WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange weighed in late Monday on the roiling debate over personal privacy versus national security brought to a head by the latest US government leaks.
Speaking from his own asylum at the Ecuadorian embassy in London, Assange urged Edward Snowden, the self-confessed leaker, that he should seek refuge in Latin America. Snowden was last seen in Hong Kong, but his current whereabouts are unknown.
“Latin America has shown it is pushing forward with human rights and has a long tradition of asylum,” Assange told CNN.
Assange’s WikiLeaks released a massive haul of secret US military and diplomatic documents onto the internet in 2010. The information was supplied by Private Bradley Manning, a former military intelligence analyst whose court martial started last month in Maryland.
Assange charged that the collection of phone and internet data by the National Security Agency (NSA), as revealed by Snowden, was a secret programme that had no validity. He said US President Barack Obama could not be trusted in his reassurances that no one was listening to the phone conversations.
“You can’t trust any sort of statements the White House is making,” Assange warned. “No one gave Obama a mandate for worldwide surveillance.” On Tuesday, the European Parliament is planning a special debate over the PRISM surveillance programme used by NSA to monitor and collect electronic communications. The discussion arose out of concern that the privacy of European Union citizens may have been breached.
A majority of Americans -- 56 per cent -- say the NSA programme to collect millions of telephone records of Americans was an acceptable way to investigate terrorism, according to a poll released Monday by the Pew Research Center and The Washington Post.
Forty-one per cent said it was unacceptable. The poll was conducted after last week’s revelations in the British newspaper, The Guardian, that the NSA was collecting metadata from the Verizon telecommunications company about all phone calls within the US as well as US calls to foreign countries.
US officials, including members of Congress who oversee the secret NSA programmes behind closed doors and the White House, defend the data collection as essential to protecting the country from terrorist attacks and say it is carried out with meticulous attention to protecting the legal rights of American citizens.