Video
Snowden Asks Putin About Surveillance
Edward J. Snowden, the former United States government contractor, asked
President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia a question about surveillance
during a call-in session broadcast on Russian television.
Video of Snowden Asking Putin About Surveillance
By ROBERT MACKEY
Last Updated, 5:11 p.m. | As my colleague David Herszenhorn reports,
the former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden made a
surprise appearance on Russian television Thursday, asking President
Vladimir Putin a question about surveillance during an annual call-in program in which Russia’s leader fields questions from the public for up to four hours.
Video of the exchange,
with an English translation of Mr. Putin’s reply — that his nation does
not have the same capabilities as the United States and intercepts
communications only with court approval — was quickly posted online by
RT, the state-owned satellite channel formerly known as Russia Today.
After a short comment on what he called the
ineffectiveness of American surveillance, Mr. Snowden asked, in an
apparently prerecorded video, “does Russia intercept, store or analyze
in any way the communications of millions of individuals?”
Mr. Putin replied: “Mr. Snowden, you are a
former agent. I used to work for an intelligence service. Let’s speak in
a professional language.”
“Our intelligence efforts are strictly regulated by our law,” he added. “You have to get a court’s permission first.”
Noting that terrorists use electronic
communications, Mr. Putin also said that Russia “of course” used
surveillance. “But we don’t use this on such a massive scale and I hope
that we won’t.”
The Kremlin’s official Twitter account also
highlighted the president’s assertion that “there is no mass
surveillance in Russia,” despite reports to the contrary.
One feature of the public relations battle
between West and East over Ukraine in recent months has been the
repeated publication online of intercepted phone calls — in which both American officials and pro-Western Ukrainian politicians have been caught making impolitic remarks — which is widely seen as the work of Russian intelligence.
Mr. Snowden’s appearance on the broadcast, which is thought to be heavily scripted by the Kremlin,
led to immediate criticism from some observers. One was the Slate
columnist Anne Applebaum, who recently compared Russia’s destabilization
of Ukraine to the work of Soviet intelligence agents in post-war Europe.
Watching from Ukraine, the Kiev-based
journalist Myroslava Petsa suggested that Mr. Snowden should have asked
Mr. Putin about Pavel Durov, the founder of the Russian social network
VKontakte. On Wednesday, Mr. Durov revealed in a post on the site
that Russia’s intelligence agency had asked his company in December to
hand over personal details of Ukrainians who were using the network to
organize antigovernment protests in Kiev. His post included scanned images of the requests.
According to a translation from Mashable,
Mr. Durov wrote: “Our response has been and remains a categorical
refusal — Russian jurisdiction does not extend to Ukrainian users of
VKontakte.” He added, “Giving personal details of Ukrainians to Russian
authorities would not only be against the law, but also a betrayal of
all those millions of people in Ukraine who have trusted us.” Not long
after this refusal, Mr. Durov sold his shares in the company, effectively ceding control to a pro-Kremlin oligarch.
Video subtitled by Radio Free Europe,
the broadcast network financed by Congress, showed that at another
point in the show, Mr. Putin dismissed claims that Russian forces were
among the insurgents in eastern Ukraine.
In response to a question from the newly annexed region of Crimea, Mr. Putin admitted
that the mysterious and heavily armed “green men” who appeared there
before it was taken over were in fact Russian soldiers, although he had categorically denied this at the time.
He also defended Ukraine’s ousted president,
Viktor Yanukovych, who was criticized by one questioner, a member of the
riot police from Crimea.
At an earlier stage of the interview, as
foreign correspondents in Moscow noted, Mr. Putin referred to eastern
Ukraine as New Russia, an old name used in Czarist times.
COPY http://www.nytimes.com
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