Snowden has been the source of the chilling leaks of the past few days

Jun 10, 2013 08:13 GMT  ·  By

NSA analyst Edward Snowden has come out as the source of the NSA surveillance program leaks that got out last week. He's been holed up in Hong Kong for the past three weeks and has made his peace with whatever fate awaits him.

In the light of the increasing pressure put on whistleblowers by the Obama administration, he knew full well what he was getting himself into.

Bradley Manning, who is responsible for many of the big the Wikileaks reveals, has been illegally held in prison and denied contact with the outside world for three years now and is being charged with "aiding the enemy," offense that carries a life sentence.

Snowden is a bit optimistic and hopes to emigrate to a country with a strong stance on free speech, Iceland perhaps. But his future lies in the hands of the Hong Kong and Chinese governments.

Still, it's hardly surprising that there's now a petition to pardon Edward Snowden filed via the White House's We the People website.

It needs 100,000 signatures within a month, i.e. by July 9, for the White House to have to respond to it. The Obama administration is in no way bound by the petition, it only has to respond to it if it passes the threshold.

And, in recent months, it hasn't even been doing that, even for petitions that have significantly more signatures than the 100,000 needed.

Still, Snowden needs all the attention and help he can get. The US government is trying to spin this as best it can and people have a short memory, but it can't be happy that all this data came out.

What's more, Snowden says he has access and copies of plenty of other sensitive information, as in his position he had access to pretty much whatever the NSA had access to. Whether he will release more info or not remains to be seen.