Edward Snowden To Work As Tech Support For A Russian Website

Former US intelligence contractor Edward Snowden, the man wanted in the US for espionage and theft of government property, is set to provide tech support for a major Russian website.

The whistleblower’s lawyer Anatoly Kucherena told the Russian news agency RIA Novosti that Snowden will start his new job on 1 November, but refused to name the workplace “for security reasons”.

To pay the bills

Snowden made headlines across the world when he revealed the existence of several highly intrusive electronic surveillance projects run by the US government and its allies, including PRISM, XKeyscore and Tempora.

He leaked the first set of secret documents while staying in Hong Kong in May and on 23 June, Snowden fled to Moscow, fearing that China would eventually cave in to the pressure from the US authorities, and send him to face trial. In August, after much delay, the whistleblower was granted one year political asylum in Russia.

Two months later, it looks like Snowden has found himself a job in tech support – hardly surprising, considering his extensive background in IT.

According to an affiliate of RIA Novosti, Mail.ru and Yandex, two of Russia’s biggest online companies, have publicly denied they had hired Snowden. But a spokesman for VKontakte, the country’s most popular social network, said it was entirely possible the whistleblower would work on improving the security of its messaging service.

Meanwhile in the US, the latest set of documents released by Snowden revealed that the NSA could have had access to the fibre network infrastructure used by Google and Yahoo to support their data centres.

“We are outraged at the lengths to which the government seems to have gone to intercept data from our private fibre networks, and it underscores the need for urgent reform,” said Google in a statement.

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