Whistleblower Edward Snowden says he’s “not going to be afraid” of reports that some US officials want to see him dead.
“I don’t lose sleep because I’ve done what I feel I needed to do,” he says in his first full-length TV interview, to be screened on tonight’s Dateline at 9.30pm on SBS ONE.
Snowden is responding to an online BuzzFeed article where government officials anonymously said they would like to see him killed.
“They said they would be happy, they would love to put a bullet in my head,” he says, “to poison me as I was returning from the grocery store and have me die in the shower.”
The interview with German broadcaster NDR was recorded at a secret location in Russia, where Snowden has remained since leaking confidential documents he’d collected while working for the US National Security Agency.
“The public has a right to know that which the government is doing in its name,” he tells interviewer Hubert Seipel. “Anywhere you try and hide your online presence, the NSA can find you.”
“The government has decided it’s a good idea to collect it all, everything, even if you’ve never been suspected of any crime.”
Snowden also rejects Barack Obama’s request for him to return to the United States to make his case before a court.
“What he doesn’t say is that the crimes he has charged me with are crimes that… don’t allow me to defend myself in an open court to the public and convince a jury,” he says.
“It’s, I would say, illustrative that the President would choose to say someone should face the music when he knows the music is a show trial.”
See the full interview in an Australian exclusive for Dateline tonight at 9.30pm on SBS ONE, and read more now on the Dateline website.
Dateline returns tonight at 9.30pm AEDT on SBS ONE. You can join the conversation using #datelineSBS.
