several countries in order to avoid prosecution in the U.S.

Greenwald says Snowden has distributed thousands of documents to others as a kind of insurance policy should anything bad happen to him.

“If anything were to happen to him, those documents would be made public,” he said, adding, “The U.S. government should be on its knees every day praying that nothing happens to Snowden, because if something happens to him, all the information would be revealed and that would be its worst nightmare.”

NBC News:

Only a few countries — including several Latin American countries, China and Russia — have dared to challenge the United States, Greenwald told La Nacion.

He said Snowden has documents that detail how the United States captures transmissions in Latin America and the programs used in this practice.

“One way of intercepting communications is through a telephone company in the United States that has contracts with telecommunications companies in most Latin American countries,” Greenwald said, without revealing that company’s name.

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— Posted by Tracy Bloom.