The New York Times is reporting:
Edward J. Snowden says he was not merely a "low-level analyst" writing computer code for American spies, as President Obama and other administration officials have portrayed him. Instead, he says, he was a trained spy who worked under assumed names overseas for the Central Intelligence Agency and the National Security Agency.
Mr. Snowden's claims were made in a television interview to be broadcast Wednesday evening by NBC News. They added a new twist to the yearlong public relations battle between the administration and Mr. Snowden, who is living under asylum in Moscow to escape prosecution for leaking thousands of classified files detailing extensive American surveillance programs at home and abroad.
"I was trained as a spy in sort of the traditional sense of the word in that I lived and worked undercover overseas--pretending to work in a job that I'm not--and even being assigned a name that was not mine," Mr. Snowden told Brian Williams of NBC News, in an excerpt released in advance of the full interview.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by frojack on Monday June 02 2014, @05:59AM
Seems perfectly believable to me that a private contractor might be sent overseas to work on some (unnamed) site under a different name, especially if the NSA wanted a back door inserted into a network by someone who was good at systems administration. After all, we've got contractors with guns running around all over Afghanistan, doing god knows what. Although I doubt he was doing much that was all that secret on these assignments.
I ALSO find it interesting that Daniel Ellsberg says in The Guardian [theguardian.com] that there is no way Snowden would get a fair trial in the US and John Kerry is dead wrong for saying he should come back and face trial. Elsberg says Snowden would be in solitary confinement from the day he stepped of the plane, probably for the rest of his life.
He also points out the total flip-flop (there I said it) of Old Kerry vs Young Kerry who praised (and still does) Elsberg's role in the Pentagon Papers case.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.