Mission accomplished: Snowden

Washington: Just six months after first leaking National Security Agency (NSA) secrets in a move that triggered a revaluation of US surveillance policies, Edward Snowden is declaring “mission’s already accomplished.”

Snowden told The Washington Post in his first in-person interview since his June arrival in Russia, which granted him temporary asylum, that he was satisfied because the public is now informed about the US government’s massive sweep of Internet and phone records.

“For me, in terms of personal satisfaction, the mission’s already accomplished,” he said in the the interview published on Tuesday.

“I already won. As soon as the journalists were able to work, everything that I had been trying to do was validated,” Snowden told the Post.

“Because, remember, I didn’t want to change society. I wanted to give society a chance to determine if it should change itself.”

The NSA’s collection of communications data has grown dramatically since the September 11, 2001 attacks. On Friday, President Barack Obama said he welcomed a debate about the NSA’s role as he weighs possible changes to its broad powers amid a public outcry over rights to privacy. The President said he would make a “pretty definitive statement” in January about how the NSA should be overhauled.

A panel of legal and intelligence experts chosen by the White House has recommended curbing the agency's powers among 46 proposed changes and a federal judge has warned that NSA’s  collection of nearly all Americans' phone records was probably unconstitutional.