July 11, 2013

Edward Snowden, the NSA whistleblower who is still stuck in Moscow's Sheremyetevo airport, has reportedly applied for asylum in Russia and 14 other countries.

His application for asylum in Russia was hand delivered on Sunday by WikiLeaks' Sarah Harrison, according to multiple news reports. A Russian official told The Los Angeles Times that Snowden has requested asylum from a total of 15 countries.

Snowden is the source of recently revealed secret surveillance programs like NSA's phone records dragnet collection, and PRISM, as well as the Government Communications Headquarters Project Tempora (GCHQ is Britain's answer to the NSA). Snowden has been at Sheremyetevo since last Sunday, after fleeing Hong Kong,

His fate, at this point, is uncertain. Russian president Vladimir Putin repeated on Monday that his country will not hand Snowden over to the United States. Yet Putin showed some solidarity with Russia's former Cold War-era enemy: "If he wants to go away somewhere and someone will accept him there, by all means," Putin said, according to Reuters. "If he wants to stay here, there is one condition: He must stop his work aimed at harming our American partners, as strange as that sounds coming from my lips."

As The Guardian's Glenn Greenwald noted on Twitter, that's an odd request, since the leaked documents are already in the hands of publications around the world.

President Obama, who said on Thursday that he wouldn't "scramble jets" to intercept Snowden's flight out of Russia, said on Monday that the United States has had "high level" discussions with Russian officials. "We are hopeful the Russian government makes decisions based on the normal procedures regarding international travel and the normal interactions law enforcement have," he told reporters during a visit in Tanzania.

Snowden's asylum application to Ecuador, which was reportedly his preferred destination, seemed to be in limbo last week. After Julian Assange andWikiLeaks helped draft his asylum application, the Ecuadorean embassy in London issued travel documents to allow him to leave Moscow's airport.

But in a dramatic turn of events, the Ecuadorian government did not ultimately consider the documents valid, and he never left Moscow. Ecuadorian President Rafel Correa said it was a "serious error" to issue the documents without the central government's approval, The Guardian reported.

WikiLeaks, however, claims everything is under control. On Twitter, the pro-transparency organization wrote that "the plan was to move him to Russia, a country without a U.S. extradition treaty, number one. Number two, asylum in a protective state," and then added that "the current situation was factored into planning. The majority risk was in Hong Kong. It has been eliminated. Odds are good now."

Apart from Russia and Ecuador, it's not clear where Snowden has applied for asylum, but new suitors seem to be revealing themselves every hour. After the German magazine Der Spiegel reported that the NSA might be spying on EU offices in Washington and at the UN in New York City, leaders in European countries are calling for their nations to lend a hand.

On Monday, Juergen Trittin, the parliamentary leader of Germany's third biggest party, said Snowden "should get safe haven here in Europe because he has done us a service by revealing a massive attack on European citizens and companies," according to Reuters. Some party leaders in France have called for their government to grant him asylum as well, according to France24.

http://mashable.com/2013/07/01/snowden-asylum-russia/?utm_campaign=...