14 DAY TRIAL // U.S. President Barack Obama says that his country will not try to intercept NSA whistleblower’s flight.
Edward Snowden fled Hong Kong on Sunday and has been on a Russian airport ever since. He was supposed to fly out to Havana, Cuba and then to Venezuela, before waiting out on an answer for his asylum request from Ecuador.
As soon as news came about his intention to fly out to Cuba, news reports showed that his flight would pass through American airspace, case in which the authorities could demand the plane to land in order to take him into custody.
Now, president Obama says that the US will not engage in “wheeling, dealing and trading” to extradite Snowden, claiming that everything will be carried out through legal channels.
Furthermore, the US president claims that he hasn’t contacted his Chinese or Russian counterparts about Snowden’s extradition, saying that he “shouldn’t have to,” Reuters reports.
Obama said that he is concerned about the other documents that Snowden may have since not all of them have been released.
A report indicated to the fact that Snowden has taken some safety measures in case anything happens to him by sending out encrypted versions of the documents he’s in possession of. These would be published if anything happened to him, reports showed.
Edward Snowden has been accused of espionage on Friday in a move that made many point out to the irony of the situation – the U.S. authorities have accused him of espionage after he revealed that the NSA was running several large-scale spying programs.
Snowden has been on the run for several weeks now and he has applied for political asylum in Ecuador, a country that has extended its welcome-mat to WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange.
The Venezuelan president has also mentioned that his country would be “almost certainly” grant Snowden asylum if he asked for it.