The U.S. government has charged former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden with espionage and theft.
Snowden, now holed up in Hong Kong, has admitted providing information to the news media about two highly classified NSA surveillance programs.
A one-page criminal complaint unsealed Friday in federal court in Alexandria, Va., says Snowden engaged in unauthorized communication of national defense information and willful communication of classified communications intelligence information. Snowden also is charged with theft of government property.
All three carry a maximum 10-year prison penalty.
The Washington Post quoted U.S. officials as saying that the United States has asked Hong Kong to detain Snowden on a provisional arrest warrant.
Meanwhile, an Icelandic business executive said Friday that a private plane is on standby to transport Snowden from Hong Kong to Iceland.
Olafur Vignir Sigurvinsson said he has not spoken directly with Snowden but has been in touch with a third party representing him.
The businessman, who has connections to the WikiLeaks secret-spilling organization, said he has access to planes in Hong Kong and mainland China that Snowden could use.
But Iceland’s government says it has not received an asylum request from Snowden.
Iceland Interior Ministry spokesman Johannes Tomasson said Snowden hasn’t approached the ministry and could initiate an asylum request if he was already in Iceland.
When asked about the reports of Sigurvinsson chartering a private plane to fly Snowden to Iceland, Tomasson said: “We don’t object to that. But we don’t have any knowledge other than what has been in the news. We can’t comment any further on that.”
Disclosure of the criminal complaint against Snowden came as President Barack Obama held his first meeting with a privacy and civil liberties board and his intelligence chief sought ways to help Americans understand more about sweeping government surveillance efforts.
The five members of the obscure Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board huddled with Obama in the White House Situation Room, questioning the president on the two National Security Agency programs that have stoked controversy after the extent of U.S. phone and Internet records the government collects were publicly disclosed.
Obama has insisted the programs are subject to intense judicial and congressional oversight and says he’s confident his administration is striking the proper balance between national security and privacy
Still, in an attempt to show Obama is serious about welcoming a public discussion about the proper balance, the White House said Obama and his aides would start meeting with a range of interested parties to talk digital privacy — starting with Friday’s meeting.
“He certainly believes that we need to evaluate them consistently and debate them and make judgments about how we’re striking that balance,” said White House spokesman Jay Carney.
The White House did not allow press coverage of the meeting. Members of the privacy board — a federal oversight panel that reviews anti-terror programs to ensure that privacy concerns are taken into account — left the White House without speaking to reporters.
At the same time, an effort was under way to determine whether more details about the programs could be declassified to facilitate greater public understanding of what the government can and can’t do.
The White House said that at Obama’s direction, his counterterrorism adviser, Lisa Monaco, had asked Director of National Intelligence James Clapper to review possible declassification of opinions from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which approves the surveillance efforts.
The government has already lifted some of the secrecy surrounding the programs. But the legal opinions from the highly secretive court remain private.
The privacy board was created in 2004 but has operated sporadically ever since, given congressional infighting and at times, censorship by government lawyers. The board was dormant during Obama’s first term and only became fully functional in May, before the NSA programs became public.
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